El Pinós, Poble de Marbre i Vi

Traditionally the first words of a seaside landlady to this week's guests are that they should have been there last week when the weather was oh so much better. It was a bit like that today in Pinoso. Yesterday we had bright sun and reasonable temperatures in the mid teens but today it is foggy and cold. And today is a big day for Pinoso; Villazgo.

Villazgo is the celebration of the independence of Pinoso from nearby Monóvar on 12th February 1826. It's the day for a nostalgia trip in Pinoso. Out come all the traditional costumes, the folk dancers, the regional games - anything vaguely related with the past will do. It's always a good day. We have stalls in the street, we have displays from the neighbourhood associations, the wine producers, local groups of every shade and hue and, probably the best bit, lots of local businesses associated with food and drink set up a stall in the town hall car park. Punters buy a set of tickets which they can swap for wine, cakes and cooked food. A veritable feast.

Today was just a bit different. The local council feels that it needs to try to attract more visitors and one of the ways they thought to do this was to try and be a bit more pushy about the town's identity. So they've invested 46,000€ in some signs, flower beds and information boards. They spent another 24,000€ on doing up one of the central streets. I'd somehow got hold of the mistaken idea that most of this stuff had been found stashed away, unused, in a storeroom so, if you're one of the people I told that to, I apologise.

The slogan for the identity campaign is the title of the blog. Easy if you're one of the 2.4 million Valenciano speaking tourists. Now if they'd chosen Spanish Spanish, i.e. Castillian, they'd have had 407 million native speakers and goodness knows how many other second languagers. I can see the dilemma though. Anyway my Valencian is up to this. Pinoso, town of marble and wine.

P.S.We went back at around 2pm for a spot of lunch and the sun was shining and the town packed to the gunwales.

Bean there, done that

As we waited in the queue to pay, there in the place normally reserved for those last minute temptations - the sweets that have children tugging on their parent's sleeves and the diet breaking choolate bars - was a big box full of habas, broad beans. Maggie, can we have some broad beans Maggie, can we? She said no of course but a touch of petulance and the beans were mine.

I always associate raw broad beans with one of the first times that we took the MG out for a run with the Orihuela Seat 600 club. It was a sunny but nippy Sunday morning and the MG was parked up in a school playground along with lots of other classic cars. It was referendum day for the European Constitution and the school was acting as a polling station so there were quite a lot of people about one way and another. The car folk were breathing smoke with the cold air as they chewed on the obligatory breakfast of silver paper wrapped baguettes and canned drinks. From the back of an old Merc I think, but it may have been a Renault, someone was doling out part of their crop of home harvested broad beans. We were offered some but Maggie has never been one to take her mother's advice about eating her greens and, without Maggie's support, I was too shy to take any.

At this time of year the beans are all over the place. The first time I actually dared to join in and eat a few pods worth was when we were in some quite trendy bar somewhere. On the bar, completely out of place, was a big glass bowl full of broad bean pods. People were helping themselves and I finally did the same. I often eat things like sprouts and cabbage raw but I think it was the first time ever for broad beans. They were good.

I know, I know. Eating raw beans is hardly noteworthy but, then again, if we were down the Dog and Duck or Spade and Beckett would there be raw broad beans for the delectation of the customers? I think not. Something Spanish then.

We eat lupin seeds too but I suppose you know that.

Rhyme and reason

One advantage of the English language is that the word banker has an obvious rhyme. The Spaniards share the sentiment but not the rhyme.

To the best of my knowledge this is a vastly oversimplified but basically accurate description of the Spanish banking system. Essentially, in recent history, there have been three types of "bank".

The first is the standard commercial bank; the bank raises capital and then lends money to people and organisations in order to make a business profit. The second is the Caja de Ahorros, a Savings Bank where the money for loans came from the deposits of the savers. Many of the Savings Banks in Spain originally loaned money against pawned items. The profit from the operation is used to support loans to savers and a certain percentage is diverted to a charitable foundation to support "good causes." The third institution, the Rural Savings Bank, has syndicalist or co-operative roots and was originally developed to promote agriculture in rural areas.

At sometime in their history the Savings Banks were limited to operating within geographical boundaries so that the CajaMurcia, the "Murcia Savings Bank" operated in Murcia and the Caja de Ahorros del Mediterraneo or "Mediterranean Savings Bank" did business in Alicante and Murcia. As the legisltion was relaxed the Cajas began to operate further from home. Somewhere along the way regional politicians got involved in the running of the majority of the Savings Banks often because of the influence they wielded through the charitable foundation of the Caja.

