Life in Culebrón

In the run up to Christmas we bought a couple of coca from the women running the Caritas stall outside the Parish Rooms in Pinoso. The coca were cooked as we watched and wrapped in silver paper. For two we paid one Euro. I like coca and I wolfed mine down. My companion was not so keen. Mind, she's the sort of woman who doesn't like digestive biscuits. She likes something a bit fancier. She calls coca fat pies. Coca has nothing to do with soft drinks or narcotics. Coca is a sort of thickish pancake made with flour, water and olive oil, salted to taste. You make a dough, separate off a small ball shaped lump of it, squash it down with the heel of your hand to make a vague circular shape before frying it up on a plancha which is an oil coated flat hot surface. You couldn't get much simpler. There's another traditional food around here called gachamiga made with just flour, oil, water and garlic. In most of the village fiestas there will be competitions (traditionally for m...

Over the last few weeks we've been in theatres a little more regularly than usual. We saw Carmina Burana in Alcoy, Totally Tina in the Gran Teatre in Elche, Miguel Poveda down at the ADDA in Alicante and then a classical orchestra at The Chapí in Villena. The last thing I went to here in Pinoso was quite a while ago now though, the Akram Trio, at the tail end of November. While we go to theatres for bands, opera, dance, music, zarzuelas and even magic we usually shy away from plays. Too tricky for our dodgy Spanish.  As I hope you know Culebrón is a part of Pinoso and Pinoso has a population of about 8,500. In the English countryside Pinoso would be no more than a village but here it's definitely a town - probably because it provides town like services. One of those services is a theatre, the frequently used Auditorio Emilio Martínez Sáez. Settlements even smaller than Pinoso boast a theatre. Nearby Algueña (1300 people) and Salinas (1600) both have theatres and so (obviously) ...

Everyone knows that Germans don't have a sense of humour. Everyone knows that people from the United States are fat, that Jamaicans have dreads and smoke ganja all the time or that we English are very formal and reserved. And everyone knows that those generalisations are all totally untrue. Jada Pinkett Smith is American, Usain Bolt is Jamaican and all those people vomiting on the payments in Magaluf are British. Bear that idea in mind as you read. Here are some things that Spaniards do or don't do. The converse is that somebody else typically does do, or doesn't do, these things. Spanish men don't wear shorts once summer is over and until the summer weather comes back. A warm day in February doesn't count. Spaniards don't put butter on the bread - not on sandwiches and not on the plate to go with the bread roll at table. It is true that, in some parts of Spain, Spaniards put butter on toast, with jam. Spaniards do not drink warm drinks - tea, coffee type drinks...

I've been chided many, many times, by friends and acquaintances, for choosing to go into "old men's bars". If you live in Spain you know the sort of place. It's not a particularly lavishly decorated spot. In fact, normally it's a bit dowdy, poorly lit, a bit grubby. It has a tiled floor that has seen better times, the tables and chairs are a bit worse for wear too. Probably there are piles of abandoned kit in plain view - beer crates, extra tables, mop buckets and over there, by the toilets, an old fashioned chest freezer, emblazoned with a company name, now used just for ice and as a resting place for flotsam and jetsam. The bar of the bar is probably quite long and it's not particularly decorative  - stainless steel or some polished stone maybe. In the old days there used to be heaps of used serviettes on the floor by the bar. The telly will be on, though usually the sound is muted. That's not the case with the rest of the place. If what your eyes se...

Last Friday, November 25, there were demonstrations and events all over Spain for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. As you enter the majority of Spanish towns and cities you will see a purple sign telling you that this town is against gender violence - that's one of Pinoso's on the left. When women in Spain are murdered by their partners or ex partners the murder is always given prominence in the news. There is a well publicised, 016, national helpline against gender violence. In Pinoso every first Friday of the month at 8pm, there are a few minutes of silence to remember the victims of gender violence. Spain was the fourth country in the world to introduce same sex marriage. The Yes is Yes Law that has just come into force, and which is having a stormy introduction for some dodgy legal drafting, is legislation which makes prosecution of rapists and abusers much less difficult and less traumatic for women. A new bit of legislation came into fo...

