Life in Culebrón

John, from Encebras, stopped me in the street the other day and, very kindly, said he enjoyed my blog. He also said I should write about why Spaniards walk in the street and not on the pavement. The only problem with this idea is that I don't know why. Mind you I've never let not having the facts at my fingertips stop me writing a blog, so here goes. I don't really think Spaniards do walk in the roadway in preference to on the footpath. At least not the majority. That's because most Spaniards, over 80%, live in Madrid or in towns and cities especially along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. If they tried walking in the road their life expectancy would plummet. I've never particularly noticed that Spaniards in Murcia or Alicante dice with traffic any more than Londoners or the good people of Workington. They certainly don't dice with traffic in the same way that Egyptians in Cairo and Giza do. My guess, though, is that John was thinking about Pinoso sized pl...

This is the second part of a blog about Moors and Christians or Moros y Cristianos. The first part is called Moors and Christians: the real thing and it gives the history behind this event. This blog is about putting on funny costumes and parading through the streets. The Moors and Christians festivals in all the towns have their own peculiarities. The costumes can be of varying styles, the individual events that make up the whole can be different, there can be different names for something more or less the same, the scale can vary enormously, the duration can also vary, the historical setting for the events may be different and even the type of music the accompanying bands play can have a local dimension. Nonetheless, most have essentially the same principal events. That said please bear in mind that this account has to be generalised and so is not always strictly accurate. The event is, in essence the re-enactment of a fight between two ideologies, Muslim and Christian, so the st...

A friend asked me a very simple question about Moors and Christians, the Moros y Cristianos festivals. What I thought would be a quick and easy blog now stretches over two parts. My usual disclaimer. This is not an academic piece so it is not 100% accurate. Moor is a slightly derogatory term for someone from North Africa. The term Moor doesn't really include Arabs, who come from the Arabian Peninsula, but most Spaniards don't let a little technicality like that get in the way and Moor gets used indiscriminately to include Arabs and, sometimes, with the wider significance of Muslim. Christians means Roman Catholics. It's relatively common for Spaniards to think that Methodists Episcopalians, Calvinists etc. aren't Christian.  Moors and Christians are parades and events that take part in several Spanish regions, Murcia, Castilla la Mancha, Andalucia and Extremadura, but they are particularly associated with the Valencian Community and the area in which we live. They are a...

We share our house with four cats. Three of them started as squatters. Our current four are the latest in a long line. Mary emigrated from the UK with us. Eduardo was our first Spanish cat. His mum wandered into a friend's house to give birth. Beatriz and Teodoro we got from a woman who rescues mistreated and abandoned animals. We got another kitten from her later, Samuel, but I killed him when reversing the car in our yard. The rest have been squatters, okupas. Some have style and manners and settle inside the house - they are given proper names and taken to the vet for jabs and potions and inspections. The ones that never get further than stealing food from us are identified by other sorts of names - Bad Cat, Mr Big Balls, Hissy Missy, Mr Stripy Pants etc. Britons often say that Spaniards are cruel to animals. I suspect that's as true as saying that cars are red. Some are. I've seen figures from the RSPCA that suggest Britons are no strangers to animal cruelty either. It ...

I'm not sure why but I have trouble remembering the word IMSERSO - it doesn't flow off the tongue somehow. The word is a name, it's the initials, plus some vowels, of the Instituto de Mayores y Servicios Sociales or The Institute for the Elderly and Social Services. It's a Spanish Government Agency that manages the extras behind the headline services of the Seguridad Social or Social Security System, namely free healthcare, disability care, unemployment payments and retirement pensions. Mention IMSERSO to a Spaniard and they will instantly think cheap holidays for old people. The idea is simple enough. IMSERSO negotiates rates with the tourist industry and then offers low-price package holidays to pensioners living in Spain. It has the twin advantages of keeping us oldies more active and less isolated while providing low-season business for the tourist industry. Our eight days in Cambrils in Cataluña, with coach travel from Alicante to Cambrils and back and with full bo...

