Powerless

Around 6.30am, as dawn breaks Eduardo the cat starts to moan and demand food outside our ground floor bedroom window. The bathroom is a bit of a favourite for a late night visit amongst we older people. I tend to go to bed later than Maggie. All in all then one or other of us is often wandering around the house in the dark.

Last night Maggie, pestered by a singing mosquito and contemplating a "call of nature" noticed that the normal Christmas tree like lights were missing from the bedroom and living room. No glowing LEDs on the modem, alarm clock, anti-mosquito plug in, TV or satellite box. Eerily dark. A power cut of course.

Power cuts are not an unusual event in the countryside, well not in our house anyway. Our power supply is rudimentary to say the least and we often lose power for a few minutes. Occasionally it's longer.

We left the house today with the power still not restored. When we got home all was well. Doing the maths from the flashing alarm clock the power came back on just after two this afternoon. Maggie's nocturnal safari was around 4am so that's more than ten hours. No information in any of the local sources as to why but ten hours is a long time.

Thank goodness we have a gas hob. Boiling water for tea in a pan. Goose Green all over again.

A nice evening in front of the telly

"Good evening, sir," said the Guardia Civil, "Alcohol test." Thus saying he passed me a mouthpiece sealed in cellophane which I cracked open before attaching it to his breath meter thingy. I blew into the machine - "Correct," said the Guardia. "You may proceed." And proceed I did. That's the second time I've been stopped for a random breath test in Spain.

It was about three in the morning and I was just joining the motorway to drive back to Culebrón. We'd been to the Low Cost Festival in Benidorm to see a few bands. I understand why the police were waiting. When we'd watched some of the early evening bands we had several acres of space around us and we were surrounded by nice people chatting gently. By the time we got to the bigger bands the space was less than that required for the proverbial cat and the crowd was a little more boisterous. By the time we watched Vetusta Morla at about 2am we had only Ryanair space and everyone seemed determined to crash into us, jump on our feet, cover us in beer or burn us with one of their strangely smelling cigarettes. This is very boring stuff when you are completely sober. I have no problem at all with the police keeping unsafe drivers off any road.

Whilst we were being suitably outraged by being jostled and bumped into I started to chuckle. Unlike the time we went to Benicassim a few years back I was definitely the oldest person I saw all evening. I must have been one of the few people on the whole site who did not need to use the keypad of my phone to communicate urgently with someone or upload a few snaps or videos. I could have given a lift to everyone else there who was, like me, wearing long trousers (that's an exaggeration, I've only got a four seater but if I'd had a people carrier...) and my Ramones T shirt came from a gig when Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee were all still alive.

I was chuckling because I was having a whale of a time. All those young people bouncing up and down. All those bands that sounded just like tens of bands that I've listened to over the years but which were still different. The way my whole body was vibrating with the sound. All that sustainable, eco friendly talk that still left stinking toilets and mounds of rubbish strewn around and a car park full of jostling vehicles of every shape and size including VW camper vans.

Maybe I should have been at home curled up with a good book and a nice cup of cocoa. No, not quite yet.

Time passes

I was wandering home from the village yesterday evening. I'd just been to watch San Jaime and San José get their annual walkabout on the shoulders of the villagers. After all our village fiesta is held in honour of San Jaime.

Last year when I was taking my snaps I tried hard to get shots without the ubiquitous small vans in the background, without tractors and without the recycling bins. This time I decided that they were an integral part of the fun. More than that I decided they were actually a symbol of the relevance and the continuity of the event.

In the procession the Carnival Queen and her Maids of Honour were in a traditional costume. Everyone else (priest excepted) wore ordinary clothes. It's an interesting idea "traditional costume" - most young Alicantino women seem to be wearing shorts this summer or at least clothes bought from Zara, Mango and Stradivarius. They are unlikely to ever wear long pleated skirts and shawls. So, at some time in the future, will the Carnival Queen be decked out in shorts and T shirt? Who decides what period represents traditional? Why not 12th Century costume or clothes from the 1960s?

