Mediterráneamente

Summer is just about to end. Very properly this year it finishes on a Sunday evening so we can all get back to work on Monday morning. Calendar controlled, on the first of the month. The TV is full of the great return as people finish their holidays. Of course there are lots of people in Spain who don't have a job to go back to and I presume those tour guides, restaurant workers and ice cream vendors who get seasonal work in July and August will be up bright and early on Monday morning to get down to the dole office.

I just saw an advert on the telly for a beer that has been running all summer. It shows lots of people having a really good time. It's sunny, the people are young, happy and tanned. The beach has a starring role and the tag line is Mediterráneamente, a word that is probably about as real as its English equivalent, Mediterraneanly.

The strange thing is that I have to agree. There is something very special about being near the Med in summer. I know I've mentioned it before but indulge me. For instance, the other day we went down to the coast at Altea to go on a tourist boat that follows a working fishing boat going about its business in coastal waters. I worried about which camera lenses to take but not about my clothes. Shorts and T shirt were the order of the day without bothering to check the weather forecast or even look out of the window. On the boat we were offered sunscreen and water. It was around 35ºC and sunny.

Shorts, flip flops, fans, aircon in the car, water, sunscreen, sunglasses and the bar table in the shade are the norm. It's not like that in all of Spain. In the North you're just as likely to need a brolly or a pullover as you are in Ilfracombe but I can't remember the last time it rained here.

Luckily for me I'm not back to work for a couple of weeks yet.

Not looping the loop

Maggie was most definite in the manner in which she declined to go on the roller coaster that flipped people over and did barrel rolls. She kept reminding me about the Icelander who had died on a similar ride in the same park just a couple of months ago. Later though, by herself - I was too macho to join her - she went on the teen size roller coaster. Emboldened by her experience she agreed to go on the old style big dipper. All Billy Butlin at Skegness. Apparently built of criss crossing wood like the rail bridges in classic cowboy films and with sit up and beg cars. It rattled and shook, it rocked and rolled. Maggie didn't seem to enjoy it much.

She did enjoy the boat ride type roller coasters though and she let me go on one of those bungee jump type rides and the one that spins around a central pivot.

In fact we had a thoroughly enjoyable time at Terra Mitica theme park. The place is based on the motifs of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. The park has an unhappy financial past. It was haemorrhaging money when I last heard. It certainly wasn't exactly bursting at the seams today and, in the afternoon, we hardly had to queue for rides. It's just outside Benidorm so it has a pretty international clientele but all day long we were generally treated in Spanish and served by Spaniards. The themes are pretty loose to be honest - the Lair of the Minotaur was a sort of ghost train and the Nile Falls or some such was the name of one of those boat rides. Maybe the big, old roller coaster was a Titan something or other. Food was expensive but acceptably so and the atmosphere was everything to everyone whoever you were. I'm sure that to the teenagers it seemed designed for them, the same for the families and at least one old codger felt perfectly at home.

It's the first time that I've actually been there when it has been open. I went to a Van Morrison concert (deadly dull) maybe eight or nine years ago but somehow I'd never eaten one of their burgers or drunk their coke since. 

Nice day out.

With Nevil Shute and Chris Rea

On the beach that is.

Maggie's Mitsu is nine years old but Miitsubishi Spain phoned us about getting a software update. I suspect that they have come across some sort of fault but when I asked they said it was nothing more than customer support. Anyway we agreed to get it done at a dealer in San Juan which is the next coastal town along from Alicante city.

So we were at the beach. Now I don't care much for the beach. I'm obese so taking off most of my clothes and displaying myself for all and sundry to see in a public place is not something I do willingly. Add to that the fact that beaches are often made of sand. Sand is a powdery substance but the individual grains are usually hard quartz. This sand not only gets into your sandwiches and your hair it sneaks into every nook and crevice of your body no matter how intimate. I was eating sand all the way home. I generally keep out of the water too. I quite like water but as I wear contact lenses I always fear that they will be swept away to sea. Anyway what do you do about the bag with your wallet and mobile phone? Like shrouds there are no pockets in swimwear - well no waterproof ones at least.

