Oops! Ha, ha!

I seem to have started to say uuf! when something goes wrong. This is a difficult word to spell. It's not the same as pah! or oops! It's more like a phew!

Spanish cockerels go kiri kiri kiri. Obviously no Spaniard has ever heard a cockerel. If they had they would know that cockerels go cock a doodle doo. It's the same with the strange half words, half grunts that we, and they, use to express surprise, to explain away a small mishap to be sarcastic and the like.

PG Wodehouse knew that we Brits made specific noises under specific conditions. I remember the books emphasising HAH!! when the hapless hero was caught out by the stern and  haughty aunt long before his final salvation thanks to Lord Emsworth, the Port and Lemon or Jeeves. It is only in the last few days that I've caught on to the fact that Spaniards emit different non word sounds to us.

This explains why one of my colleagues often seems to dismiss most of my humorous comments as mere tomfoolery with a half mouthed, half nasally blown khah!

Up to now I'd thought it was because she thought I was a fathead.

Lavatorial humour

Sorry to be indelicate but imagine we are in the toilet. No, not we, you or I, separately, apart,  in different but similar toilets. The sit down toilet, not the stand up one.

This toilet is in Spain and on the wall there is a notice which says "Do not throw the paper in the toilet" - well it says it in Spanish but the translation is good. Now paper, papel, is a bit of a multi purpose word. For instance the car parking tickets are often papeles and you can use it for receipts and other things made from paper. The very first time I saw it I thought ah, they mean paper towels and the like but no, alongside the stool was a wastebasket full of soiled toilet paper.

Now Spain is a country blessed with an interminable supply of flies. Unsurprisingly they are attracted by this copious quantity of food. The original concept of  the waste basket isn't particularly pleasant but add in a cloud of flies and it becomes decidedly nasty.

For years I presumed that this was because of dodgy plumbing especially as there are fewer and fewer of the notices nowadays. A few sheets in the pan and the resulting flood could be even more disgusting  than the piles of soiled paper. However, the other day, I was in a high tech building, the sort where the lights are controlled by motion sensors as you walk past yet there was the notice. Surely modern Spanish plumbing can deal with modern toilet paper designed to more or less dissolve in water?

All I can think is that the notice was there because that's how we do it. Not me I hasten to add. 

Maxi Banegas

Pinoso is definitely going all out for the tourist trade. Back in February we got the new street furniture and today we got the Maxi Banegas route. Veritably a seething cauldron of tourist activity.

But who, you ask yourself, is Maxi Banegas? Well, a couple of years ago, I asked that same question and I drew a blank. But tonight I got a clear answer.

Maximina Banegas Carbonell was born on September 15th, 1923. She grew up in her father's barber's shop at Monóvar street, in a warm and family atmosphere, humble but educated, surrounded by books and newspapers, ideal for Maxi's formation and imagination.

Her family's sacrifice and her desire for bettering herself, in spite of the difficult times during and after the Civil War, bore fruit on September 29th, 1951, when she graduated as a Primary School Teacher. She taught in Bacares (Almería), Monóvar, different municipal districts from Pinoso, and finally at San Antón School, where she stayed until her retirement in 1999.

Her nearly 40 years of teaching career left an imprint on the people from Pinoso. As a sign of this, the 'Maxi Banegas' Poetry Contest was created in 1997, currently nationwide. Moreover, in May 1999, Pinoso's Public Library was given her name, and a year later this garden was dedicated to her.

She died on March 27th, 2002, after spending her whole life next to her beloved sister Conchi. Her teaching and her poetry were her legacy.

During her life she wrote eloquent lines, some of which are compiled in her book ‘Entre Pinares’ (Among the Pine Trees) (1999). In her poetry predominates sincerity and the simplicity of her figures, personal feelings and everyday characters from our village, remembering its festivities and devotions, the landscape, her dreams and hopes, which reflect the woman and the teacher.

So now you know as much about Maxi Banegas as I do.

