Life in Culebrón

On a Tunisian holiday we ate lots of carrots and lots of strawberries. They were in season, they were cheap, they were tasty so the hotels bought barrow loads of them for their guests. It's the same with lots of garden crops. They come in shedloads, all at once. Suddenly you have cherries or plums or green beans coming out of your ears. With us it was only ever figs. We've never done well with our garden - most things are early for the next extinction event. The figs were an exception but most of our garden is either dead or dying. We had three trees: two big ones and a smaller one. The big ones produced two crops a year. I mean, seriously, in the UK I'd occasionally see figs in Waitrose and buy them as a bit of a novelty. It was a novelty that lasted for maybe half a dozen figs over a couple of weeks. What does any individual do with thousands of figs? There are only so many jars of fig jam or fig and cheese starters that any one person can eat and most of the possibilitie...

Something in today's news about income tax completely flummoxed me. I think I've got it worked out now. I may be wrong so don't take my ramblings as gospel but I thought you may be interested too. The current Spanish Government is a coalition. That coalition can usually garner support from other parties to approve its legislation, but not always. Today, one of the news stories was about a row within the two parties that make up the Government. Yolanda Diaz, from SUMAR, has done a deal with the Unions to put the minimum wage up to 1,184€ per month. Because there are 14 payments in the Spanish year that's a total income of 16,576€ per year. At the moment the minimum wage is 15,876€. Yolanda Diaz also pushed through legislation which dropped the working week from 40 hours to 37.5 hours for the same pay. The majority party in Government, the Socialists or PSOE, argue that, as the minimum wage is now a reasonable income, it should be taxed like other incomes. SUMAR argues th...

Much to the amusement of Maggie, my partner, instead of resolving to go to the gym or to stop drinking alcohol in the New Year my resolution was to learn the words to Un beso y una flor. It's a song popularised in Spain by the singer Nino Bravo in 1972.  I don't know about you but I was forced to learn things by rote in Secondary school on pain of serious bodily harm.  Latin master to an 11 year old me. "Alright Thompson;  present tense of to love in Latin" I try. "Wrong, lift one leg, stand on just one. Try again. Same verb, same tense." I try again. "Wrong, lift the other leg too!"  Should you be concerned I can still trot out amō, amās, amat, amāmus, amātis, amant even when I'm dead drunk. I can also do "I wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats on high etc.," and "So shaken as we are, so wan with care, find we a time for frighted peace to pant, etc. That seems to be it though. There must have been more but they've go...

Being as how they're in season Walnuts are a common sight in Spanish supermarkets and homes around Christmas time. Apparently Britons and Spaniards open walnuts differently. In the UK, in my youth, Christmas was about the only time of the year we'd have nuts, in shells, in our house. What joy, a reason to bring the crocodile nutcracker out of it's almost perennial hibernation and set it to task. The tail applied the pressure to the nut placed between the beast's jaws. Now this, plier like, action, is fine for nuts with hard shells - Brazil nuts, hazelnuts and almonds for instance. It was complete overkill for monkey nuts and problematic for walnuts too. Instead of a nice clean break the intricately constructed walnut shells generally shattered when they suddenly lost their structural strength. The crocodile jaws would smack to producing a mixed pile of pulverized nut and shell fragments. When you buy a net bag of walnuts in Spain they usually (not always) come with some...

Maggie tells me I should be explicit and say that I have been given the cancer all clear. She tells me that a sentence built into the story of the Imserso holiday is not good enough. That all the people who have shown concern need to be told clearly and succinctly. Clearly fine, succinctly - not likely given my style. On 10 January I saw the oncologist at Elda Hospital after doing a PET -TAC at the Vinalopó Hospital in Elche a couple of days before. The oncologist told me that the results showed that the lesion that had been in my throat, in August, was no longer there - the cancer was gone. Every few months I will have to have another TAC scan and then go to see the oncologist to see whether the cancer has come back. I asked what chance there was of the cancer returning and he said 40%. That puts the odds in my favour. I thought I was done there but Maggie tells me that I should tell you that I'm still having trouble eating. That, even now, I'm taking most food through a stoma...