Going to the beach though is a Spanish passion. I don't think that Spaniards behave particularly differently on the beach to us or the Germans or anyone else. There are the young ones who turn up with the minimum of equipment - towels, suncream, a book and the mobile phone and the three generational family groups who arrive with a veritable encampment - chairs, sunshades, windbreaks, beach games and an epicurean feast packed into coolboxes. Fat, old men and women queue up early in the morning on the busy beaches waiting for the beach cleaners to finish their work. At the off they head for the waterline and set up chairs and sunshades to bag their spot, which the families will later occupy, before heading back to their summer digs for a leisurely breakfast. Towels and Germans spring to mind.

If we are away from home and we tell Spaniards that we live in Alicante they always presume we live on the coast. They will congratulate us on the quality of the Costa Blanca beaches. Ask my students where they went over the weekend and the answer is to the beach. Question the families of Alicante or Murcia as to whether they have a summer house at the beach and the answer will almost certainly be that someone in their family does. Turn on the TV and go channel hopping and you will find a programme where people are being interviewed about their beach experiences.

The tourist figures are up for Spain. Once again it's tourism that's the motor for the economy. Where are those tourists heading - the landscapes of Galicia and Aragon, the marvellous Andalucian or Salmantino cities? No, they're headed for the beaches of Catalunya, Andalucia and the Islands. The Sunday supplements may be full of the voguish delights of rural tourism but it's on the beaches where it's standing room only.

As traditional as...

We were in Jumilla today for a while. Jumilla is a town just over the border into Murcia. They have "always" produced wine in Jumilla but it just keeps getting better and better. Today we were there for a very small part of their Fiestas de la Vendimia -the wine harvest festival.

So wine is a traditional crop in Jumilla just as pelotas and gazpacho are traditional food. We Pinoseros also claim wine and gazpacho as our own but as we are only 35km away I suppose that's fair enough. After all it's Yorkshire Pudding not Barnsley, Ripon or Cleckheaton Pudding though thinking about it we do have Bakewell Tart and Caerphilly Cheese. Anyway.

So when do things become traditional? Family names, surnames, generally pass from generation to generation. Surnames like Thompson, son of Tom, are equivalent to the Arabic ibn or bin names whilst the Spanish tend to use -ez endings, as in Dominguez. But why did it stop? My Dad was John so why am I not a Johnson? And if it's Fletcher and Barber and Smith why not Mr. Web Designer?

Although they are quite different outfits Spanish bullfighters, the ones who fight on foot, wear costumes based on 18th Century dress as do their horse mounted counterparts. Why did it stick at the 18th Century - why not the 16th or why aren't they dressed, like cyclists or swimmers, in the latest technologies?

So. Just 35kms between Jumilla and Pinoso but in Pinoso the traditional dress for women, in the Fiestas at least, is an incredibly ornate affair The local women folk dancers wear a much simpler skirt that seems to be of circle of cloth made to work as a skirt by multiple pleats. In the Villazgo festival in Pinoso traditional dress for women is more practical, less ornate and the men wear a black smock and neckerchief. Over in Jumilla the costume is much simpler again. It actually looks like something that people may have worn everyday at some time in the past. Cloth and woven grass shoes, simple skirts or trousers, white shirts for both sexes with shawls for the women and waistcoats and cummerbund like sashes for the men

This traditional clothing is only trotted out for traditional events. Women heading for the supermarket wear everyday skirts and jeans and shirts and tops. If anythinng were traditional summer dress for women at the moment it would be shorts and vests. For men shorts and T-shirts. Flip flops or sandals and not the traditional rope soled alpargatas.

I'm pleased to say that this divide between what's trotted out as traditional and what people actually do is not true of the wine or food. Just as Lancashire Hotpot is alive and well so are local traditional foods. In fact maybe it's time for a nice longaniza sandwich with a drop of monastrell to wash it down?

Tabarca

I couldn't help it. My gaze kept wandering to the man sitting to my right. He was shirtless and his belly was so huge that it was squidged onto the table even though his chair was pushed well back. I also noticed the young women in bikinis in the restaurant but Maggie must never know.

We were in Tabarca. It's an island just off the coast from Santa Pola though we'd travelled over on the boat from Alicante. Considering that the Med. is nothing more than a big lake and given that we were hugging the coast it was remarkably choppy.  The crew were handing out sick bags willy nilly. I expected to succumb but despite the sweat dribbling from my forehead I reached terra firma with breakfast still somewhere in my digestive tract.

