Life in Culebrón

We all have our favourite words and expressions. One of my oft repeated phrases, when I'm saying where I live, in Spanish, to a Spaniard, is to say that I'm paleto and cateto. I thought these were two synonyms to describe country bumpkins. It turns out to be much more complex than that. And all I really wanted to say, with just a touch of humour, is that I live in the countryside. As I write I'm sitting outside the front of our house. The birds are chirping and I can hear a tractor working somewhere up on the hillside. There are dogs barking, of course there are dogs barking!, thankfully in the distance. I can see three of our four cats in various shady spots. I can see roses and trees and lots of other greenery, including far too many weeds, and piles of fallen blossom from our neighbour's tree. Country life. We country dwellers represent a small percentage of the total Spanish population. Exactly how small a percentage depends a bit on how you do your sums. Yecla isn...

Humankind has a long relationship with mind altering substances. We chew mushrooms and leaves, we sniff things, we smoke all sorts of vegetation, we (not me you understand but we, humankind) drink snow laced with reindeer urine and, for lots of us there is a close relationship with fermented and distilled alcohol. Around here the most obvious local booze is wine, and the variants on it like vermouth, but there are others. In fact, years ago, I wrote an article about it for the old TIM magazine. That TIM article was inspired by a visit to the bar in Calle Sol in the Santa Catalina district of Pinoso. We were in Santa Catalina for their fiestas, I had never been in the bar there and, once inside, I realised that every second person in the bar was drinking cantueso. I'd been blissfully unaware of its existence till that moment but it's actually readily available around here. It's fine, not my preferred tipple but, if you like the brandy based drinks like Ponche Caballero, you ...

Spaniards don't care for British beer. They don't like it because of the temperature it is served at. Most use the word broth in their comparison. Spaniards like their beer cold. British style bitter beer isn't easily available in Spain because here, like in most places, beer means bottom fermented rather than top fermented product - lager instead of ale. Obviously, when I moved to Spain I wanted to integrate so I embraced Spanish lager wholeheartedly. It wasn't as hard as cracking the subjunctive because, when I was young, drinking Indian Kingfisher, American Rolling Rock, Italian Peroni, Canadian Labatt, Mexican Dos Equis, and so on and so on, was considered eminently cool. I had prior form. To my mind most lagers tend to be quite samey. It's not that they taste the same but the standard light, crisp and gassy lagers, like the majority of the Spanish ones have quite a lot in common. That's presumably why most Spaniards, in Spain, don't specify and simply a...

I stopped listening to the Archers almost as soon as I moved to Spain.  For those of you who don't know the Archers is a long running British radio soap. I know that lots of young people hardly know what radio is but this is as far as the explanations go. I enjoyed the Archers, in fact I enjoyed BBC Radio 4 in general, but I decided, when we first moved here, that if I were to embrace the culture, and the language, I needed to start listening to Spanish radio, watching Spanish telly, reading Spanish books and the rest.  I haven't been systematic in this abandonment of things British. It's not that I wish to deny my birth right or some such. The thing is that I'm not a visitor here, this is my home. Just as I wanted to know what was happening in the UK when I lived there I want to know what's happening in Spain now that I live here. Wherever you are lots of news is International anyway, the big stuff, the important stuff, but the detail of British politics, British c...

For years and years I've been fed up that my Spanish isn't as good as it should be. It's always seemed to me that without being able to read, understand and speak Spanish we immigrants become perpetual tourists. Obviously some things get translated for us and they are accessible because the Internet makes them so but lots of stuff will sneak by if we are not able to understand the conversations of our neighbours, read about events or keep up with the current affairs type memes that pop up on social media. I try to do something Spanish language most days. I have conversations with people on the Internet or I read a few pages from a book or learn a few words. I read and watch Spanish news, I listen to Spanish radio and other bits and bats. I'm also still on the mailing list for a couple of language learning websites too. One of them, a video blog, suggested that we should set ourselves a language challenge; do something that was a bit beyond our grasp - pushing the envelo...

