Life in Culebrón

We are going to have a cut down version of the Pinoso Fiestas next week. Less than usual but much better than nothing. Well done Pinoso! The various conditions to keep the concert type events safe means that the audience for any events has to be controlled and that involves tickets. Most of the events are free so the tickets are called invitations but, nonetheless, you need to have one in your hand to get to see or hear the event. We've had to get the same sort of thing for months, and nearly years, now at lots of venues but mostly the bookings have been possible online. That wasn't the case for Pinoso.  As well as the fiesta events next week there was a concert by a local choir yesterday and the town band have a concert today. I got the band tickets by going to their office one afternoon. A bit of a trek but easy enough. I went to ask at the Cultural Centre about the choir concerts at the beginning of the month and I was told I was too early. I tried, unsuccessfully, on two se...

Being remarkably hip and cool, or whatever you say nowadays for being hip and cool - straight fire Gucci maybe - we go to see a fair number of contemporary musicians. Just so my mum understands I mean pop festivals. We go to see the town band too so, really, we're neither hip nor cool. Never mind. At a music festival, in non Covid times, the security check at the entrance was to look for anything unsafe and to root out food and drink. Nobody likes to pay festival prices for beer or for a rum and coke. Festivals aren't permanent events, more or less by definition. The jobs they provide are temporary. Most of the staff are temporary. And temporary tends to unknown and unknown tends to untrustworthy. Years ago the daughter of one of my work colleagues went to Ibiza for the summer season to work in a bar. The young woman turned up, sober and unstoned, on time, every day, for the whole of her contract. Her boss was so unused to this responsible behaviour from his young, temporary ...

We went to see a band at the Mar de Músicas in Cartagena a few days ago. The Mar de Músicas is a series of musical concerts held over a couple of weeks in the Murcian city of Cartagena. Spain was quick to open up theatres and cinemas and audience venues in general after the total shutdown in the Spring of last year. The venues adapted. Things, generally, had to be booked online beforehand, even for free events. The programmes started much earlier than is normal in Spain. The capacity of venues was drastically reduced and there were all sorts of restrictions about entering and leaving the venue and where you could sit. I have felt much less safe in supermarkets, where the tussle for the unblemished and tasteless tomatoes went on much as before, or in bars and restaurants, where friends and acquaintances greet each other effusively, than I have over the Covid time in a theatre or cinema. Some of the Covid measures were a nuisance. I don't like giving my phone number and email address...

Last week we went on holiday. We stopped off at a couple of places but our destination was Finisterre, the End of the Earth, in Galicia. When you travel in Spain, which usually means that you will eat in a restaurant, the choice of food is simple. If you were to travel to Valencia for instance you would probably order paella, if you were to come to Pinoso the paella would be the rabbit and snails variety. Go to Cartagena you might try caldero. In Asturias the first choice would probably be fabada and in Cataluña you might try calçots. Eating the regional food is something that Spaniards do when they visit and it's something we mimic. We were in Ponferrada, which is still in León but closing in on Galicia. There was something on the set meals list called botillo which turned out to be a reddish ball like thing full of bones, lumps of fatty pork seasoned with paprika all shoved into a gut skin and served with cabbage, potatoes and chickpeas. It is an experience I won't be repeati...

A few days ago, in Galicia, where we were, you needed a light jacket in the evening. Daytime temperatures were low but, with the sun, it was perfectly pleasant. A Coruña was the worst, weatherwise. As we joined the crowds to protest the homophobic killing of Samuel Luiz it was bucketing down. I know it rains a lot up North but I'd underestimated the Northern Europeanness of the Galician climate, my shorts got a week off and I had to buy more socks. Sandals and trainers with invisible socks were just too Mediterranean. Back in Alicante the sun was cracking the flags. The news was full of weather warnings for everywhere except where we were. Pinoso is quite high up and the temperature only got to about 38ºC but other places in the province got over 40ºC. On the journey back, and yesterday too, we had dust laden skies and high temperatures. So we returned from temperate climes with greenery and rivers to the dustiness of Alicante. Yesterday was the first full day back so there were sw...