In fact the whole procession was a very everyday sort of event. I've seen scores of small carved this or that saint or virgin moving around the streets of Spain dodging the parked cars and litter bins just as presumably they once dodged middens and loose animals.

So, back to where I started. Wandering home, watching the sun set and thinking how nice it all looked in a scruffy and non twee sort of way. Time may be slower in the countryside but it hasn't stopped.

For goodness sake - get a grip

The maximum temperature in Stavanger, yesterday was 16ºC and the minimum was 11ºC. In Kirkwall, on Orkney 14/10ºC. In London 23/13ºC. In Alicante, just down the road, it was 29/20ºC and in Doha in Qatar 45/31ºC. No real surprises there then.

The highest temperature ever recorded in Spain is 47.8ºC in Murcia on 29 July 1976. Murcia is about 50 minutes from here by car.  The highest temperature ever recorded in England is 38.5ºC in Faversham, Kent on 10 August 2003. No big surprise there either.

Over the winter our perception was that Cartagena was warmer than Culebrón. In summer it's just the reverse; warmer by day in Culebrón but still warmer overnight in Cartagena. We think that it's a lot stickier in Cartagena now than in Culebrón. The figures for yesterday bear out our perception. Cartagena max. 29.5ºC, min. 21.2ºC, humidity 65%; Culebrón (Pinoso really) max. 30.3ºC, min. 15.4ºC, humidity 58%.

It's a while since I've been in the UK in summer but, if I were to describe June, July and August in England I would say that it stops being cold, that there will be two or three weeks worth of sunny, warm, dry days but that even when it's not sunny, dry and warm it's perfectly pleasant. That doesn't mean there won't be a couple of days when you'll need a raincoat or a jacket in the evening. You may even need to fire up the heating a couple of days but it's not like January. And yes, I have heard that it has been an exceptionally poor summer so far in the UK. Nonetheless, if you know the UK I'm sure that you would agree that the above description is largely accurate.

In Spain, at least in Alicante and Murcia, I would say that June, July and August will be hot and dry.

So why oh why does everybody I talk to in Spain say, and I paraphrase, "Crikey, it's hot!" Are they surprised?

Bread and tomato

Here in Alicante and just across the border into Murcia we eat a lot of toast with grated tomato  - particularly at breakfast or brunch time. It's also very common to get either bread or toast served along with little dishes of grated tomato and all-i-oli as a free appetiser before a substantial meal. Easy enough, nothing too complicated. Then I came across this piece written by a Catalan. You will see that they take the whole thing pretty seriously. The writer is disparaging of our ready pulped tomato - the devil's work!

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The ingredients to prepare it couldn't be easier – bread, ripe tomatoes, olive oil and salt. There is a second option which is to toast the bread and rub garlic on it but that's a matter of choice.

In Catalonia which, claims this snack as its own, they use “pa de pagès” or “peasant bread” which is the typical rounded loaf found in bakers the length and breadth of Spain. It's usually described as “village bread” or “farmhouse bread” or sometimes as “a drum loaf” - the important thing is that the bread should have an open grain and not be too compact. The bread is cut into slices and theses can be used as they are or they can be toasted a little. Should you decide to use garlic to flavour the bread or toast don't use much and just rub the garlic once or twice along the length. If you don't have access to the correct shaped bread wood baked bread of any sort does nearly as well.

Cut some ripe juicy tomatoes in half and rub the open face of the tomato onto the bread until the juice and the pulp give a nice pink colour to the bread. Never use tomato purée or ready pulped tomatoes – that's just not right – always rub fresh tomatoes directly onto the bread. The best tomatoes are “hung vine tomatoes” or “tomates de colgar” which are soft, juicy and have a lovely red colour.

Afterwards we add a little sprinkle of salt and a generous squirt of good virgin olive oil. Eat immediately.

The secret is not to prepare the dish beforehand because the bread will absorb the juice and become too sloppy and flabby. You have to prepare it as you're ready to eat it before the tomato and the oil soak into the bread.