The route, which I went to see opened this evening, is marked by a series of lecterns which explain details of various spots in Pinoso. Each stop also features a few lines of Maxi's poetry about the place. There were seven stops along the route. Each lectern carries a QR code so, if your phone has the right app, you not only get the information in Castillian, Valenciano and English but also the route shown on Google maps so you can't get lost. Pretty go ahead I thought. The text above is the English page for the board in the Maxi Banegas garden.

I'm sure the busloads of tourists will be with us very shortly.

Gran Canaria

We went on holiday last week to Gran Canaria one of the Canary islands just off the coast of Morocco and the Western Sahara. The islands have been Spanish for a long, long time so, despite being geographically in Africa, they look and feel like Spain. Chris Columbus stayed over for a while in 1492 on his way across the Atlantic to what turned out, to his surprise, to be America.

Gran Canaria is a smallish sort of island, round in shape and about 50kms in diameter. The island is volcanic and hilly. If you think of it as the summit of a volcano sticking up out of the blue grey ocean you'd be about right. It has a motorway system joining all the main towns on the coast and a mish mash of little roads twisting up hillsides to connect the hundreds of small settlements inland.

We drove around the island in an underpowered and hired VW gawping at banana trees, sugar cane plantations and the carpet of spring flowers before stopping to eat wrinkled potatoes with a spicy sauce. It was nice and warm and I took to driving around with my left arm out of the open window of the car. Before I knew it my arm had turned pink and peeled. I still look like a proper Benidorm guiri a week later! Surprisingly we Brits appeared to be outnumbered by Germans and Norwegians especially in the seaside resorts.

Anyway, enough Arthur and Sheila Miller travelogue. Time for the wry humour. My advice, if you ever decide to hire a car on Gran Canaria, is to take a parking place with you. There certainly aren't many to be had on the island. We spent hours looking for somewhere to park and often paid through the nose for the pleasure of doing so. In one town even the gorillas, the chaps who make their living from guiding drivers onto every available inch of possible parking space, waved us away.

To be honest it wasn't a particularly memorable break. I suspect that my overwhelming memory will be of crowded roads and terribly limited parking and of the surprisingly good deal offered by the pop radio branded travel agency.

The Real Spain

We were probably as guilty as anyone. We wanted the Real Spain. That's the one where dark skinned men ride donkeys and raven haired señoritas swirl their skirts. Houses should probably be whitewashed and bougainvillea trimmed. A BMW xD35i would be a cause for young boys to point. Benidorm and Torremolinos would, like Bhopal or Fukushima, be places to avoid.

Not a lot of donkeys in Cartagena.  Though we did get the Friday off work because it was Dolores  - Nuestra Señora de los Dolores - Patron Saint of Cartagena. There were bands marching up and down the street getting ready for the processions, fine tuning their timing for Holy Week. They were surrounded by shoppers. All next week it will be big time Catholic ritual as the brotherhoods, dressed in robes that became the model for the Klan, parade around town carrying huge religious statues. One of my students told me that he dislikes the religious parades but he loves being in Cartagena for Holy Week. The town's alive he says.

On the way home to Culebrón we stopped in the industrial estate between Santomera and Abanilla to go to the restaurant that shares a metal box type industrial building with a sweet manufacturer. Lovely sugary smell as we left. We reckoned the restaurant would have a cheap set meal because there were lots of production line workers sitting at the tables outside having a smoke. We were right; the bar was heaving and the food was cheap. There were maybe five blokes behind the bar and the waiter dealing with our section was actually running between tables. It was as typical a bar as you could possibly want though there wasn't a whiff of bougainvillea.

We've got builders in. There are a couple of blokes plastering as I type. They'd said they'd be here around 10.30 and one of them did show up pretty punctually for a builder at 11.10. Before coming here they'd been to check that the solar powered hot water system they'd installed somewhere else yesterday was working properly. One of them couldn't come straight here after he'd checked that job because he had to take his daughter to her swimming class.

So, you see, we got the real Spain after all.

Filling up

I try to avoid the single petrol station in Pinoso if I can. They aren't ever actually unpleasant but they are a bit offhand. The staff sort of vaguely ignore me or talk across me to another customer. It's common for them to beckon for my credit card rather than ask me for it. Their reasoning may be that very few of we Brits speak any Spanish so it's not worth trying to talk to us but, whatever the reason, I don't like their attitude much.