The island, it's actually an archipelago, is a place that locals and tourists go to get a bronzy and to eat. In the summer heat the main things you smell in the air are hot cooking oil and sun protection cream. Lots of the home team take everything bar the kitchen sink and set up bedou style, on the beach. They carry army feeding amounts of food. Most people who go there though eat in one of the several restaurants. Menus are principally fish and seafood based. Rice dishes, paellas, are de rigeur.

The island  was used as a base by pirates to raid the coast so, in 1760, Carlos III used a group of shipwrecked Genoese as a garrison on the island. They came from the islet of Tabarka and so the Spanish island, our island, got a new name. The remains of the fortifications, like the church are somewhere to stroll in your flip flops and swimwear before or after eating.

I think I was the only visitor on the island with full length trousers.

Women don't sweat....

The building is an old Victorian indoor market - all cast iron columns and glass ceiling. The air conditioning was going full blast producing a background growl but if the aircon was at full tilt the hand held fans were going faster. Those fans make a distinctive sound as they furl, unfurl and flap and that sound was everywhere. The seats were relatively hard and relatively uncomfortable so there was a fair bit of shuffling. At least twenty official photographers wearing orange ribboned passes kept moving around crouching down like John Ford Indians dancing around the tribal fire with their tomahawks. Despite the fanning, despite the cooling system and despite the shuffling we all glistened.

On stage Estrella Morente was belting out flamenco songs. The name never goes without mention of her late great dad, Enrique Morente who went into a coma after an ulcer operation and died in 2010. She was there to sing in, and we were there to watch, a part of one of the most prestigious flamenco events of the year. It isn't held in the ancestral home of flamenco down in Andalucia nor in one of the big cities. The Cante de las Minas is held in the very ordinary, bordering on ugly, Murcian town of La Unión. I lived in La Union for about ten months so I can have an opinion.

I've mentioned this competition before so no extra details here but it was extra interesting this time. I like this event so I have a predisposition to go. I hadn't read the tickets or the advertising bumph very carefully. It said Estrella Morente and that was enough for me. I've heard her on the radio a few times and she had a song I liked in the Almadóvar film Volver - though it was Penélope Cruz who mouthed the song in the movie. Basically then I had no idea what I was going to see. I sort of expected crossover stuff - proper flamenco breezed up a bit. Like the stuff you get in almost any flamenco show in Spain but a lot classier. It wan't. To my untrained ear it sounded like a variation on the real stuff that the fat men in overtight suits wail out.

Maggie had arrived in Alicante airport from the UK at about a quarter past nine. The concert was at eleven and about 120 kilometres away so it was a bit of a dash. It was only when a woman in a long frock welcomed us to the concert that we realised the second half was going to be el Amor Brujo (the bewitched Love) by Manuel de Falla performed by the orchestra from a local private university. Originally the conductor was going to be Roque Baños, who is quite a famous writer of film scores, a chap who comes from Jumilla just down the road from us in Culebrón, but in the end Roque was doing something more important. I checked my tickets and yes it was all there. Clearly.

I don't care for Falla. I've tried honest. All that Three Cornered Hat and Nights in the Gardens of Spain stuff. It doesn't work for me.

Anyway so there we are shuffling and sweating and a bit surprised that we were watching a bunch of young people on stage producing classical music with Estrella doing the singing parts.

As we filed out into the square it was still only a bit short of two in the morning so we stopped to get a drink and a snack and we talked about the concert. We always talk about the things we go to see of course but usually it's a shortish conversation and this time it was much longer. I strongly suspect that it's not a concert we will forget easily.

Keeping up to date

When we first settled in Pinoso the Internet wasn't as all pervasive as it is today. There was still a weekly rag, el Canfali, which reported the news from Pinoso and many of the surrounding towns. The quality of its journalism was questionable but it was a part of my weekly routine to buy and read it. I was sad when it died. Good for my Spanish and good to know what was happening.

