Life in Culebrón

The Spanish are doing really well at cutting the number of accidents on the roads. In the last 5 years road deaths have dropped about 46% though that still means 2181 people were torn apart on the roads. More people died in the UK in the same year, 2538, but as the population of Spain is some 44 million and the UK about 61 million then you have more chance of staying alive in Dagenham than in Mostoles. A disproportionate number of motorcyclists die though. In fact until 2007 whilst motorist deaths were dropping steadily bike deaths were going through the roof. Last year, for the first time, the number of dead bikers dropped but it was still over 300. The bikers of course blame a range of factors particularly car drivers for bumping into them. I must say that they always seem like a sober bunch of individuals to me and hardly any of them go too fast on monstrously powerful machines. And those young lads on the bikes in town, as well behaved as my Aunt Lizzie hoped I would be. I wa...

My usual November 1st post revolves around how lots of Spaniards make a day of visiting the family grave complete with scrubbing brushes and bunches of flowers. This year we avoided any morbidity and headed for the fair at Cocentaina. Spain is quite good at themed market type fairs but there are certain staples for them all - crusty bread that costs 25€ per loaf, the people from Guijuelo with boxes of cooked and cured meats for just 40€, big yummy sweets made with real fruit juice that cost 5€ for four and mustard flower soap that costs 12€ for the smallest slab. See the theme? This one seemed a bit different though. For a start it was huge. We didn't quite know what we were going to and as we approached the town there were cars parked all over the verges of the roundabout we used to come off the main road in that amazingly higgledy piggledy way that Spaniards have. No flower bed too small to park in. We presumed there must be something going on right there and tried to park up...

In June 2008 I mentioned this house as being an important HQ for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. Someone has been doing some work on it. With its new yellow finish it is quite difficult to tell that the house has any history at all - it looks nearly new. I've just read that the last Republican Prime Minister, Negrin, fled Spain as the Republican forces admitted defeat in March 1939. Negrin left on 6 March and the last Republican cities, amongst them Cartagena, fell on 30 March. His departure airfield was the one next to this house.

There's a shoe museum in Elda. It's not surprising; shoes were big business along the valley of the Vinalopó. They still are but, as you might imagine the industry has taken a battering from the Chinese. There are often pieces in the local papers about Chinese firms based here importing shoes from China and then bunging them in boxes marked "Made in Spain" before shipping them all over Europe with names that sound Spanish or International. Stories about counterfeiting of branded shoes abound. Spanish workers regularly march around with banners or go in coachloads to Madrid and dump shoes in front of Government buildings. Anyway, ther's a shoe museum in Elda. It's a big building, a modern and quite impressive building with interesting displays as I remembered and I hadn't been there for a while. So when I went to Elda to sign on yesterday I thought I'd have another look around. I've been here in Spain a while now and lots of things that used t...

One of the few poems I know is Auden's Night Mail - the one that has the clackety clack rhythm. For we Brits mail and trains go together. Maybe it's no longer a reality (doesn't all the mail go by road or air nowadays?) but we old folk still talk about Mail Trains. I certainly expect a post box at a railway station. So just now, when I went to collect Maggie from the train as she arrived in Petrer from Cartagena I took a couple of letters to post. A waste of time. Not a letter box in sight, not on the platform nor near the station nor even on the nearest main road. A whole culture to unlearn and relearn still.

I got back to Culebrón today and this bird was in our living room.

Really I have nothing to report. Well nothing in the way of an insight into Spain unless you want to read my stupendously insightful 500 words on street names in Spain as published in this month's TIM magazine . I think the article is on page 8, it's called 1066 and all that . Third article I've had printed in the magazine. But I did want to make sure that you knew that Life in Culebrón was still alive. We were here for the weekend. It's been rather nice actually. Away from the hustle and bustle of Cartagena. Paradise for Edi the cat who has been able to get out of the house and slaughter all sorts of small lifeforms. Last night we went, with some English pals, to take in one of the Moors and Christians parades in the nearby town of Crevillente. I wasn't looking forward to it all that much (seen one M&C seen 'em all) but we actually had quite a good evening. We even stopped for a beer on the way home in the town of Aspe. Sitting out at 11 in the evening ...

Get to Know Spain is a companion book for GCSE exams written by Rosemary Hunt and first published in 1980. In the section on climate it says - In most parts of Spain the climate is extremely harsh. As I've said in another post we haven't seen much rain over the last two or three months but for the past couple of days the temperatures have dropped (27ºC daytime 15ºC overnight) and the sky has been threatening rain. And today it came. Buckets and buckets of the stuff. As usual our interior patio started to fill with water and I had to wade out to unblock the drain, our next door neighbour is apparently, as I type, trying to stop the water flowing down our joint track from carving out a mini version of the Grand Cañon, our aljibe, the thing that collects run off water, is overflowing, we keep losing the electric for a few seconds after every lightning flash and we've unplugged all the computers from the mains just in case. The hail was bouncing off the cars and patio furn...

I was with a British pal yesterday as we went to the fruit and veg stalls in the town market. He had been charged, by his wife, to buy potatoes and tomatoes. At the stall he pointed to the potatoes, showed five fingers and said kilos, he repeated the mime for the tomatoes (though with a different number of digits) and then held out a handful of small change from which the stall holder took the appropriate amount. His wife mentioned that they have been living in Spain for six years.

Back in Culebrón for the weekend and I noticed that there were a lot of small moths hanging on to the kitchen ceiling. Something similar happened a couple of years ago we had tens, if not hundreds, of moths inside the kitchen cupboard where we keep the dried goods. Being murderous and ecologically unsound I set about them with the fly spray which worked to a degree in that the moths had soon gone. I forgot all about them but later Maggie noticed that there were grub like caterpillars undulating their way across our ceiling. Horrid. Manual harvesting along with a thorough clean out of the flour and cereal cupboard seems to have done the trick for the moment.

We Brits have been running auctions at two spots around Pinoso for a while now - one at the Country Hotel, La Pinada and the other at Bonnie's Bar and Campsite. We went along to Bonnie's as we were looking for things for the flat in Cartagena. My guess is that we will not be regular attenders. Don't forget: with our weeks now split between Culebrón and Cartagena new posts will be on both sites.