Life in Culebrón

Besides perfume and cars there are multiple adverts on Spanish telly for food. Particularly for fast food or franchised food chains - Foster's Hollywood, KFC, Domino's - or for quick to eat food - Casa Tarradellas pizzas, Yatekomo noodles. Now I'm not a discerning diner. I was a big fan of Spam, I like crabsticks and I still buy el Pozo meat products despite seeing the stomach turning documentary on TV. But I have to say that the adverts are putting me off a bit. The food is all so shiny and bathed in red or yellow sauce of dubious parentage. Eating with hands squidged over with sauce appears to be a positive thing. I have a Spanish pal who is very set in his ways. From what I can tell he eats a lot of very traditional Pinoso food. If it's not local then, whether it's at home in a restaurant, he sticks to the tried and tested - grilled meat, stews, rice dishes and the like. I usually meet this friend around 12.30 so, a long hour later, I'm saying goodbye because...

I went to the UK, well England, a few weeks ago. I like England well enough but I don't visit that often. I probably go a little more often than once a year but I usually only stay three or four days. My visit in February was my first since May of last year. Both of my last two visits have been prompted by my mum being less well than usual. It's funny going back. I'm English, I'll always be English and my English is still pretty good - a bit old fashioned maybe but good. My language skills and my cultural knowledge make me feel comfortable in England. I usually know how things are organised, how to behave but if things have changed, or start to go a bit awry, I can ask, I can talk to people, find out what's going. Nonetheless I had, at one point, to hold out a handful of coins and ask the person on the other side of the counter to take the appropriate money. I am, of course, aware that simply using physical money makes me a bit odd but, in the heat of the moment, I ...

This is a piece about days out on the train. As usual I got distracted. If you're not interested in the Spanish railway system skip the next four paragraphs I was told, ages ago, that, where there are twin tracks, Spanish trains "drive" on the left. That is they use the left hand set of rails in relation to the direction they're travelling. The reason, so said my informant, was that the first railways in Spain were built by British engineers and without giving it a second thought the Britons built the system that way around. It turns out that I was lied to. It's partly true in that the first line on the peninsula did use a British Engineer but his line, from Barcelona to Mataró, opened in 1848, ran trains on the right.  As the railways boomed the first big Spanish railway company - MZA - Compañía de los Ferrocarriles de Madrid a Zaragoza y Alicante - bought the Barcelona to Mataró line. They bought the direction of travel too. MZAs big competitor in the pioneering...

I didn't understand much of what she said. Well, maybe half. This drives me bonkers. Nearly 20 years, and I still have trouble understanding a tour guide. Maggie said that it was because of her Murciano accent and the residual noise all around us, maybe, but if the guide had been speaking English, I would have understood everything. Well, more than half anyway. We were doing a coach tour of the floración, the flowering, the blossom on the fruit trees in Cieza. Like lots of places with almonds, cherries, peaches, etc., Cieza makes a bit of a thing about it. They have a big programme from country breakfasts and bike rides to photographic exhibitions, music competitions and visits to lots of local places of interest all tied in to the blossom. I have to be honest and say I usually forget until it's too late. For some reason, Cieza, which is only 45 minutes from Culebrón, isn't one of those places I think of as a likely destination. What I should do, as soon as I see some sort ...

I like to do things, to go places, to get out to Spain. To concerts, to parades, to fairs and fiestas, to restaurants and landmarks, to open days, exhibitions and guided walks. There always seems to be lots going on all over the place. I've never been quite able to decide whether this is because there are a lot of things on offer or because I've got into the habit of hunting them out. It may be a combination of both. It may also be because of where we happen to be based. Pinoso is surrounded by other towns and, as everywhere does things, the cumulative effect is impressive. When we first got here there were a whole load of new cultural experiences to tap into. A lot of the information came from posters. It was both comical and frustrating that the posters often failed to give basic information - when or where - for instance. That's because the posters were a gentle reminder to a local audience. As the event hadn't changed in years, everyone who mattered, the locals, kne...

