Life in Culebrón

I typed the first draft of this when the lights were off - all over Spain. What a strange experience that was. We were fine but it did make us think about the number of things that would be difficult or impossible without power. You know the sort of thing - even if it were possible for the staff to get past the supermarket shutters to open up  they would find the the lights, freezers and cold displays off, the price scanners wouldn't work, the tills wouldn't open and even if the customers had cash there would be no way to compute the bill or store the loot. We imagined abandoned electric cars with depleted batteries, abandoned thermal vehicles with empty tanks (no electric to work the fuel pumps) and traffic chaos as all the traffic lights failed. Perhaps one of the oddest things was that, when we got in the car, the radio started up, as it does so often, and we didn't notice that the programming, which told us about the blackout, was being broadcast on what is normally a c...

I once shook Desmond Tutu's hand. He didn't really shake mine back -  he was looking the other way and talking to someone over his shoulder but he was also shaking any hand that was thrust towards him, and mine was one of those. Our palms touched so I've always claimed it as a handshake. The truth is, but for that handshake I remember nothing else about that day. I presume Nelson was still locked up, I suppose Queen, and many others, were still playing Sun City. No matter - both Dessie and I thought we should be there that day and we were. Google tells me it was probably 1988. That may be the last time I was on a big demonstration—the ones where I joined one of the coaches to take protestors to London. I'm sure I did some picket line duty into the 1990s, and I've been a half participant in a couple of things here about worker's and women's rights but my real demonstration days were Cruise Missiles at Molesworth, the Miners' Strike, Ban the Bomb, and the ...

The Pinoso Pensioners’ Club has a WhatsApp group. At times I wonder if the the application is totally under the organiser's control but the messages are often interesting. Anyway, a few days ago, there were a few lines on it exhorting me to join in with the upcoming Merienda de Pascua (Easter Picnic) at the Club HQ. The message suggested I pick up my wicker basket, load up on monas , get out my typical apron and headscarf, and come to share my victuals with my friends – to keep alive an old tradition. Now, I have to say that I don’t like it when I don’t know stuff like this. What aprons? What baskets? I did know about monas . They’re a version of toñas  and a  toña is a sort of sweet bread presented as a rounded loaf, some 20 cm across. I understand that one of the odd things about the toña is that it includes potato in the mix. The mona – which would usually translate as a female monkey – is the same sort of bread but with a hard-boiled egg set into it. Often, the eggs ...

I was going through my hat collection with a view to throwing a few away. I came across an obvious candidate; a fluorescent Caja Rural baseball cap. It was a pale imitation of the original Caja Rural baseball caps (as in the photo here) that were briefly trendy among urban hipsters as a sort of cipher for their claim to family roots in a bucolic rural past.  I was thinking about these hats as I talked to my AI Spanish application. Billy-no-mates that I am, I've quite taken to talking to this gadget on my phone. One of the things I like is that, as well as practising my Spanish, the AI is backed by the internet so it knows all sorts of things. It makes for a strangely informed conversation. I asked if it were true about Caja Rural hats and  if there were other things that were everyday and boring but considered to be very typically Spanish. It came up with botijos, porrones, botas de vino and abanicos. It just so happens that we went to an open day at a pottery museum in Agost ...

Villena is a town forty minutes up the road from Pinoso. It's a town I like: there's often something going on there. The theatre is lovely, there's a train station in town and another, the quietest AVE station in Spain, in a field near enough to be called Villena and, of course, it has 22 kilos of Bronze Age gold—the Villena Treasure. And if none of those are enough, then Ferri, the huge ironmongers, is really good for any unreformed men with all those tool belts and strange bits of machinery. I also find the occasional mispronunciation of the name quite amusing; when I think that someone is off to the Austrian capital rather than popping up the road for a new pool pump. Anyway, I'm listening to Nieves Concostrina doing one of her little history slots on the radio. She's talking about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 with her usual mix of dry humour and anticlerical sarcasm. It's pretty obvious from her description that the two kingdoms that would la...