The food tasted horrid. It may really have been horrid but I think it was probably right enough given that it was mass catering. My recentish bouts of radio and chemotherapy have mashed up my taste buds and almost everything tastes odd. In fact until a couple of weeks ago I hadn't tried eating, by putting anything in my mouth, for a bit over three months but, when the oncologist said there was no sign of cancer, it seemed about time to stop messing around and get back to normal. I'm still taking most of my sustenance through a stomach tube though. Whether the food was foul or not it came as part of the package and so, come hell or high water, I was definitely going to force some of it down my gullet. Anyway I'd also promised the nutritionist I'd try.  Mealtimes, not eating much, I had the opportunity to look around at my fellow travellers. I felt for the few young people who had, mistakenly, booked into the hotel. It was full of holidaying pensioners. Most of us were ov...

I was hanging around in the Corte inglés in Alicante the other day. Corte Inglés is a big department store. Like all traditional retailers Corte Inglés has been having a hard time recently but they're still something of a Spanish institution. Anyway, Father Ted like, I, inadvertently, wandered into the women's underwear section. As I averted my eyes, I found myself gazing at small section dedicated to "traditional" clothes from Alicante. I was rather taken with the silk brocade waistcoats but not so much with the 190€ price tag on most of them. I've often wondered where people get their "traditional" clothes from so Corte Inglés was a bit of a surprise. Maybe all the branches in Provincial Capitals have a "traditional" section. I've asked of course and been variously told that some of the clothes are hired, that there are family heirlooms, that lots are made in family, that there are people who make a living by supplying the clothes and, fr...

There are lot of strange fiestas in Spain. Every now and then I'll see some article or read a report about this or that event where everyone throws paint at a man dressed as a clown/harlequin for either attempting to steal/failing to steal a religious icon in Guadix and Baeza (Cascamorras), where a man, also dressed as a clown/harlequin, jumps over babies each Corpus Christi in Castrillo de Murcia, in Burgos (El Colacho), where devils capture saints with the intention of burning then to death if they are not sidetracked into climbing onto the balconies of fair maidens with rape in their minds (La Santantonà in Forcall), where six open coffins, with live occupants, are paraded around a church and its cemetery to musical accompaniment in Las Nieves, Galicia (Fiesta de Santa Marta de Ribarteme) or where giant puppets, skeletons and knights Templar parade through the torchlit streets of Soria (Las Ánimas). Once upon a time any list of odd festivals would include the takeover of the tow...

The local Medios de Counicación recently published Capito's analysis of the annual data from the weather station in Pinoso for 2024. It's in Valenciano, so I may have got some things wrong. I missed out a couple of details on purpose. I may have missed others by mistake.  Capi Gonzálvez Poveda, Capito, taught in Pinoso for years and he still runs the local weather stations one of which forms part of the AEMET, the National Weather Service's, network. So, the maximum temperature was 41°C on 3 July, and the minimum was -2.5°C on 21 December.  We received 256 litres of rain during the year,  the rainiest day was 11 June, with 41 litres.  The windiest day was 8 June, when the wind blew at 75 km/h.  The day with the highest minimum temperature was 16 July, when the temperature didn't drop below 23°C.  The day with the lowest maximum temperature was 11 December, when the temperature didn't exceed 9.5°C. There was rain on 55 days, it dropped below freezing on 20 d...

Sometimes I think my Spanish is OK. Other times, I despair. Most of the time, when I have a longer session speaking Spanish, despair is the overriding sensation.  Right at the beginning, it was verb tables, pronunciation, grammar, trying to understand the structure and learning vocabulary. Even today I try to find a few minutes a day to read through my vocabulary books. Every now and again, as I stumble over some verb tense in a real-world conversation, I go back and have a bit of a read through those verb tables or something on object and subject pronouns because I seem to be a little confused. It amazes me how difficult it is to retain some of the basic grammar, learned vocabulary or phrases after all these years. My Spanish is miles better than it was when I got here, but it's still terribly pidgin. The only place where I still can fall completely apart is on the phone; but even there I generally manage to scrape through nowadays. In general, in a normal sort of conversation, I ...