Our local Town Hall runs a radio station and a TV station. The TV station fell foul of the digitalisation of the Spanish television networks and finally gave up analogue broadcasting in March 2012. Even before it closed we lost the signal in Culebrón with a change of transmitter. I don't quite understand how or why but it still exists on the internet although it seems to produce still rather than moving images. There are just fourteen videos on its Facebook page for instance. The Pinoso Town Hall website is enigmatic about Telepinos's future "waiting to find a method of being an open window for all the people of Pinoso."

The radio station is fine. The signal's a bit weak our side of town but it broadcasts on the internet too. A mix of local programming and idiosyncratic music.

The other source of written information, alongside the commercial Canfali and the generalist commercial provincial press, was and is a free magazine produced by the Town Hall. It's called El Cabeço. It used to be monthly but times are hard and it now seems to be truly periodical - sometimes it covers three months, sometimes two. I don't have to worry about publication date. My pal Geoff collects one when he sees one in the newsagent where he picks up his Daily Mail every day. When it comes out I get one. I presume the same writing team put together the news on the Town Hall website every day.

I suspect that the editorial in El Cabeço is a little biased. When the PP/UCL were in power el Cabeço told us about their wonderful achievements. The present administration is PSOE/PSD and it's their turn to be outstanding. Nonetheless a lot of the information is purely factual and the parts I can read (much of it is in Valenciano) are usually pretty interesting. Each of the political parties gets space in the magazine anyway and they anticipate the guff of their opponents and answer back in anticipation. It can be amusing to read. There is obviously something close to "Parliamentary Privilege" in what opposing politicians can say within its pages.

You may remember that when we voted in the European elections I mentioned that we had a sort of referendum about some local questions too. Well El Cabeço tells me there's going to be another one in September this time about the future of our local salt dome, our emblematic mountainlet, el Cabeço in Valenciano or el Cabezo in Castellano.

Before I explain tell me what the answer is to this question: "Are you in agreement with the wells of the salt dome being used for potentially contaminating substances quite unrelated to their actual use?" It loses something in translation but I hope you have no doubt about the correct answer.

This is about the plan to use the empty spaces within the hill to store some of Spain's strategic oil reserve. I notice in his editorial in the magazine that the mayor doesn't shilly shally around when he describes the idea as damaging (nocivo) and says that he hopes the referendum will give support to the plans his party is developing to stop the project.

I don't quite understand why there is going to be a referendum. Thousands of opposing signatures have already been collected which surely serve the same purpose but I look forward to reading about the landslide support for keeping the hill clean in the next edition.

Braceando en el barro

It's a nice day. The weather station says 34.6ºC. It's still, and the only sounds are things cracking with the heat and buzzing flies. In Pinoso, just four kilometres way, they will be finishing off the free giant paella and the free beer to go with it. I wondered about going in but I couldn't raise the energy. I did the ironing instead.

I'm off work of course. I don't work, nor do I get paid, July or August. It suits me though my joy is always somewhat tempered by the alarming outflow from my bank account. The perennial problem plenty of time but no cash.

I'm only putting off one job. I have to phone the electric supply company to ask them about moving a pole. I've mentioned it before. The power supply to the house is being menaced by our still very healthy and free of the nasty beetle like picudo rojo, palm tree. I sprayed the tree again a few days ago and I hurt myself less and did it more quickly than ever before. I'm putting off the phone call for all sorts of reasons but I do need to talk to the neighbour first and he's not around at the moment so I can claim lack of opportunity rather than sloth.

It's not that I've been particularly slothful since finishing work. I went to Madrid to collect Maggie and we spent a couple of days there together. We made a frankly disastrous foray to Cartagena to see a couple of bands in the Mar de Musicas. We did our Hispano Luso road trip on which I finally got to see inside el Escorial (Felipe II's enormous monastery palace) after 25 years of trying, we got back to Ciudad Rodrigo after five years away, we bagged another of the fourteen Spanish National Parks at Doñana. Overall we saw a myriad of interesting and exciting things in the 2,890 kilometres we did on a route that took in stops at Cercedilla, Ciudad Rodrigo, Tabuaço, Lisbon, Evora, el Rocio and Malaga. A couple of days after getting back to Culebrón Maggie set off for the UK to catch up with her family and my life slowed down a little.