It's not a cheap petrol station either. The diesel cost 1.439€ per litre today and the price comparison sites says that if I'd hunted out the cheapest petrol station in the province I could have saved 13 centimos per litre and got it for 1.309€.

According to the reports if I want to save money I should avoid Galp or BP stations where prices tend to be the highest. Repsol stations, which are the most widespread, have widely variable prices and the best bet for lower prices are the independent brands including the hypermarkets or Cepsa, the second most common brand. There is a common belief in Spain though that cheap fuel from the independents isn't to be trusted because it lacks the essential additives of the big names.

Apparently if I really want to save money I should make sure that I tank up on a Monday with diesel in a hypermarket in the province of Huesca. Conversely I should avoid stations at weekends, especially just before a Bank Holiday and especially on motorways or in rural areas. It's a Bank Holiday in Alicante on Monday and of course Pinoso is a small rural town.

The Monday thing is interesting. The EU asks Member States to report fuel prices on Mondays and Spanish prices are habitually a couple of percentage points lower that day. The petrol companies say it's because demand is lower on Mondays so they drop their prices to attract more trade. Critics say they do it to make their prices seem more reasonable.

Most of the petrol stations in Alicante and Murcia still seem to be attended service. The last few times I've filled up before today it's been in a service station near Fuente Alamo in Murcia. The first time I went there I didn't see anyone on the forecourt wearing the distinctive blue and orange overalls, I looked for, but didn't find, one of the signs to say service was attended so I set about serving myself. The pump fired up OK but as the fuel began to flow and I stared vaguely into the distance I felt a hand close on mine. "How much do you want?" said the attendant as he gently, but firmly, relieved me of the nozzle.

The fuel market in Spain is controlled by three big firms. Repsol and Cepsa  have well over 55% of the total outlets between them with BP being the third big player. Nearly all the refining capacity is with the same companies so that even independent stations and hypermarkets are ultimately buying their fuel from one of the big three.

Most people believe that these three companies operate a form of price fixing policy by not really competing too hard with each other. Even the independently owned but company branded stations get a message everyday to suggest appropriate pump prices.

But cars won't run without the stuff and we can't all live in Huesca so we mutter gently but ultimately pay up.

Back to Benidorm

It cost more this year. 15€ more to be precise. We set out earlier and I think we maybe got an extra meal. Otherwise it was very much the same. In Spanish style we stuck with what we know and went to the same hotel. Benidorm remains as unique as ever.

Maggie said the best part for her was in a bar with a motorbike/Hell's Angels theme and live music on the seafront. I think the bit I enjoyed most was when someone asked us if we wanted to go into a bar - free drink he said. He wasn't the first to ask nor was he the last but, for some reason, we went into his place and not the others. There was a group of girls on a hen party and later a bunch of blokes out for a stag night. They were all in fancy dress and it seemed a bit desperate as they tried, so hard, to have a good time in a tacky bar on a coolish evening in a quiet Benidorm. There was a bloke who took off his shirt maybe in the hope of attracting one of the girls with his six pack. Unfortunately for him any physical plus was nullified by the minus of his drink fuelled inability to walk.

On Sunday we crossed the whole length of town to the Gran Hotel Bali, until recently the tallest building in Benidorm and for many years the tallest building in Spain. There are four taller skyscrapers in Madrid now but Benidorm, amazingly, still has the most high-rise buildings per capita in the world. We intended to go to the observation floor of the tower but the cloudy day and the draw of the paid for school dinner quality food in our hotel were too much and we didn't make it. A treat for next time.

We were with the Culebrón Neighbourhood Association of course. Just like last year. Actually we didn't interact with our Spanish neighbours as much as last time because of our unwillingness to initiate conversations in Spanish so it wasn't really as interesting. We have nobody to blame but ourselves and we still had a good time.

Finally, a word of warning. The Benidorm City Bus Tour has to be one of the least informative tours in the world with, apparently, nothing of note along the whole length of the journey.

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.