Life in Culebrón

There's quite a lot of stuff that I'm aware of because I'm English. Stuff like knowing that Belgravia and Chelsea are rich parts of London, that Trafalgar Square is the (English) place to be for New Year, that Land of Hope and Glory will get a lung bashing the Last Night of the Proms and that haddock is not the usual fish in fish and chips but it was where I grew up. One of the pleasures and pitfalls of living in a place you were not born is that the common knowledge in the new place will be different. I've mentioned this in blogs lots of times before. I find it interesting, otherwise why would I be in the least interested in the story of Suavina lip balm  and why would I keep going on about how strange Spaniards find it that we drink hot drinks with food or think that cheese and onion sandwiches are normal? Last month we stayed over in Alcoy during the weekend of their Modernista Fair. Modernista, modernism is something else that I'd never really heard of till I go...

Some friends asked us if we could organise a visit to a bodega. They didn't really mean me, they meant my partner, Maggie. She likes wine, she likes to visit bodegas. Wine is one of her hobbies, she knows a good deal about the local wineries and their products. I count beer and brandy among my hobbies but the focus is somewhat different. Spain produces a lot of wine. I wasn't quite sure how much or where the country was in the pecking order of wine producers but I was sure the Internet would know. Like so many times before I found that the information is not so cut and dried as you might expect.  Where Spain ranks in world wine production fits with what may, or may not, be a Spanish urban myth about Italian olive oil. Spaniards say that the oil produced in Spain is shipped in bulk to Italy where it is put into stylish bottles with Italian labels and passed off as Italian. The Italians have, for a long time,  marketed their oil as a top quality product, much better than the hum...

Our house is a shade over 600 metres above sea level. If you say that in feet it's just shy of 2,000 feet which, in the UK, would be hilly. The Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge with Pen-y-Ghent at 694 metres, Whernside at 736 metres and Ingleborough at 723 metres are all a bit lower than the humble, but 800 metre high hill, Xirivell, at the back of our house. Just a little further away the Sierra del Carche range, which you can see from Pinoso and which you drive alongside on the way to nearby Jumilla, rises to 1371 metres which is just a few metres up on Ben Nevis at 1345 metres. That said the Grampians, the Lake District or the Machynlleth Hills call for high tech footwear, cuben fibre gear and trekking poles while Xirivell is much more a flip flops and shorts hill. The difference is the height of the surrounding flatland. The Spanish Ordnance Survey, the National Geographic Institute (IGN from it's initials in Spanish), began work on the first topographic maps in 1857. One of...

Second-hand car prices being what they are in Spain, and because I could, I bought a car from new. I was actually in a situation where I could have paid outright (pension lump sum), but the dealer offered a better price, even with all the interest, on a finance package. The finance period had to be 48 months or more. When the last instalment left my bank account on September 14 this year I grinned. The car was mine. Or so I thought. I have an application on my phone called Mi DGT or My DGT (DGT is Dirección General de Transporte - something like The Ministry of Transport ). Apart from being a bit on the clunky side, the phone app's OK. It holds my driving licence and most of the official documentation on the car. At the top of the details about the car, there is a red band and a warning sign. Basically, it says I'm not the owner of the car, VW Finance is. I've been waiting for the red notice to go away since I paid the last instalment, but today, for the first time, I bothe...

I forget exactly but I think it was when they were burying the old Queen. As the cortege passed, at least on one stretch, people applauded. The British public didn't keep quiet, they didn't hold with the old stiff upper lip rule. No "dignified" silence. They showed their appreciation. They clapped. Spaniards always applaud at funerals, at celebrity funerals, at funerals for victims, at funerals for heroes. Reverence isn't the way; full voiced appreciation is. Spaniards applauded the health workers every evening for 64 consecutive days during the pandemic. Spaniards applaud under lots of circumstances. When something bad happens. When women are murdered by their partners. When children are kidnapped, when workers die in industrial accidents, Spaniards go and stand somewhere, together, and make a show of their concern and solidarity. A short period of silence, at noon, followed by applause, outside the town hall is typical. When something bad happens in a town. When...