So the history of the Cajas de Ahorro is a familiar story, similar to the UK Building Societies. Local Savings Banks merge to produce larger institutions which look, to anyone without specialist knowledge, almost exactly like banks though their names at least suggest some link to the locality.

There were tens of big and powerful Savings Banks when we first arrived here. Lots or maybe all of the Cajas ploughed money into what is now worthless land, overpriced houses and grandiose and redundant building projects. As the debt burden caught up with them and the regulatory authorities started to investigate the level of bungling, cronyism, mis-selling and straightforward theft started to emerge.

Recent legislation, the demands of Brussels and the European Bank have all helped to change the face of Spanish banking. Unfortunately the system we live in depends on the banks acting as the conduit between lenders and borrowers so we, the taxpayer we, have been forced to bail the bunglers and crooks out. I resent that and I would be very happy to see lots more of the fraudsters go to prison. Fat chance of that though - the old boy network is very alive and well in Spain. Only the other day one of the alleged culprits from one of the biggest failed bank mergers got himself a nice little number as an advisor to the old ex state monopoly telephone company.

Anyway. I understand that only two Savings Banks still exist in Spain. All the rest have become commercial banks. We went to Ontinyent today to have a look at one of them. It looks pretty modest doesn't it? In fact it was the 43rd biggest of the 45 Cajas in Spain but 43 of them have gone. Now the Caja de Ahorros de Ontinyent is the largest survivor. The other the Caja de Ahorros de Pollensa is in Mallorca on the Balearics.

Apparently it's in perfectly good financial shape, it's bosses and workers get reasonable salaries, politicians are not involved in its operations and there is not a whiff of scandal about the way it does or has done business.

Billowing skyward

Nuclear Power Plants always take me a bit by surprise. I remember the first time I saw the one at Heysham when I was catching the ferry to the Isle of Man. It was just there. No more fuss about it than a bus station or an industrial estate.

Today as we passed the Cofrentes Power Station I thought it sobering that alongside the enormous, and picturesque, steam cloud coming from the twin cooling towers, was a nuclear reactor which might, at any time, do a Fukishima or Chernobyl and start killing and polluting for generations to come. On a sunny and crisp December day it just looked tranquil. The cooling towers plonked in the middle of the landscape weren't quite so romantic but the fluffy steam clouds rising to play with the vapour trails left by passing jet planes seemed very peaceful. Much more peaceful than the busy blades of the hundreds of wind turbines in the area. There are windmills dotted along the top of nearly every ridge in the borderlands of Valencia, Castilla la Mancha and Murcia.

Spain currently has eight nuclear reactors running on six sites. Two more reactors are in the process of being dismantled after suffering "incidents." Within the last few weeks the operators of the Santa María de Garoña plant in Burgos have said that they will close that plant down ahead of schedule to avoid paying a new tax which will cost its owners approximately €150 million per year.

The largest percentage - 33% - of electricity production in Spain comes from renewables of one sort of another. Next up is nuclear with around 21% and then come the combined cycle with about 19% of the power generation. I presume that the missing percentages are from the older non combined cycle power stations.

Iberdrola, the people who send us our electric bill, own Cofrentes. It produces 1,110 megawatts. I have no concept of a megawatt fortunately the operators make it clear that this is a lot. They say that Cofrentes could, singlehandedly, provide all of the domestic supply for the three provinces of Valencia. In 2010 the plant ran faultlessly for 365 days without any halt in production and provided nearly 5% of all the electricity used in Spain that year.

The website of the Nuclear Safety Council mentions that all of the reportable events since 2005 at Cofrentes have been Level 0 on the International Scale of Nuclear Events - that is ones which have "no safety significance." However, between 2001 and 2011 Cofrentes made 25 unplanned shutdowns and reported 102 security events three of them at Level 1 which is classified as an anomaly but where there is still significant defence in depth.

The Nuclear Event Scale has three levels of incident and four levels of accident. Chernobyl and Fukishima are way out at the front at the moment on Level 7. The 1957 Winscale Fire was a Level 5 event, on a par with Three Mile Island in 1979. Sellafield has also had five Level 4 accidents between 1955 and 1979. In Spain the biggest incident to date, Level 3, was at  Vandellos in 1989 when a fire destroyed many of the control systems and meant that there were almost no safety systems remaining. Vandellos is one of the two plants that are being decommissioned at the moment.

I don't suppose there are quite the same sort of specific accident and incident scales for bus stations and industrial estates.

Coming to get us

I'm that sort of age.The heart attack, the stroke. Despite our best efforts an exploding gas bottle could leave one or both of us bleeding amongst the tattered ruins of the house. Maybe just a flood or a forest fire. Whatever the reason we might need the emergency services.