Rubbish collection in Spain is pretty standardised. There are big rubbish bins, of various types, scattered at strategic points in cities, towns, villages and the countryside. The bins are emptied to some organised schedule - usually every night in the cities and towns - less frequently in country areas. Householders take their rubbish to the bin. Pinoso town is a little unusual in that it has a door to door collection most nights. There are big recycling bins all over the place too - the ones in the photo are our nearest in Culebrón village centre - and there are Ecoparques where you can take those hard to get rid of things like engine oil. For bigger things, old sofas and the like, you phone either the town hall, or the company that collects the rubbish on behalf of the municipality, and they, usually, cart it away for free. I'd half wondered about the subject of this blog, with it's not very Spanish content, when I changed the printer ink the other day. I took the old cartri...

Easter Week, Semana Santa, is huge in Spain. After all Easter is at the very heart of the Christianity and lots of Spanish events are still tied in to the Roman Catholic calendar. Easter Sunday is the culmination of Holy Week when, so the story goes, Jesus Christ rose or was resurrected, from the dead. On Good Friday Jesus was executed by crucifixion and he was put in a guarded tomb. When some of his women followers visited the tomb on Sunday they found the tomb empty. It is an article of faith with Christians that Jesus rose from the dead. Between Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered Jerusalem to the adulation of the crowd, through to his crucifixion on Friday and his resurrection on Sunday there are lots of other Easter scenes: the trial by Pontius Pilate, Peter, Jesus's follower, denying - three times - that he knew Jesus before the dawn cockerel crowed, Jesus's walk up to Golgotha or Calvary carrying his own cross and the help he received along the way, the crucifixion scene its...

Now that I'm old I'm slower. I don't worry so much about getting there, about saving time. I've come to think that a couple of minutes isn't really going to make much difference in the scheme of things - at least most of the time. It hasn't always been like that. I remember speeding down the A14 heading for a meeting, when I still worked in the UK, and suddenly wondering why I was risking my neck, and my licence, to be on time for yet another completely superfluous meeting. So, when I'm driving through Pinoso, I don't usually mind, or get flustered, when the car in front stops to let the passenger out or even when the car stops for nothing more essential than to have a chat with a passing neighbour. In fact I quite like it, a sort of Archer's like everyday tale of country folk. Over the years I've even grown accustomed to the person at the supermarket checkout first having a bit of a chinwag with the cashier and only then starting to pack away th...

This time it's about localness and the annual flow of events but, as always, there's a long and sinuous lead in. We moved here in 2004 and, at first, we knew very little about the ebb and flow of the Spanish year. As we hunted for a house to buy we rented in Santa Pola and, one evening, as we watched the telly, I got really fed up with the thud, thud thud of a couple of drums in the street. It was obviously a pair of lads on their way back from band practice. I went onto the balcony to give them a right rollicking only to find 50 blokes carrying a big frame on their backs and practising that rhythmic swaying that they use to manoeuvre the Easter floats. The drums were to mark time. I turned round and turned up the volume on the telly. We didn't know about the enormity of the Easter celebrations in Spain. Just before our first Pinoso Fiestas, in the August of 2005, I was talking to a bloke called Ian who'd lived in Pinoso for a while. The first stall holders were beginni...

Tapas trails are probably a bit old hat now but I still like to do one from time to time. In fact we went over to Novelda last weekend and, between dodging puddles and downpours, we did four stops on their current tapas route. It reminded me that I hadn't written anything about the trails for several years and whilst, for some of you, there may be a touch of "been there, done that" for relative newcomers it may still be one of the untried delights of Spanish life. The first tapas trail or ruta de tapas that we ever did was in Sax, probably in 2005. I don't suppose that was the first one ever organised in Spain so they must have been around for ages. There are lots of variations on a theme but the basic idea is pretty straightforward. Some body, often the local Chamber of Trade or the Town Hall, persuades any number of restaurants or bars to take part. Each participating establishment prepares a tapa, often two tapas, for the route. They agree to sell the tapa and a dr...