My sister-in-law is, apparently, learning French. She and my sister, who is learning Russian, were talking about Duolingo, the telephone and computer language learning app. I really don't care for Duolingo in Spanish—it's too strict, too dogmatic and often arguably wrong. I was once asked, in a schoolboy quiz, how many sides a threepenny bit had. I was on top of that obvious trick; everyone knew there were 12 sides, but there were two more—the heads and tails—making 14. I showed I'd caught onto their little trick by putting my answer as 12+2=14. "No," said the quiz setter—"12." An injustice that still rankles 62 years later. If that quiz setter were not dead, he'd work for Duolingo. Lynn—for that's my sister-in-law's name—said that it wasn't the general stuff but the artificial intelligence bit that she actually liked. She said she had conversations and did spoken grammar exercises with Duolingo AI. I've seen the adverts, of course, b...

I don't think I'm unusual in keeping my diary on Google calendar. It reminds me of the repetitive jobs, it reminds me of important appointments and it reminds me of birthdays. In fact it's probably one of the main banes of my life with its constant nag, nag nag. I also use the diary to jot down something interesting that I've missed. In that case I put a note to myself, at some appropriate time in the future, to check the details/dates/blood type of the missed event so that I catch it this time around.  A reminder turned up a couple of weeks ago that said check Les Velles de Sèrra in Elche. So I did. There were several newspaper articles and bits on websites that talked about reviving this ancient tradition. It turned out to be a bit like the scarecrow competitions in the UK or Día de la Vieja in el Cantón with large dolls or mannequins dotted around the streets. In the case of the Velles these were, apparently, mannequins set in a tableau with some sort of commentary o...

I went to the UK last weekend. I don't go very often but my mum moved, just before Christmas, into a care home and I felt nosey enough, or bad son guilty enough, to go and have a look at her new digs. A long weekend, Friday through Monday. My mum seemed fine and happy enough, given her 93 years and her circumstances, and it was good to see her. To make it even better I got to see my sister and brother and their partners. I just asked Maggie how long she considers I've spent in the UK in the last 20 years and she reckoned a month. I think it must be more than that but I'd be amazed if it added up to more than three months. This means the UK is a bit foreign to me. Obviously it's not really strange to me because I'm British and lots of stuff just got coded into my DNA - be that sausage rolls, drinking tea, double decker buses, Boxing Day or the winter sound of cawing crows. Just after we'd arrived in the UK, in the bus on the airport apron, a group of young people...

You may have noticed that the tagline at the top of this blog has changed. It used to say old, fat, white haired. Through absolutely no effort on my part I've lost a fair bit of weight. In fact so much so that there was some doubt about whether my feeding tube could be removed today. Patri, the nutritionist, obviously thinks I'm not making enough effort to pile in those calories. I'd like to think it was my vivid description of what I'd eaten on the tapas trail in Yecla yesterday or the slightly inflated description of the nature of Shepherd's Pie, which swung the balance. Actually it probably wasn't as my Spanish was particularly stumbling and faltering today.  The nutritionist didn't remove the plumbing herself. She had to call for a doctor. I could see why. It was specialist work. The tube I've had in since August last year looked exactly like that clear plastic stuff that blows bubbles in home aquariums. The tube was about 30 cms long had a junction ...

One nice thing about living in a small Spanish town is that it's pretty easy to be on nodding terms with most of the local councillors. Not that it's really such a great thing but at least it means you can appear integrated when you have visitors from the old country. I often think it must be quite difficult for them, the councillors that is, not the visitors, because they have no easy escape. I saw one councillor, for instance, obviously in a hurry and trying to buy a couple of things from a local supermarket yet he was being harangued by someone, most forthrightly, about something.  There are thirteen councillors in Pinoso. As with all Spanish municipalities the number of councillors is determined by population. The way it's done, in most, is that there are population bands that determine the number of councillors. Pinoso has between 5,001 and 10,000 inhabitants so it gets thirteen councillors just like Banyeres de Mariola with a population of 7,255 people. It's alway...