Now our address is nothing more than a number and the name of the village. As it happens we're on the edge of the village. A bit difficult to find. You just ask any of the courier services who occasionally try to deliver packets to us. We inevitably end up meeting them outside the local restaurant.

Back to that heart attack - time is of the essence. The paramedics going this way and that searching for the house. The house ablaze - the fire crew scanning the countryside for smoke.

The local police had a simple but brilliant idea. They asked anyone who lived anywhere out of the way to register with them. They came to the house and logged the GPS position. What we didn't realise was that as a part of this process they then allocated a simple code to the house. Provided we are able to use a phone all we have to do is ring the emergency number, give them our reference number and they can dispatch the appropriate emergency team to accurate GPS co-ordinates.

We did this ages ago but we weren't around when the majority of the information cards with the code were handed out. In fact it was purely by chance that we found out there were cards. I suppose I thought that simply being on the register was enough.

So today I popped into the local police station to collect our card. We were on the system OK but the officer I talked to didn't know where the actual card was. "Can't I just have the code?" I said. Of course not. I have to go back for the official card.

I hope they can find the house, if the time comes, more effectively than the card.

Seasonal snippets

Christmas Eve and we have a turkey in the fridge - dead you understand. We have sprouts too though they are frozen because there weren't any fresh ones available in our chosen hypermarket. Not a big queue for sprouts then in Carrefour but a thronging mass around the fish counter. Fish and seafood are huge for Christmas here. Different traditions, same idea.

We were watching the news on the telly over the weekend. We saw both la Sexta and Cuatro. Each of them had reporters at an airport to watch arriving friends and family being hugged and kissed. Families and Christmas. Same tradition, same idea.

The el Gordo lottery came and went. We usually have one ticket which wins back its stake or turns in a small profit but this year nothing, nada, zilch; not a sausage. There were the usual scenes of rejoicing outside the lottery shops. The radio and TV interviewers found lots of people who were on the dole and who'd won 400,000€ for their 20€ stake. One chap had bought the whole ticket made up of ten fractional tickets and handed them out to his family or swapped the tenths with friends; 4 million euros in the family. The Government will tax winnings from next year but this time it's still tax free.

We went to the coast yesterday. It was a pleasant sunny day with temperatures in the high teens. We sat outside in the sun for a coffee. I had to go back to the car to abandon my jacket, I was too hot. From the coast we went on to a shopping centre. It was like the seventh circle of hell. Thousands of people wandering hither and thither and showing every emotion from pure joy to seething rage. Shops aren't usually open on a Sunday in Spain. Whether they were buying or just indulging the Spanish characteristic of enjoying being with crowds of people I'm not sure. The radio is full of stories of people spending less on Christmas.

Boxing Day, the 26th, is just another working day. The big days for the family meals are Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Gift giving is much less prevalent than in the UK; for family and especially for children of course but for work colleagues, next door neighbours, acquaintances much less so. Christmas cards are a rarity - not a one from any of my students or colleagues. Santa Claus tussles with the three Kings as the principal gift giver. Polvorones, mantecados and turrón instead of, Christmas pudding, mince pies or Christmas cake. There are Christmas lights and Christmas trees but they are not de rigeur whilst a nativity scene, the Belén is. No town would think it had celebrated Christmas properly without putting up a Belén but most of the Christmas trees in the street are now cones of LED lights rather than a real tree. There are none of those houses dressed up with enough lights to make EDF Energy, or Iberdrola, smile. There are Christmas carols and Christmas songs but, mercifully there are no equivalents to Slade, Wizard and  Jona Lewie to make the supermarket shop even more onerous. The Christmas number one isn't a news story. Holly, robins and miseltoe get the occasional look in but there is no obvious association with Christmas and thinking of miseltoe the works do is nearly always a meal out and does not involve photocopied buttocks or worrying that the Christmas groping may leave you without a job next year.

So Christmas is just the same and yet completely different. We do, of course, wish each other Felíz Navidad y prospero año nuevo without any thought for the political correctness of the sentiment and that's what I wish you now.

Happy Christmas.

Return to sender, address unknown

   Santiago Alcanda a radio 3 presenter      

I have quite a long Christmas break. I fancied getting away from work and the usual alternatives of doing very little and drinking a lot of brandy. I spent hours on the Internet looking at websites in Teruel, Granada and Albacete provinces. I sent a few emails - "Are you running your horse riding/cookery courses/star gazing courses in the period between 26th and 31st December?" I got not a single reply. I'm not surprised. From my experience lots of businesses never look at their email. And whilst there are lots of honourable exceptions the disorganisation in Spanish businesses makes me laugh and cry by turns.