In Catalonia it's very common to eat the bread and tomato with good mountain ham or with one of the the many varieties of local sausages. It goes well with a potato omelette too, with French omelette and indeed with any number of dishes.

It's a typically Mediterranean dish – bread, tomatoes, olive oil and garlic – healthy and easy to make. But the best thing is that it is yummy.

Feeling at home

We went to see our pal Pepa this weekend. She has a Casa Rural up in Teruel in a place called Fuentes de Rubielos.

I never quite know how to translate casa rural - rural house isn't right and although I always tell my students to use country cottage that doesn't really convey the same idea. It's somewhere people rent for a holiday and it's usually in the middle of the countryside. Anyway Pepa owns one. There are tens of them in Fuentes de Rubielos and hundreds in this part of Teruel province, part of the ancient Kingdom of Aragon. I've always thought staying in a casa rural would be the perfect recipe for getting bored in 24 hours - reading is great but it can also become a chore and how many times can you walk up a hill for entertainment? Pepa surprised me by saying that there are all sorts of activities on offer for people who stay in the houses - bird watching, astronomy, furniture making, canyon running and a recent addition - first you hunt out your truffles and then you cook with them. Teruel is famous for ham - I wonder if it's pig and tourist in perfect harmony sniffing out subterranean mushrooms?

Fuentes is called Fuentes because on every corner there is a drinking fountain, horse trough or open air wash house - something powered by water flowing down the hill and all described as fuentes in Spanish. There is also a rather more sophisticated stretch of water which is the municipal swimming pool. Every year the local town hall auctions the right to run the pool for the summer months. For the second year in a row three young woman won the contract. They do a splendid job running a bar alongside the pool. They're a bit alternative - baggy harem pants and tied back hair. They produce snack food which is pretty unusual for Spain - couscous, Greek salad, hummus - light, tasty stuff with enough Spanishness not to put the Spanish off but different enough to be interesting.

I've just been looking for more information about the pool. I expected it to feature on websites because Fuentes is full of people who are a bit "hippy" - felt hats, non standard hairstyles and clothes that don't come from chain stores. My guess is that they are all computer wizards, have an allotment outside the back door of a house powered by a mix of small hydro-electric plants, chicken droppings and photovoltaic panels. They hang around the bar so I presumed they would have done a webpage for their chums at the pool by now. If they have I can't find it. Nice to know that when you don't want to read or walk or hunt for truffles there is still alcohol and food to be had.

We went for a walk of course. We went to see one of the now abandoned masías which is nothing more than a family farm at some distance from the main village. We passed one of the ermitas, hermitage in English, but really a sort of rural chapel that gets occasional use for local religious processions or feast days and maybe the odd wedding. We passed several of the multiservicios - a multi-use community space. There is a multiservicio in Fuentes so that means there are two bars to choose from. We strolled through villages where nothing stirred and the only sounds were of things creaking in the sun. There were people in the bars though and it was noticeable that there were bars. Food smells wafted from open windows.

Sitting in Pepa's house we had several reminders that we weren't in our own home. We couldn't get a decent cup of tea. She had thousands of varieties of fruit teas and infusions but nothing like council house tea. Anyway she had no milk - she had soya milk and an even stranger milk substitute made from oats. It's not the first Spanish house I've been in without milk or tea. Coffee was awkward too. Hot drinks at home are a bit unusual. Different traditions. She did have a frying pan though that she keeps specifically for when she cooks tortilla - the Spanish potato omelette - she says it's a necessary expense to stop the tortilla from sticking. She offered us a burger - I think they may have been bought in specially for us. It was easy to see what a strange food it was for her. She served it without any garnish, with the bread on a side plate and with a side dish of fried spring garlic and broad beans. Very McDonalds

Variation on a theme

One certain way to bring the rain is to hang out some washing or maybe to wash the car. To bring on a heat wave wear a nice thick coat.

