Life in Culebrón

I always say that it's a part of my cultural education to get out and about in Spain a bit. Getting out and about has several levels. If you consider that our house is a little island of Britishness then going to a bar and getting a coffee is a journey to Spain. It doesn't really matter whether the out and aboutness is big or small. Memorable things happen on the doorstep just as much as hundreds of kilometres away though, obviously, the reverse is also true! Out and about can be villages and towns and cities and parks and castles and museums and hills and churches and, even if they fail you, your luck may be better in a restaurant with something that you've never heard of on the menu. Out and about can be fiestas. Most countries have theatres, cinemas, museums, concerts, coastline, woodland, prehistoric sites and so on and most places have fiestas too. The Tar barl festival in Allendale in Northumberland, the one with the burning tar barrels on the head, is as barmy as any...

As they do each year Pinoso Town Hall has published it's population statistics. The statistics do not always match personal perceptions but you have to remember that the figures are for the municipality. So the people who live in Chinorlet or Cañada del Trigo who come into Pinoso for their shopping or to get a beer do not count in these stats. By the end of 2021 there were 8,478 people on the padrón in Pinoso, that's 120 more than at the end of 2020. The number is made up of 4,305 men and 4,173 women (no mention of those who prefer not to have a gender assigned) which is more or less the same, percentage wise, as last year. This means there has been a year on year increase in population in Pinoso since 2017. In 2021 that increase was of 120 people. There are now 56 different nationalities living in Pinoso with new people from the Czech Republic, Zambia and Japan joining the list for the first time. Most of we foreigners are from Europe, from 25 different countries. There are al...

We went up to Castellón for the weekend, the most northerly of the three provinces that make up the Valencian Community. The place we went was called Forcall and we lodged in an old palace. We were there to see a very odd festival where a couple of saints, Anthony and Peter, are harried by demons who try to burn them to death. My guess is that the roots of the festival are maybe older than Christianity! Whilst we were there we wandered around some of the nearby villages, mostly just over the order into Teruel, one of the provinces that makes up Aragón. If you want to see the snaps they're in this album  which is just a part of the January 2022 photo album that you can access from the tabs across the home page, or here Teruel is quite famous in Spain for being the back of beyond. At the last General Election for instance the province elected an "MP" as a member of the party "Teruel Exists". Teruel is always used as an example of España vacciada - emptied Spain. I...

Pinoso has a weather station that forms a part of the AEMET network. AEMET is the Spanish Met Office, Agencia Estatal de Meteorología. So far as I know the weather station for AEMET is in the centre of Pinoso, at the Instituto José Marhuenda Prats. I think it's at the school because the bloke who started it all up taught there though that may be wrong. The man is real enough though, Agapito - always called Cápito - Gonzálvez. He's been Mr Weather in Pinoso for over 30 years now.  If you haven't seen the AEMET site this link  should go directly to the observations over the past few days. Click around the site and you'll find forecasts and a whole lot more. There is another weather station out at Rodriguillo, which was damaged when the reed beds there went on fire in the summer. Capito got it up and running again within 8 days. There's another another on the Yecla road out of Pinoso. These two stations log their recordings on the Valencian Meteorological Association w...

I've recently been in one of those linguistic slumps where I feel that my Spanish is so deficient that self flagellation seems appropriate. These dark moods are brought on when I come away from some film without having understood the plot or when I've no idea what the people in the queue behind me are talking about. It happens too frequently. This time my response was to give up on my one to one online, italki , Spanish lessons. My penance began just before Christmas. It didn't last long though. I've spent years and years trying to speak Spanish and I'll be damned if I'm going to give up now. Well, that's today's position statement anyway. Tomorrow it may be back to deep despair and a retreat to comforting chocolate treats. So, I'm online and nattering to Miriam. On my insistence our sessions don't have any structure. I just wander from this to that topic. It has been suggested to me that my thought patterns are a bit random anyway, which must be...

