Life in Culebrón

As a follow up to the last post (not the haunting melody but my last entry on this blog) I wrote out my appeal against the new drainage charge using the official form downloaded from the SUMA website. On Tuesdays I meet with a Spanish bloke called Carlos to do a language exchange. I fail to speak Spanish and he talks some English. I asked him to check the grammar and what not of my appeal. "No problems," he said, "all the right boxes filled in and the explanation is simple but clear and accurate." The last item asked me to list any supporting documentation I was sending and as I had none that's what I'd written. "You should send a copy of your DNI," said Carlos. The DNI is the Identity Card that all Spaniards carry. I have an equivalent but it would never have struck me to send a copy. Thinking about it though I knew that Carlos was right. Everyone, but everyone wants to check your identity here and it has become so routine for Spaniards to s...

The majority of the local taxes in Alicante are collected by an agency called SUMA. So the water bills, the rubbish collection, car road tax and the equivalent of the council tax all come from SUMA despite actually being set by the local Town Hall in Pinoso. SUMA, in my experience, is an efficient organisation. I pay most of my bills by "direct debit" and SUMA's notifications always come a couple of weeks before the due date reminding me to check that I have sufficient funds in the bank etc. So unlike the banks, phone company and electric people who just take the money on random dates often without notification (though to be fair the phone and electric people have improved recently) SUMA do it the correct way. So the other week a notification arrives that says that there has been a bit of a cock up on their part and that for some tax period they have either made an error in or forgotten a charge relating to sewerage and sewage charges. The language is the archaic stuf...

Back in November the Royal British Legion, Pinoso Branch, organised a Remembrance Day Service in the local Parish Church. According to a pal of ours who was one of the organisers the Town Band pulled out all the stops to learn the hymns. By all accounts the event was a resounding success attended by Brits and Spaniards alike. Tonight we went to a carol concert. The bulk of the carols were performed by the Parish Choir but the first two carols of the evening were performed by a group of Britons who had formed a small choir especially for the occasion -  "The British Community Choir." For a couple of songs  Britons and Spaniards sang side by side. It was a splendid little event. Next May there are local elections and one of the political parties has been using the services of another British pal of ours to act as their liaison. He speaks good Spanish and offers a sort of general help-desk to Britons. One of his recent innovations has been an email newsletter which ...

"What do you fancy doing today? - I want to go to the Nueva Condomina Shopping Centre," said Maggie. I groaned. It's not that I've got anything against shopping centres but I only choose to go to them when I need or want something that one of the shops there may have. Maggie goes to shopping centres for fun. She may have some vague idea about buying a top or shoes or something else but that translates into traipsing around shops that don't sell tops or shoes or that other thing. Different philosophy. She had something in her favour though. I teach English to the staff of another shopping centre and the boss there had mentioned that a couple of quite well known Spanish fashion designers had created the Christmas lights at the Nueva Condomina so there was a vague reason for going. "Alright," I said. I have to say I was mightily disappointed. These two blokes, José Víctor Rodríguez Caro and José Luis Medina del Corral trade as Victorio and Lucchino....

Sunday morning and I was strolling around the garden with a pot of tea in one hand and a cigar in the other. Down the road I noticed the "higos chungos" glowing red against the broad green leaves in the early morning sun. I finished the tea and went to take some snaps and then had a look at Wikipedia. Apparently they are not called higos chungos but higos chumbos -  though it's apparently a common mistake. Chungo means something akin to dodgy, dicey or nasty and higo is fig; seemed reasonable enough - a dodgy sort of fig. We'd definitely been told they were called chungos. Apparently the plant is Mexican in origin. The leaves of the cactus are eaten like vegetables and the fruit, well as fruit. In Spain the leaves are used as animal fodder but in my search for information I came across lots of Spanish recipes and childhood reminisences of the "We always used to get these as children when we went to see my gran at Christmas," type. As we never got around ...

Bit miserable in Culebrón today. Maggie is upset about losing her break in the UK because of the unofficial strike by the air traffic controllers. I'm fed up because of the accusations at work that I smell like an old tramp which may lead to me losing my wage and then, on top of that, it's freezing in this house. Now I know a bit of frost is nothing if you live in Bradford or Burgos but it's pretty unusual in Alicante and it's more of a shock to us because of the contrast between our weekday residence and inland Culebrón. Yesterday was chilly; pullover and sports jacket weather in Cartagena (11ºC) but 600 metres higher and I'm worried about the pipes freezing and reduced to wearing socks in bed.

Maggie is due to fly to Blighty tomorrow. She was concerned that the weather may be a problem but no, it's the air traffic controllers. For the past year the controllers have been a bit disgruntled. Some of them top out a salary of around 900,000€ a year but, as their Union points out, at least half of them only earn around 200,000€ a year. The Government though thought this was a tad too much, especially in light of the proposed privitization of the airports, so they introduced new working conditions which basically set the working hours, before overtime, at 1670 hours per year. So today, the controllers took their revenge. Lots of them didn't turn up for work and Spanish airspace has been closed down. The timing was perfect, it's a long bank holiday weekend here stretching through till Wednesday so the airports were busy. They are now full of stranded passengers. The Interior Minister has just been on telly threatening to send in military controllers and the Union h...

Like Captain Sensible, the residents of El Culebrón were glad it was all over. The biggest cheer of the afternoon came when the Annual General Meeting finally came to an end. The Association was celebrating its tenth birthday. We've been members for five of those. Like all Spanish public meetings it had bordered on chaos with personal attacks and insults thrown into the mix. At one point the chairwoman attempted to re-assert order with a spot of fingers in mouth whistling. Nothing much was decided except to accept the annual accounts and to agree a small increase in the annual membership fee from 18€ per household per year to 20€. I must have missed the re-election of officers and acceptance of last years minutes amongst the din. From the accounts it appears that only 21 households actually sign up to the Neighbourhood Association so the 2€ increase is hardly going to make much difference to the annual figures. When I used to stage AGMs getting anyone there was always th...

For the past eleven weeks I've been watching a programme on Spanish telly called "Your favourite view." The format is simple; forty celebs, walked us through their favourite area of Spain, usually the area where they had grown up. To add a bit of spice the TV company hired a helicopter to overfly and film the chosen areas. Four views each week, a vote by text message and at the start of the next programme the winner of the last programme was announced. Spectacular views but basically standard stuff. Tonight was the final. The ten chosen views were to do battle in a live show. The presenter, who has anchored the programme over the last ten weeks, had changed out of her habitual  red anorak and stripy T shirt and was dressed in a military style jacket and spike heeled fetish boots. The setting was the helicopter hangar. No audience, just the presenter. Voting was only possible via the TV company's website. The cumulative vote was shown throughout the show so it soo...

The photo was in a national newspaper as a competition winner; it's by a woman called Cristina de Middel. I thought it was interesting for two reasons. The first because I thought it was a nice snap but also because I thought it summed up the Spanish attempt at using English. Close but not quite. Consider that the translations are of one, two and three words - there are several mistakes. Dreadful as our Spanish is we always ask for menus in Castilian because if we get the "translated" version we often simply can't make sense of it.

Down in Cartagena it's still a toss up as to whether you will need a jacket to go out. A shirt or a light pullover usually does the job but up here in Culebrón it is distinctly cooler - read cold. The house is built to keep cool, not warm, and coming inside is like entering an ice box. Normally we pump heat into the living room from a couple of calor gas heaters after we've used the heat setting on the aircon unit to get the room to a reasonable temperature. Yesterday though it was raining too so we decided to stay in and, for the first time this year, we lit the log burner. Warm hands, warm feet - luvverly.