Well we've just spent hours cleaning the house and, coming in from the South there are some very dark clouds. I don't think it's rain; it could be smoke from the forest fire that's burning out of control in Valencia at the moment or, more likely, it's a dust cloud blowing in from North Africa ready to coat all our newly cleaned surfaces with a layer of orange dust.

Summer exodus

There's an advert on the telly at the moment. The premise of the ad is that, during the summer, everyone abandons the cities and heads for their village. The village that their family hails from. Some poor souls have no village to go to. They are left alone, orphaned, in the deserted cities. So the advert directs you to a website where inhabitants of the idyllic rural villages can nominate their villages as reception centres for the poor lost souls and where city orphans can seek refuge in an adoptive village.

The idea that cities are deserted for the summer isn't quite as far fetched as you may imagine. There is even a phrase in Spanish for the plight of the men left behind to work whilst the family heads for the cooler mountain or beach air- estar de Rodriguez.

Down in Cartagena I needed to park in a part of the city where parking space is normally at a premium but not on Thursday it wasn't. Oh no, it's after San Juan, the children have broken up from school, the exodus to the beach has begun.  It's the beach in Cartagena but as an awful lot of Spain is a long way from the nearest beach people have to make do with anything rural.

Over the past few weeks nearly all of my students have been preparing their summer homes ready for the 10 or 11 weeks they will spend there until the children are back at school. Sometimes the house is theirs but often it's just someone's in the family. Brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins and grandparents all muck in and somehow manage to find enough sleeping space for everyone.

We're back in Culebrón. Our next door neighbours who usually live in Elda are here too. I noticed a light in one of the houses down by the farm - the last time they were here was the summer of 2011. Culebrón is filling up.

P.S.

Across the top of the page there are some tabs for the three Life ins but there is also one called The TIM articles. Nobody ever looks at it. I understand.

Breaking Radio Silence

It's not that nothing is happening. The footie is a huge media and bar event. I sit, drinking coffee, and watch the world go by in bars and log away little incidents and forms of behaviour. At work I get lots of stories from my students that give me an insight into life here. I listen to stories from friends and acquaintances of redundancy, closures, cutbacks. I feel the collective holding of breath as we await the collapse of the old continent, overseen by a group of uncomprehending and powerless politicians, whilst everything continues with its usual banality.

Not much to report in Culebrón though. The big events of our weekends here are collecting the post or having a coffee with some British pals. I would be happy to write about the delights of our visit to Consum yesterday if the most exciting thing hadn't been that we bought boquerones but decided against the red peppers as they were a little soft. I could tell you about Carlos's book, of which I read the first draft pages yesterday, except that I am sworn to secrecy about it's content. The weather is always a good topic but I've told you before about the weather here and, at the moment it's uneventful. The weather log would read  - sunny and warm: high 31ºC, low 18ºC. The farmers are up early - collecting apricots and maybe cherries - and they finish when the light goes at around 9.30 - just like they did last year. The goats and goat-herder seem to be in fine form but I've written about their belching and farting before. The swallows in our garden are noisy but the cuckoos are less noticeable than a couple of weeks ago. That's the thing - Life in Culebrón is calm and cyclical.

I could, of course, write about anything I like but I'm a pretty disciplined sort of chap and the tag line of things that happen to us and around us sort of rules that out. So I have nothing much to say.

But I thought I'd prove we were still breathing.

Nul points

Culebrón doesn't offer a wide range of Saturday night entertainment. We drank brandy, well at least half of us did, and watched the Eurovision song contest.

We were flipping between the BBC and RTVE channels. The Spanish was deadpan, the British, or should that be Irish, was tongue in cheek. The Spanish commentator was sympathetic to Englebert and the British song. The Portuguese didn't let us down. And the Irish? Where were the traditional 12 points for the neighbouring country? The Turks did it for Greece. Everyone else did it for everyone else. Graham wondered if we expats would do our stuff in Spain but we must have all been out having a beer. The large Romanian population in Spain obviously had nothing better to do with their Saturday nights.

Well at least the Swedes can afford to host next years competition.