Life in Culebrón

It was in the early 80s. I had discovered Spain and was determined to learn Spanish. I didn't know that Andalucía had a reputation for an impenetrable accent, but as I had obviously heard of Seville/Sevilla, a two or three-week language course there seemed like a good idea. I went just after Christmas. Sevilla has never been kind to me. It's a city where I lose my wallet, get stranded, choose the wrong hotel, or end up in a shoving competition with nuns. That first time I went there, for the course, it was horrible. They put me in a pretty advanced class based on a written exam. Although it was easy enough to fill in a box on a test page with the third person plural of the imperfect as against the preterite, it's quite another matter remembering that as you try to recall vocabulary, word order, gender, as you wrestle with the pronunciation etc. I struggled and struggled with the spoken language. I seem to remember the caretaker found me hiding somewhere, sobbing at my inabi...

It often crosses my mind that the micromanagement of the Spanish state in not allowing car number plates to include vowels, because the letters of the plate may end up either being a name or something rude or offensive, is a bit excessive. I can't think of many rude three-letter Spanish words - 'ano' for anus is the one the authorities always quote, along with ETA, the disbanded terrorist organisation. And as for names like Ana and Leo, well, imagine if Swansea couldn't sell those vanity plates - there would be uproar among British-based Range Rover drivers. For years there was something akin in the naming of children. A little while ago, we were at one of those craft markets. Maggie was very taken with a little knitted cardigan and, for once, she knew a potential recipient - one of the Culebrón villagers was just about to give birth. The child was eventually named Vega, not Bego, the diminutive of Begonia, but Vega which, along with Martina, were the top two girls'...

Sitting around nattering, putting the world to rights, as one does, on a Saturday morning with friends. We were talking about how people make a living in Pinoso. The most obvious source of employment is in agriculture, particularly in producing wine grapes and almonds, though there are lots of other crops. Unfortunately, it's also true that there are hectares of good agricultural land lying fallow because of the problem of the "generational replacement". The farmers and winemakers are getting on in years, and their sons and daughters want to be teachers and scientists and influencers and local government officers and not farmers and winemakers. We'd talked about the salt that is pumped out of the salt dome, El Cabeço, and sent as a brine solution down a pipeline to Torrevieja where it is added to the salt lagoons there to increase the yield. Actually, the technical term for a salt dome, diapiro, also gives its name to a couple of wines produced by the local bodega or ...

We form impressions about places. Ask me to describe Morocco and I'd say reds and oranges and hot and noisy with strong aromas. I wouldn't talk about snow and ice even though I know there's plenty of snow and ice in places and at times in Morocco. In just the same way some of those impressions are now dated. The Britain in my childhood was a pretty austere place and while my my contemporaries wore terylene shorts and brown plastic sandals to play out men going to work in offices really did wear bowler hats and carry folded umbrellas. My guess is that you'd have to go some to find a bowler hat in the city nowadays, at least in an everyday context. In Spain a lot of those cliches come from the South, from Andalucia and from the past. Very few people would think bagpipes as typical of Spain (but try going to a festival in Asturias or Galicia and avoiding them) but they might think flouncy frocks and bulls. I heard a programme on the radio the other day that made me think o...

I just had three or four days in hospital, sort of related to the cancer but not directly.  On Monday I went to the local hospital to speak to a nutritionist and to get a dressing changed, and one of the nurses thought I looked so rough that she marched me down to Urgencias (A&E), where they did a few tests, kept an eye on me in observation for a while, and then admitted me onto the cancer ward. I spent the next three nights there. Basically, I was just a bit feverish and a bit dehydrated, but at one point the doctor used the words insuficiencia renal , which obviously translates as renal insufficiency—something kidney-related, though I didn’t know quite what. It certainly rattled a Spanish friend when I repeated the phrase to him. I'm not surprised. I looked up the translation, and “kidney failure” sounded quite bad. Apparently, there are stages, though, and dictionaries can be a little binary at times. It was just that my kidneys were a bit overstretched because I was vomiti...