Going to the pictures in Spain is a bit sad at the moment. The cinemas are just so quiet. The reports say 35% down on pre pandemic figures. I suppose that when everyone was locked in their homes they subscribed to Apple TV or Netflix or Filmin. At that time the film makers and distributors thought, well, if anyone is going to see my film then I have to put it on HBO or Amazon Prime or the Disney Channel and the rest. So film making is healthy enough, lots of product, but with many releases going direct to platforms or having very short cinema runs. Although I go to the flicks a lot, I go at unpopular times. Not for me the crush of Saturday evening but, more usually, the peace of Tuesdays. Even then the fall off in numbers is noticeable. I've been in cinemas where, so far as I can tell, there are no other customers in the whole building. Tuesday is favourite because the nearest cinema to Culebrón, the Yelmo in Petrer, does its original language films then. It's become a habit s...

I have my little ways. When the sun's shining and I'm sitting outside a bar I like to drink cold beer. I tend to ask for tercios, the beer bottles which contain a third of a litre, hence the word tercio, a third. I started with bottles because they hold a definite amount, unlike glasses which can vary quite a bit from bar to bar. Especially when driving is on the cards I like to know how much I am drinking. Nowadays there is also much more variety in beer styles in bottles than on draught. I don't care for those smaller bottles, the botellín or quinto. Logically, with quinto meaning a fifth, they hold a fifth of a litre. Neither fish nor fowl. The most usual way to ask for a draught beer is to ask for a caña. One of the reasons for drinking cañas, rather than, say, buying and sharing a litre bottle, is that beer warms up quickly in the Mediterranean sun and most Spaniards like their beer cold, cold, cold. Caña is an imprecise and yet detailed way to describe a specific glas...

I really couldn't think of a topic for this week. So, disconnected jottings. I consider we live in a reasonably rural situation so I was a bit surprised when, this morning, a Guardia Civil car, ablaze with lights and horns, shot past our house. The dirt track peters out another three or four hundred metres up the hill so I went to see where they were going. The car did a left foot/handbrake turn about 200 metres past our gate, sped past the house again, going the other way, and did a sliding turn to the left. Sixty seconds later they were back. They roared off to whatever it was that they didn't know how to find.  It made me ponder the things that pass our house. A couple of weeks ago we had a small lorry, with a hydraulic platform on the back. The driver assured me he wasn't lost. Too early on Sunday morning a very clunky bucket excavator trundled up the track in the thick mist presumably to root out the de-branched apricot trees. Cars and vans, homeowners and their frien...

A couple of chums were talking about buying their weekly Euromillones (EuroMillions) ticket. I asked after their Christmas lottery purchases. They sort of knew what I meant but they sort of didn't. I saw an opening for a blog. Just to be even handed O.N.C.E., the organisation for people with a visual impairment, run a Christmas lottery and there's a State lottery, el Niño, to coincide with Three Kings. I'm sure they are all fine and dandy but the one that counts, the big one, is the fat one - el Gordo - drawn on 22 December. In truth, el Gordo isn't quite so fat. A winning ticket is worth 4 million euros. The thing that most people buy though isn't a ticket, it's a decimo; a tenth of a ticket. If you buy a ticket from one of the State Lottery Administraciones and you pay 20€ for it then you have a decimo.  If you want to have a go you will see the ticket/decimos (I'm going to stop that now) on sale all over the place. As well as in the lottery administration...

There are lots of Western Europeans, other than Spaniards, in Pinoso. In fact there seem, without knowing the figures, to be more and more. Belgian and Dutch voices are much more evident now than they were a little while ago and there is a good smattering of German and French in the supermarket too. Obviously enough there are other nationalities hoping to carve out a better life and, recently, there has been an influx of Ukrainians but those people have different stories. The Belgians, Germans and Swedes are here, generally, by choice. They may or may not be resident. Signed up Europeans, not the ones who rant about secure borders, have rights in Spain. They can come and go more or less at will, so determining who is and who isn't resident can be quite tricky. As it used to be with Britons. A question I have been asked lots of times by Spaniards is why so many Britons choose to live in Pinoso. I've never been able to think of a good response. I can't now.  Part of it must b...