In Spanish shopping centres, like everywhere else, the fronts of shops are, often, open. The idea is obvious enough. The shops want to make sure that there is no barrier to you buying something. It's not the same in small towns. There shops not only have doors but they are also, often, locked. You have to ring a bell to get in. It's not for security, not in the jeweller's shop sense, but it is because the staff in lots of smaller businesses aren't exactly waiting, poised, for the next customer. It's not just shops. For instance you have to ring the bell to get into the Footwear Museum in Elda. So I went to buy an inner tube for my bike. The fly curtain covered the front door of the shop. There was a bell. Once upon a time I would have found this odd but I've rung so many bells here that it's just normally normal nowadays. I rang it. Nobody came. I realised there was a note on the door. It said ring the bell. It also said if we don't answer telephone th...

I'm sure you've heard my theory before that you don't learn popular culture; if you're born somewhere then the culture is yours be that food, music, TV programmes or YouTube influencers. You can't help it. The talk at work, the talk at school, the stuff your parents tell you, the memes and gifs that turn up on your phone, the little snippets you read in the newspaper all help to make sure that you know what's going on. That's how, I suppose, I learned about MOTs, Trooping the Colour, Premium Bonds, the Boat Race, laverbread, the RNLI Lifeboats, Spaghetti Junction, Engelbert Humperdinck, driving on the left and how to make tea.  Changes in language are similar. Ordinary people are in charge. Words and phrases come and go. Some old academic bloke might argue that there is a perfectly good phrase to describe keeping a safe distance during a pandemic but everyone else is going to say social distancing whether he likes it or not. Somebody once asked me about how ...

Last night, well this morning I suppose, the windows started to rattle and the wind howled and the thunder thundered and the lightning lit the bedroom from time to time. When I got up a couple of hours later the sun was shining on the puddles on the patio and the cats were tiptoeing from dry spot to dry spot. It's a sign of the time of year. Like my feet hurting. Neither is new. I've complained about this, the feet that is, a lot. It stems from walking miles in flat bottomed sandals at Benicassim pop festival but the foot pain was always bad each summer long before the Benicassim debacle. Really the trouble starts as I move from proper shoes with proper socks to sandals and lighter shoes worn with those funny short socks. In Spanish the socks are called pinkies. Isn't that a great name? So Summer, early Summer when it's still Spring, is big storms and uncomfortable feet. And flies, hundreds of flies, thousands of flies. No, not just flies really; all sorts of small flyi...

Our neighbours have been putting up a new fence over the past couple of weeks. Facing each other across the footings for what would be the new fence Vicente, for that's the name of our neighbour, was complaining about the builders. I sympathised - one has to with builders. Even builders complain about, other, builders. Taking advantage of his sunny disposition towards me I asked him if he could spare a couple of the concrete blocks that were piled up in his yard. The question I asked was something, in translation, like "Are two of the concrete blocks in excess for you?" I got them and I went away well pleased with myself not only because I had the blocks, but also because I'd used a phrase that a Spaniard would use without having rehearsed it beforehand.  I mentioned this phrase to my online Spanish teacher. I was bemoaning the fact that this, and other, fleeting victories over Spanish are wasted on the audience. I may be pleased with myself for having got the constru...

Luis Garcia Berlanga was a Valencian born, Spanish film director who made some 19 films between 1951 and 2002. He was born on 12 June 1921, 100 years ago give or take, and his centenary is being celebrated all over Spain through lots of screenings, exhibitions and new books. I went to see one of his films, el Verdugo, The Executioner, at the Fundación Paurides in Elda on Wednesday evening.  Now Elda is our nearest large town so I know it reasonably well but I'd never heard of the Paurides Foundation. The bit of town it's in didn't seem particularly salubrious. The woman who dragged her three kids past me as I was locking the car gave me a very fierce look as though I didn't belong. I double checked that I'd locked up securely. Google maps, on my mobile, refused to speak and was almost invisible in the bright 7pm sun as I searched for the venue. I found it though. The Paurides Foundation turned out to be a neighbourhood based arts and culture centre with a nice lit...