In Alicante, on the quayside near the hotel, going down to the Casino there's a little bust of Archibald Dickson and a plaque to commemorate him and the crew of the SS Stanbrook. Archie Dickson was of the same stuff as the men and women of the boats patrolling the seas and oceans looking to save the lives of desperate people fleeing for their lives today. Archie knew what was right. The Stanbrook is small coal fired ship just 70 metres long, 1400 tons and 11 knots top speed. Archibald Dickson is from Cardiff, 47, British Merchant Navy. His ship owners have told him to leave Marseilles and pick up a cargo in Alicante. A Spanish Navy destroyer, controlled by the rebellious forces, which are just about to crush the remnants of the legitimate government, tell Archie not to enter Alicante. He hoists the Red Ensign just a bit higher, grits his teeth, crosses his fingers and takes his ship into Alicante. He doesn't like being told what he can and can't do. The quayside is heaving ...

Done it then. The prescribed treatment for my throat cancer and inflamed lymph nodes was three sessions of chemotherapy in Elda and thirty three sessions of radiotherapy in Alicante. Today I had the last session - everything finished. The medics tell me that I'll still feel sick, not be able to eat through my mouth, continue to have skin peeling off my neck, and whatnot, for a month or two yet. My next appointment with the oncologist isn't until 11 November (not at 11am) and the next time to speak to the ear nose and throat people who did the original biopsy isn't until mid December. But, for the moment I won't have to get up at 5.30 am to be ready for the ambulance to take me to Alicante every weekday and nobody is going to poison me with vile chemicals or bombard me with particles for a while. Of course nobody has suggested what will happen if it hasn't worked. I don't know whether they wade in with more of the same or if they give it up as a lost game and jus...

I've been riding around a lot in ambulances recently. I remebered an earlier blog about ambulances, back in 2019. I re-read it and it's much better than this one. It flows more easily and it's reasonably interesting in a Big Chief I-Spy sort of way. The sort of simple information with which you can amaze your friends and confound your enemies. So far as I can see there have been no basic changes to the legislation since I wrote that blog but that didn't stop me publishing this rewrite. This piece is about the ambulances that are contracted by the Generalitat Valenciana, the Regional Government in, the region I live in. Every now and again Valencia put a contract out to tender and anyone interested enough to bid has the potential for providing the ambulance fleet for the requirements of the region. There are other ambulances, private and NGO ((Non Governmental Organisation). The private clinics and hospitals need ambulances to move their customer/patients around and othe...

October 9th, is Valencia day, a regional Spanish  "bank holiday" to celebrate the day that King Jaume I entered the captured city of Valencia to bring it under the reign of the Kingdom of Aragon in 1238.  In 2006 my friend Pepa told me, that on Valencia Day, one of the typical things to do was for lovers to give each other little handkerchief-wrapped bundles of marzipan sweets in the shapes of fruit, piulets, and tronadors (even having seen pictures, I don't know how to translate those words into English). So, on that first 9th October in Pinoso, I sneaked out to buy some from a local bakery, as a bit of a surprise for Maggie. I found all the shops were fast shut. It may be the tradition in the Valencia province of the Valencian Community, but it isn't here in Alicante. It's like paella. Up in Valencia, they have that bright yellow stuff with big prawns in it and round here we have a muddy brown-green paella with rabbit and snails. Ours is much better. I get most ...

I wasn't going to do this again. Not for a while. In fact I have a very slight blog ready to go about ambulances, but a number of people have asked or sent me messages so, I'll do my best to make it short and sweet. Yet another update on me and throat cancer. Nothing has changed in the treatment stakes. I've now done 25 of the 33 sessions of radiotherapy. An ambulance collects me from home and deposits me back here a few hours later. It can be as few as four hours from start to finish and as many as six and a half. The treatment takes about twenty minutes and the rest of it is waiting or travelling time and the occasional medical Q&A. Yesterday the ambulance from Alicante brought me home via Biar. Locals can gasp and chortle.  I've done two of the three chemotherapy sessions. The third and, hopefully, final session is on Monday 14th provided that there is no medical reason for not going ahead - apparently things like anaemia, lack of platelets, reduced kidney functi...