Interesting week this week. Out and about in Spain much more than usual. Last Saturday, the Neighbourhood Association of our village, Culebrón, organised a coach trip to a couple of towns over the Murcia/Alicante border. We went to Cehegín and Bullas. As always with the neighbours, the vecinos, it's the human bit that makes it interesting. I'm not a particularly outgoing or effusive person, but that doesn't mean that, as we waited for the coach to arrive and as people drifted into the agreed setting-off point, there wasn't an awful lot of cheek-kissing, hearty handshakes, backslapping, and a general bonhomie that always makes me grin internally. We got to Cehegín and did our bits of wandering around, looking at museums and churches and whatnot, but the real focus of any outing with Spaniards is the meal. The restaurant that the organisers, María Luisa and Inma I think, had chosen in Bullas was absolutely cracking. There was a busload of us, 50 plus people, and the meal ...

I was a bit worried about Spanish music when we first got here. I was worried that I didn't know any. I suspected that "Viva España" didn't count. After all, one grows up with music. It insidiously surrounds you. It comes at you in shops, on adverts, from the telly, and in films.  I'm bad with music. When the musicians on stage incite the crowd to clap along I'm the only one in the audience out of time. The level of my rhythmic incompetence may be demonstrated by my being barred from using the triangle in my infant school music class; I was relegated to the benches. In secondary school I was beaten when the music teacher, carrying out tests for new members of the school choir, accused me of singing so badly on purpose. I don't remember song lyrics or titles particularly well yet, despite all these failings, I still know hundreds of songs that I never tried to learn. This is perversely opposite to the handful of poems that I've struggled to memorize and...

Ten years ago I saw the Pet Shop Boys at the old SOS 4.8 Festival in Murcia. I expected them to be terrible but they were just the opposite. They really engaged with the audience. At one point Neil was talking to us. He said how much he and Chris had enjoyed sitting in the Plaza Cardenal Beluga, in front of the Cathedral in Murcia, with a drink and a snack. "It's beautiful, isn't it, that Cathedral?" The home crowd roared its approval. He's right though. Whatever you think of its purpose Murcia Cathedral is quite a building. Although the current building was started in 1394 the part you notice first, the frontage or facade, is Baroque in style. To my mind Baroque architecture means that it has lots of twiddly bits just like Baroque music is Handel, Monteverdi and Vivaldi. But, I have a duty to my loyal readership (hello Derek!) to be a bit more specific. Wikipedia tells me that Baroque Architecture is a highly decorative and theatrical style. It began in Italy in ...

If Britons, young Britons especially, still drink tea then "Shall I put the kettle on?" must remain a common question in British households. As long as I can remember, in houses where I have lived, one of the potential answers has been "Well, if you think it will suit you". Just in case you are not a native English speaker the English language uses something called phrasal verbs. To put on is one of them and it has several meanings. Two of the common meanings are to cause a device to operate and to wear. This means that "Should I put on the Television?" and "Should I put on a tie?" have the same basic structure, both make perfect sense, yet the meanings are completely different. The answer to the kettle question is a deliberate confusion of two of those meanings. It's not much of a joke though some of us find it weakly humorous. Strictly Come Dancing is a British TV show. It's a programme where personalities are paired with professional...

As I shaved I was listening to the radio, to the part they call a tertulia, that's the bit where pundits, usually journalists, talk about the latest news. They were talking about inflation and about electric prices. They had some boffin who knew all about the electric market. One little tidbit he dropped in at the end of his section was that every Spanish electric bill has a QR code which leads to a webpage maintained by some sort of Government quango, the "National Energy Commission". By using that code/website, you get a direct comparison between your last bill and the market in general.  To explain it all properly would take pages and pages. It's quite complicated stuff, so I've kept this as short as my ponderous writing style will allow. The Spanish electric market has two sorts of contracts for we household users. One is in the controlled market. The other is in the free market. The controlled price varies from hour to hour. It's an almost incomprehensibl...