Life in Culebrón

This last weekend we popped over to Murcia to see las Cuadrillas in Barranda. The event is principally a folk music event with bands on every street corner but there's also a big street market. We were looking for breakfast and there was a stall in the market selling migas. Now migas come in all sorts of shapes and sizes but the ones in Barranda seem to be fried flour and water crumbs with lots of sausages and vegetables mixed in. Because it's broad bean season the beans were offered as garnish; migas con habas. Migas are nice but the stall also advertised Spanish, run of the mill, sandwiches or bocadillos which use the bread we Brits call French sticks. The migas were still being prepared so we were able to queue jump by asking for a couple of the sandwiches. The man serving on asked what we wanted to drink. Tea, the drink of Gods, wasn't an option, in fact options were few and far between. The question was really, "Do you want a red wine?" So we breakfasted on ...

I'm sorry but I have to admit to enjoying Joyas sobre ruedas on the Discovery Channel - Wheeler dealers in its original. That interest explains why I asked after the hire car of a couple of friends visiting from the UK. The car had a late letter L registration - well under a year old - but it didn't have one of the emision badges or stickers on the windscreen. I mentioned this and, not surprisingly, our friends were completely in the dark about the badges. I explained. It's basically an emission thing. The idea is that electric cars, hybrids, newer petrol and diesel cars can get stickers whereas older petrol and diesel cars can't. The environmentally cleaner your motor and the fewer restrictions. The older and dirtier your car the sooner it will be forced off the road. I remembered the badges conversation when we were in Altea town centre. "Ah look, there'll be a badge on this car", I said, but there wasn't. I walked down a row of at least 50 parked ca...

I try to be frugal with toilet paper. One sheet at a time if possible. It's not because I'm particularly mean, it's because toilet paper blocks up Spanish drains. I've never quite been able to bring myself to do that thing you are instructed to do so many times in Spanish "public" toilets, the ones in bars and the like, to put the soiled paper in the wastebasket. It just seems a bit too close to living in a cave and wearing skins. That primness caught us out once though and we had to have the floor ripped up to clear the blockage. In order for that not to happen again I now go around our three bathrooms each week and tip buckets of water down the toilets, clean the hair from the plugholes and other routine things to avoid a reoccurence. When we have houseguests who use up a couple of toilet rolls in a weekend I'm hard pressed not to reprimand them sternly. Our house is old but it's a bit like that bucket that has a new handle, a new bottom and a reweld...

When Spanish people ask me what I like most about Spain I say the anarchy. Then I have to backtrack because the word has more history and more significance in Spanish than it does in English. I should say something like the informality, a touch of rebelliousness, the remarkability of some fiestas and the way that after a family meal in a Spanish restaurant the proverbial bomb dropping would make no noticeable difference nor would it stop the kids playing tag around the tables. There are lots of other things I like too but it's a good starter. When Spanish people ask me what I like least about Spain I say the cold. They think I'm joking. I explain that in the UK it might be cold outside in winter, and dark, but that inside it would be nice and warm. It's not true of most of Spain but here in Alicante, where insulation is practically non existent, where tiles and ornamental stone are everywhere and where central heating is almost unknown then wearing outdoor clothing inside i...

Bétera, near Valencia, mid August, years ago. Our friends had taken us to join the crowd in the main street. We didn't quite know why. They weren't explaining and our Spanish wasn't up to asking. When the fireworks, hung from overhead lines, started to go off and shower the crowd with sparks and flame we knew what to do though. We retreated before the wall of fire. The end of the street was sealed, there was nowhere to go; hundreds of us cowered, cheek by jowl, knowing, or at least trusting, that the flames and sparks wouldn't reach us. And sputter out they did.  The next night we went back to the same place to join in the fiesta. We noticed there were no parked cars and that all the windows were boarded up. As midnight approached our friends herded us back to the car and abandoned the town centre. We didn't know why. We found out though. After midnight gangs of young people wearing overalls and crash helmets, and with at least one fire extinguisher per group, just ...

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...