We're going to take a stroll through a typical Spanish Archaeological Museum. First though some figures to show just how much of our history is really prehistory. Take my figures with a pinch of salt. The information is generally European and, because there was some variation in the detail, I rounded and massaged the figures. They are fine for a conversation down the pub but not detailed enough to form the basis of your specialist subject on Mastermind. About 4,500,000,000 years ago the Earth was formed About 3,700,000,000 years ago microbes pop up About 500,000,000 years ago jellyfish are doing just fine About 2,500,000 years ago and there are eight (and probably more to be unearthed) human species like the Neanderthals and Denisovans kicking about About 300,000 years ago we appear - Homo Sapiens. Time will prove that sapiens was a bad choice of name. Total human population about 30,000 About 73,000 years ago the Toba catastrophe (a volcanic eruption in Indonesia) reduces the huma...

We were up in Valencia a little while ago. One of the places we went was a museum called L'Etno. I'd heard on the radio that it had won the 2023 European Museum of the Year Award so, while we were in town, it made sense to go and have a nosey. My 'two and two' skills being what they are, I'd failed to realise that it was an ethnology museum. Ethnology isn't a word I use every day but, in essence, it's a museum about society and its artefacts; old cars, 8 tracks, telephone boxes, rolling pins and fridges. Like everyone else, as we gawped at the exhibits, we reminisced. "We had one of those in our kitchen" or "My mum used to swear by Oxydol." One of the many things that drew my attention was a photo with the title "El baile de los solteros." The museum people had interpreted that caption into English as "No dance for the single men." It's a black and white photo. The background music is a chotis, a Madrileño folk dan...

The tyres on my car were getting towards the dodgy end of the spectrum. There are two obvious tyre retailers in Pinoso - places with pictures of tyres on their signs. I asked them, in person, for prices. I got quotes for tyres made by Aplus, Kummo, Minerva, Roadstone, Firestone and Hankook. I was born in a simpler world. A world where Cadbury was British, not American and Volvo was Swedish, not Chinese. When a Mini had a BMC engine and not a Peugeot one. When tyres were made by Pirelli, Goodyear, Dunlop and Michelin. I'd never heard of most of the brands. The only decision I could make about quality was price. If Firestone cost more than Insa I supposed they were better but then again we all know that sometimes we're paying for a name. The Internet reviews were useless. The tyres were still legal. I decided the choice could wait. At a routine, prepaid, service on the car SEAT disagreed with me. They said the tyres didn't have enough tread left. They gave me a price to repla...

Try telling a Spanish insurance company's price calculator that you've been driving since you were 17. They won't have it. Spaniards can't get a driving licence till they're 18 so the Spaniards believe that everywhere in the world starts driving at 18. The insurance company's database is built around the Spanish way of doing things. It's a good job I'm not from South Dakota. It used to be the same for foreign names. I'd want to register on a Spanish webpage. I was asked for both my surnames. As I don't have two surnames, and as it was often a required field, I'd try with an X or a dash. Sometimes that didn't work; I'm still Chris Thompson Nil on a fair few databases. It's a problem that has almost gone away nowadays. There's still space for two surnames but only the first will be compulsory. This is because, as I'm sure you know, most Spaniards have two surnames; one from the mother and the other from the father. The usual...

If you've ever seen people in Alicante or Murcia dressed in traditional clothes, you may have noticed that they are wearing rope-soled shoes. Before I moved to Spain, I'd have called them espadrilles. Here, they are called alpargatas. They are made from esparto grass which, like hemp or sisal, can be woven and sewn to make numerous everyday items. Once upon a time ordinary people wore alpargatas all the time for everything form climbing palm trees and working the earth to dancing at fiesta time. I have a friend who, often, when we go somewhere new, asks me how people who live or lived in that place make or made a living. Usually I guess that it's web design or selling insurance or running a bar, just like everywhere else but even if I have a better answer it can seem unlikely. We're in some forgotten village in Teruel in front of a gigantic old house, palace-sized and the answer is that all that money came from sheep. Hmm, a likely story. It's true, though; wool gen...