Life in Culebrón

Thanks to William Blake, and probably more particularly to Hubert Parry, we know what colour England is. It's a green and pleasant land. I heard the tune the other day and it made me wonder what colour Spain is. Round here my first thought is dust coloured. Alicante is summer and the summer is all orange and yellow and buff with a bright yellow sun.  Blue as well. People often comment on the blue of the Alicantino sky. And the Med of course, despite being, apparently, full of plastic and other even more horrid things often gleams bright turquoise or sky blue. Just over the border into Castilla la Mancha, where they are a bit short of Mediterranean colour, they like to paint their towns white and indigo blue to compensate.  If the Manchegos paint their towns blue and white the Alicantino tradition is of different colours to the facades of adjacent houses. Villajoyosa is well known for it but even in the streets of Pinoso the tradition is there if you look. Alicantino houses als...

I was in town this morning, on Bulevar, drinking coffee and reading a really interesting book about doors. A car stopped, the driver jumped out and went into the paper shop to get a newspaper. While he was parked, in the middle of the one way street, a van came up behind and had to wait. When the paper purchaser came out of the shop the van driver shouted to him "You couldn't do that in Madrid".  And it's true Nobody would describe Pinoso, or even Culebrón, as "Deep Spain", la España profunda. That's the Spain that's empty, without services, left behind by the modern world. No mobile network, no health services locally, no Internet access, no shops. But lots of Spain is like that; nearly empty. There are hundreds of villages that only have a few inhabitants, usually older people, and there are even villages that are totally abandoned apart from, maybe, occasional weekend and summer occupants. There's a whole movement about la España vaciada, empt...

We were in a traffic jam this last weekend. A proper traffic jam. A traffic jam that kept stopping and starting and which we took half an hour to clear. I felt quite sorry for the bloke in the Porsche Cayenne Coupé. He was originally alongside as we put on the hazard warning lights and slowed to join the tailback. He was so pressed for time though that he had to dodge from lane to lane. It worked. He was at least 100 metres in front of us when the traffic started to move again as the RM19 motorway, the one we were on, merged into the A30 that skirts Murcia city.  I seriously don't remember the last time I was in a similar traffic jam here in Spain. We don't have traffic in the countryside. We really don't. Sometimes, where the Monóvar road meets the Yecla road in Pinoso, there's a police officer to make sure that you don't have problems turning left across traffic but that's only around the time the industrial estate kicks out. On the main roads in and out of Pi...

The modern world is leaving me behind. I've said before about paying for things with my phone. I keep meaning to but, well, I don't really see the point. It looks as though using an app to pay may be slower than taking a plastic card out of my wallet and waving it at the payment terminal. I know I'm not keeping up though. My outlook is wrong. Lots of things that are, apparently, essential, from gaming to only tucking in half of my t-shirt seem a bit pointless to me. It smacks of my dad complaining about my musical tastes. Tom Eliot put it so well in his poem Little Gidding "let me disclose the gifts reserved for age".  It's not that I feel that dinosaur like. I know about Google lens. This morning the arty Spanish podcast I was listening to (on my noise cancelling bluetooth headphones may I add) talked about the 40th anniversary of Bob Marley's death (who I proudly admit to seeing, in concert, in London in 1976). The music that accompanied the piece was a...

Not that I expected a marching band or anything but I did expect a bit more of an event. A queue of people waiting for the vaccination would have made it more memorable, serried ranks of desks each one attended by a little group of medical personnel all in purple gloves would have been good. But none of it. Yesterday I got a phone call on the landline. It was the local health centre and they gave me a time for an appointment today. I left home fifteen minutes before the set time. "I'm here for the jab," I said and I think the person on the door already knew my name rather than reading my name from the health card she asked to see. No temperature check or anything. I was taken to a chair in the corridor, where people normally wait to see the doctors, and told to wait. I was given a couple of stapled bits of the sort of photocopy where the second copy was made from a copy and the third copy from the second copy and so on for forty generations. Stencil quality. The first she...

I always called it Road Tax and I suppose that's what it really was, in the beginning. You had a car and you paid tax that was then used to build and repair roads. It's not a principle that's applied to schools or social services but I can see the sense.  Not everybody needs roads so the people with vehicles pay. But UK road tax was abolished in 1937, long before even I was born, and replaced by Vehicle Excise Duty. This is, and was, a tax on cars, not roads, and it goes straight into the general fund. Here in Spain I pay a vehicle tax too. It's charged by the local town hall and collected on their behalf by a tax management agency, called SUMA. SUMA is a local organisation created by most of the Alicante town halls, working collectively, to collect local taxes. The tax on the Arona for this year is a bit short of 18€. Obviously comparing a local tax with a central government tax is unreasonable but it looks as though the Vehicle Excise Duty in the UK for the same car w...

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 ...