In my diary I often use the expression sunny and blue to describe the daytime weather in wintertime Spain. Hardly a cloud in the blue, blue sky and a temperature anywhere from the low teens to the low twenties. This year it's been particularly warm. But warm is relative. In the sun, in a pavement bar, in our garden, it's warm, but in the same spot, half an hour later, in the shade it's chilly. Our incoming water pipe passes along a North facing wall and often, during the winter, it would freeze up and leave us waterless till around noon when the day warmed up. Nowadays it has layers and layers of lagging and duct tape and we no longer need to venture out either smelly and tealess. Our kitchen door opens onto a patio. l leave it open as I'm cooking lunch and I'm fine, temperature wise; not so good chef-wise. Our living room, on the other side of the kitchen though is distinctly chilly and, before Maggie comes home from a hard morning at the office, I put on some heat...

I've always liked going to the pictures, to the cinema. It's not just the film but the experience. It's true you can see the pictures and hear the words on Netflix or Apple TV, or even on the broadcast telly, but it's hardly the same. The cinema is total immersion, a darkened room with one focus of attention, and a screen that dwarfs even the largest television screen. I also like that it involves popping out of British territory and into Spain. I used to go to the pictures in the UK too. A huge advantage that we Britons have, in relation to film viewing, is that we speak English. This means that the films produced by the US film makers aren't seen as being foreign, even though they are. Italian and French and Iranian films, those that come with subtitles are foreign. I don't think I ever saw a dubbed film in a cinema in the UK, foreign films always came with subs. Not so in Spain. Here nearly all foreign language films (which obviously embraces Hollywood produc...

There are plans to build a solar farm pretty close to our house. I've mentioned it before. The main development is going to be run a "field" back from the main road, the CV83, that's the road from Monóvar to Pinoso. The larger part of the development will start just past the Culebrón roundabout, on the left hand side of the road going towards Pinoso, and run up to finish near the track opposite the ecoparque. There's a secondary part of the development a little higher up the hill from our house too.  Now, to be absolutely honest I'm not that bothered about the panels. Like nearly everyone I think solar energy is much better than coal, gas or nuclear plants. It's not as though the unploughed field alongside the CV83 is particularly picturesque and from our house we already have views of a bunch of falling down buildings, out of place brightly coloured monocapa houses, goat sheds and any number of telegraph poles, posts and cables. I'd much rather have t...

Now to explain a little. The usual way for anyone to refer to the Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria, AEAT, the Spanish tax collection agency, is to say Hacienda. Each year Hacienda publishes figures, based on tax returns, to say which is the richest municipality in Spain. They give the median (declared) income as their yardstick. The figures are always a couple of years behind because the tax return we will do in Spring of this year will be for 2023 and with the time it takes to finish everything off this latest set of figures are for the tax year 2021. I have no idea why a news article turned up on my phone about these figures this morning, they were published in October 2023, but they did and I thought they were just about interesting enough for a blog especially if I added a few local numbers.  The richest place in Spain is Pozuelo de Alarcon close to Madrid with a median gross income of 80,244€. In the Valencian Region the richest town is Rocafort, a small town to th...

I went to see a fiesta in honour of Saint Anthony in Vilanova d'Alcolea last weekend. I've seen some pretty bonkers fiestas in Spain over the years but, so far, this one takes the biscuit. I seriously thought, for a few moments, that I might burst into flames and die in a ball of fire. Castellón province seems to go to town on Saint Anthony celebrations. The events are pretty obviously pagan at root, with a bit of Christian updating. In 2022 we went to the Santantonà in Forcall where a band of devils take two saints, Anthony and Peter, captive, tie them up and drag them around the streets on the way to be burned in a bonfire. Occasionally the devils are distracted from their primary task of immolation when they spy fair maidens watching the proceedings from their balconies. The devils climb to the balconies intent on another of the three tenets of the classic Viking battle plan: burn, pillage and rape. This year, as I said I went to Vilanova d'Alcolea, a village with a popu...