Anyway, back in November I got a little annoyed at not being able to find anything but the most banal contemporary music on Spanish radio and I wrote to Radio 3, the state broadcaster which says it champions contemporary music, to ask what their music policy was. They have an Internet form for the purpose. I anticipated at the time that I wouldn't get any sort of reply and of course I haven't.

But this isn't reasonable. Who do theses people think they are that they can just ignore my question? It's a public enterprise, paid for by us, the taxpayers. The question wasn't rude, I kept the bad language to a minimum and there was no doubt what the question was. So I sent the question again, and again, and again and then I sent a snotty email in English asking if they were guarding state secrets. I gave them the template for a simple reply too "We don't have a music policy we just get a few old blokes to drone on for a while on air"

Tonight as Maggie made the living room a no go zone with Strictly Come Dancing I used the time to step up the campaign. I sent the question again. I also sent the same question to another part of the same broadcaster (a bit like sending a question about BBC Radio 1 to Feedback on BBC Radio 4.) What's more I sent the original question and a complaint about not receiving an answer to the "Viewers and Listeners Defender" a sort of radio ombudsman.

Good grief, all I wanted was to hear a few non top 40 modern Spanish bands on the radio but now what I want is an answer. It doesn't have to be an answer I like but I want an answer.

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At the risk of opening myself up to public ridicule I have reproduced the question here just to prove it wasn't rude. Well it proves that if you can understand my version of Spanish.

¿Cuál es la política musical de Radio 3?

Querría disfrutar de Radio 3. Creía haber descubierto una alternativa a la programación repetitiva, limitada y lenta de emisoras como Cadena Dial y los 40 Principales.

Pensaba que R3 era una emisora musical. Desafortunadamente cada vez que pongo R3 hay alguien hablando. Me parece que la mayoría de los locutores preferiría oír sus propias voces que la música

Pensaba que R3 era una emisora contemporánea. Desafortunadamente cada vez que pongo R3 suena música de los años 50,60 o 70

Pensaba que era una emisora tanto generalista como especialista. Desafortunadamente muchas veces cuando pongo R3 oigo Country y Western, Jazz o Flamenco. Esas músicas tienen su valor y su audiencia pero, en mi opinión, no son estilos musicales aptos para las horas de máxima audiencia.

Por eso tengo interés por conocer cual es la política musical de Radio 3 pues no logro encontrarla en la página web.

I'll name that tune in one

Many, many years ago I had quite a good collection of salsa, cumbia, son and other Latin American music. A colleague I gave a lift to soon grew tired of my conversation and turned on the tape player to be greeted by Celia Cruz. He wasn't impressed with the Latin sound. "Don't you have anything British?" he said as he shuffled my tapes. Finally, with a little whoop of joy, he found Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. "Now there's some proper music," he said, as he pushed the cassette into the slot and began to hum along. He was an educated chap, I'm pretty sure he knew Beethoven was German but that isn't the point. He was culturally in tune with Beethoven in a way that he wasn't to with Los Van Van.

Pinoso has a nice theatre, the Teatro Auditorio Emilio Martínez Sáez, named for an ex Mayor of the town. The walls of the theatre are lined with light wood panelling and the ceiling slopes gently from the back of the circle to the rear of the stage - you know the sort of place - pretty typical for its 2002 opening date. Tonight, on our way from Culebrón back to Cartagena we stopped off at the Auditorio to see a performance by the Elda Chamber Orchestra.

The programme, in aid of a cancer charity, had lots of titles that we didn't recognise along with lots that we did. When it came to the tunes though we recognised them all. Canon de Pachellbel may be spelled oddly but we were pretty sure what to expect whereas Oh Luz de Dios didn't really give us any clues until the musicians struck up what I recognised as either O Tannenbaum or The Red Flag.

It was an enjoyable little concert, nothing too strenuous, but, all the way through, as an unknown title became a recognisable tune I came back to a thought about a heritage shared across Europe.

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The picture is from the Telepinos Facebook page

This is not my beautiful house

Quite a strange experience today. We went for a meal. The odd thing was that it was in somebody's living room. A chap and his wife, who used to run a restaurant in Pinoso until they retired, now do meals to order from their home in the countryside.

A pal booked eight of us in. We ate quite a lot of very decent food for a rock bottom price sitting on green plastic patio chairs. Plenty of booze as well though some of us were driving and stuck to water.