I noticed that Marina, the Spanish half of the Notes in Spanish team, used the verb to hoover in one of their videos instead of to vacuum. We Brits do that all the time, use trade names as nouns and verbs: Thermos flasks, Astroturf, App (apparently it's from Apple not application), Cashpoint and Lilo being examples. So do Spaniards. I've mentioned things like Danone (yogurt), Mistol (washing up liquid), Minipimer (hand blender) and Táper (from Tupperware but which you have to pronounce as Tap-per in Spanish) before. Every now and again I come across new ones, Chirucas for climbing boots and Camisetas de Abanderado for a singlet type vest. I suppose it's a bit like we old people used to buy Jockey's and Y Fronts. In English, for ball point pen, I usually say Biro (Named for the inventors as I understand it) and instead of saying boli (short for bolígrafo) in Spanish I've tried to use Bic. Apparently though, for most Spaniards, Bic is precise, it's for the sort ...

Often, when we encounter something new, we describe it my comparison to something that we recognise. A turnip?- well, it's a bit like a swede. We Britons living in Spain often use this equivalence for things Spanish. Sometimes the idea is spot on; IVA and VAT, the sales tax, is alike in all but name and rate. It doesn't work for lots of things though. The car roadworthiness test for instance, the ITV, isn't really much like the MOT but it's sort of the same and we know what we mean. And MPs are not a bit like Spanish diputados except that they are the rank and file national politicians. After all the blue whale and the field mouse are both mammals, they suckle their live born young, but they're not quite the same. Morning, afternoon and evening are different too. If the plumber says they'll be around in the afternoon then you shouldn't give up on them till about 8.30pm just like 1.30pm is still very much morning. I still get caught by someone saying we must ...

I think Quality Street are yummy. Not that good for the waistline perhaps and a bit of a type 2 diabetes problem but, hey ho. Both they and I come from West Yorkshire. When I was a lad, I went on a school trip around the Mackintosh's factory where Quality Street were made. They gave us hundreds of free samples and I'm still grateful. Not that I have a problem with Celebrations or Heroes but, if I were forced to plump for just one, it would still be the Halifax product. I live in Spain though and here the Christmas habits don't include Quality Street. There are no mince pies either. Instead the customary sweet things are turrón, polvorones and mantecados.  Every year these Spanish Christmas sweets cause just a little friction when Maggie and I go to do our joint Christmas food shop - I think we should and Maggie thinks we shouldn't. She has no problem with turrón, she likes the two local versions - turrón is often translated as nougat in English because, like the French ...

Last week we booked up for an Experiencia Gastro-Cultural in Novelda. The hook was the word gastro rather than on the word cultural.  The morning consisted of a couple of visits to the two "principal" Modernista or Art Nouveau houses in the town. Both are on the Calle Mayor in Novelda. One is run by the Fundación Mediterráneo and has an entrance charge whilst the other, the Centro Cultural Gómez Tortosa, is owned by the Town Hall, so it's free, and is home to the Tourist Office. Both are pretty stunning in their detail and, every time we go, they seem to have improved their offer of things to see. So, if the Modernista heritage was the cultural part of our visit, what were we going to get on the gastro side? Novelda has long been associated with saffron . The crocus flowers that provide the saffron originally all came from Castilla La Mancha (nowadays a lot of the saffron also comes from Iran) and it seems to be by sheer chance that Novelda became the place to process the...

I'm going to tell you some things that I think Spaniards think about the British. You may notice the teensy weensy little flaw here. Actually though, when I say what Spanish people think I should change that to what several Spaniards have said to me, over the years, about Britain and the British. So my Englishness is not, really, a handicap. When I say Britain and the British, I actually mean England and the English. Occasionally the Scots get a mention, because of the supposed similarity to the Catalans and because Mel Gibson, like all Scottish men, wore a skirt. No Spaniard I've met has ever voiced their opinion about the Welsh or the Northern Irish.  Lots of Spaniards think that we are the only country in the world that drives on the other side of the road. This belief is usually mixed with an undertone that suggests we English are a bit full of ourselves. After all, don't we use different measures for length and weight too? I know, as do you, that there are about 70 or ...