At one point I was outside the chap's house having a cigar and staring at the sun bathed scenery. In the distance was the village of Algueña overshadowed by the huge marble quarry that produces so much of Pinoso's wealth. The man told me he'd worked there for 26 years before setting up his restaurant. He remembered me as an occasional customer from the time I worked in the furniture shop. I asked him if he didn't miss the convenience of town living. He didn't. He'd been to see his grandaughters dancing ballet in Pinoso the evening before and the day before that other members of his family had been to his house. What more could he want - a peaceful existence with friends and family close by?

I talk to a lot of Spanish people because of my job and it's one of the recurring themes. They have plenty of complaints about how things are but, when push comes to shove, the great majority seem very happy with their lot.

Bring me pine logs hither

Around fifteen years ago, when Maggie and I finally set up home together, we bought a Christmas tree from Woolworths in Huntingdon. We still use the same tree. The lights, the sets of lights that burst into life yet again tonight, came the year after. The first set were very sensitive and gave up the ghost after their debut.

I was adamant about us buying a plastic tree. I wanted something that we would remember each year, something that would grow older and more threadbare along with us. I have fond memories of the tree I grew up with, the tree my dad and I decorated to celebrate the arrival of my new baby brother. I wanted something similar for us.

Whisky, like Nat King Cole, is a part of the ritual of decorating the Huntingdon tree. For years it was a decent malt but times are hard and it was Dewars tonight. Unfortunately driving and scotch don't mix which meant that the tree decorating, the official recognition of Christmas, had to wait until we'd been to see The Pinoso British Choir do their stuff in their annual carol concert in the Pinoso Parish Church.

I mentioned the British Choir a couple of years ago. Since then Spaniards and Brits have sung side by side at Christmas. This year a later date for the carol concert meant that several members of the British Choir would have been missing because of the call of family, turkey and sprouts. It looked as though there would be no British presence in the Parish Christmas celebrations The local priest was having none of that. He suggested a separate British concert. That's what we went to see tonight.

To be honest it wasn't the usual standing room only event in church but, nonetheless. there was a good mix of Spanish and British in the audience. The Priest made a good fist of speaking English and the English chap who spoke for the choir did a splendid job of speaking Spanish. The choir did really well. All through the concert I found myself grinning from ear to ear. It was excellent fun.

As we walked back to the car I asked Maggie if she thought I could use a phrase about the choir on this blog along the lines of "What they lacked in technique they made up for in heart." "Absolutely not," she said," I thought they did really well."

I agreed. So our Christmas has now begun.

People aren't nice about Albacete

My mum reads these blogs so I'm going to be in trouble. If you tell Spanish people, presumably those who aren't from Albacete, that you are going there they trot out a little phrase of advice "Albacete, caga y vete" Albacete: shit and leave. There, I've done it now. No pocket money for weeks. Better not to recount the story of my first ever visit to Albacete on a perishing December night as it involves a porn cinema. I could end up grounded for years.

Maggie is not here so I'm alone. She's not a big fan of Albacete anyway. Personally I like it. On a sizzling August afternoon with the heat haze rippling off the plain I think it's about as Spanish as Spanish can get. Today it was a bit dull and then a bit wet.

The town isn't large. It's small or at least it feels small though apparently it has 170,000 people. We, I was with my pal Geoff, found ourselves wandering in circles because we had no map. I would have liked a map. Indeed we followed the signs to the tourist office so we could get one. The tourist office was closed. It was a particularly splendid example of the art in that it had no sign outside to say it was a tourist office. We had to ask someone where it was although we were standing just 10 metres from it. I presume it was closed because yesterday was a bank holiday and local government employees often get the bridging days to form a long weekend. Lots of Spaniards would have been on holiday today but Albacete isn't a big tourist destination so presumably there wouldn't have been any work for the tourism people anyway. Hang on, do I glimpse a paradox here?

We did stumble across the Cathedral though and opposite was a very green building with an ornate frontage. I took a snap and walked over to see what it was. The sign next to the door said MCA. It wasn't a big sign; think solicitor's office brass plate sort of size. Underneath, in quite small lettering it said Museo Municipal de la Cuchilleria. Albacete is famous for knives. Like Sheffield and Toledo it has a long history of finely crafted blades and here was the local museum dedicated to knives, scissors and all things cutlery. We paid a very reasonable entry fee and went in. I thought it was a good museum. Geoff doesn't really read Spanish and, as all the labelling and notices were monolingual, our pace around the exhibits was more hare than tortoise. The video was in English though so we watched that through. I was impressed enough to buy a couple of books telling the history of knife making in Albacete.

Once we'd eaten a rather ordinary meal we took people's advice, at least the second part.