That said I went to see a paid for concert, Pastora Soler, as part of the Pinoso Fiesta and I've done a few other things there from the opening ceremony to sitting in the market square drinking gin and listening to the free soul night with a couple of pals. Life you know, drifting past.

Good morning sir. May I see your documentation please?

I get pulled over fairly frequently by the police, usuallly the Guardia Civil. Normally it takes seconds - they see I'm wearing my seat belt, see that the car has been checked for roadworthiness or whatever and I'm soon on my way. Not always, they sometimes have big guns and give clear instructions about leaving the car s-l-o-w-l-y. I've been breathalysed either three or four times as well. Always 100% clear.

On the way to stay in a hotel in Cartagena last week I was being followed by a police car with speed cameras mounted on the roof. I signalled left and pulled into a parking bay. The policeman started gesticulating and shouting. Once out of the car in that flurry of tripping over things fluster he told me off for crossing an unbroken white liine in the centre of the road. I shouldn't have turned left.

Today we went to visit a bodega though here in Portugal they seem to be called quintas. When it got to the wine tasting I only took about half a mouthful of wine. I've got to drive I said.

Five minutes down the road and we were pulled over by police officers on a country lane - their uniforms had the letters GNR on them. "Documentation please," they said in Portuguese. I tried answering in English, no good, I tried Spanish - that worked. It turned out the poliiceman had been a lorry driver and knew our bit of Spain as well as Spanish. There were no problems with the paperwork. "You haven't been drinking have you?" he asked, almost as a throwaway line. I told the truth. I was lectured on the strength of Portuguese wine and sent on my way. Two police incidents in five days is a bit on the top side thouugh.

Interesting about the language too. I complain a lot about not being able to speak Spanish very well. Being here in Portugal where I have difficulty pronouncing the name of the town that I'm staying in has brought home to me how communicative I actually am in Spanish. It is horrible being so lost and having to be so British about speaking to foreigners - well modulated sounds, a slow delivery and simple words. Of course, just as everywhere else the foreigners put us to shame and usually manage English remarkably well.

Like the dentist's

Maggie wants a mobile phone. Well, actually, she's got a phone but she needs a Spanish SIM card and a contract to make her phone work. It's taken a little while for her to get around to it but this morning she sat at her half functioning computer (the connection is completely unreliable at the moment) and set up a contract to Pepephone, one of the newer and cheaper mobile phone setups in Spain.

Just one problem. The card has to be delivered by carrier and signed for. As we are in and out all the time and then Maggie is off to the UK for a couple of weeks opportunities for delivering or receiving the SIM card are very limited.

Pepephone uses a travel agency as a shop for its services. It just happens that we're in Cartagena for a concert so we thought we could ask if there was the possibility of collecting a SIM card directly.

We have now been waiting for over an hour, we're still waiting. It's nobody's fault the people are doing their jobs but it is a very, very long winded process.

Badly informed - as usual

People tell me I complain. I usually think I am commenting or, more often, guffawing, at the preposterousness of whatever it may be. For instance in Of no fixed address

Anyway, as usual, I was wrong. Just ask Maggie. Always wrong. My address wasn't the real problem. True I had to go to Elda about 25 kilometres away where I was sent from one office to a second but once I was in the right place it took only a few seconds to change my address with the Social Security, with the Health people.

Back at the computer I applied for my European Health Card only to have the application turned down again. So I rang the helpline. I enjoyed the music and the mix of information and encouragement to not go away as the minutes ticked away.

The woman told me that I'm not employed, I'm not a pensioner and I'm not unemployed so I can't have a card. I explained that I have a job. She couldn't find me on the system and it took a while before she did. Ah, your contract ended at the end of June she said. Well, yes and no I replied. I have one of these fixed discontinuous contracts so I presume that although I'm not being paid I am considered to be employed. Not quite apparently. I have the right to claim unemployment pay and I would not be added to the unemployment statistics but unless I actually claim the dole I have no right to a health card. I checked that there was no problem with ordinary health care here in Spain and that was fine. I can get sick at home but not whilst I gad about Europe.

These contratos fijos discontinuos are designed for people who work in seasonal businesses. The job is yours when there's work but apparently the idea is that you go and draw the dole when the firm doesn't need you. Despite being entitled to unemployment pay people on these contracts are not registered as unemployed. A very odd situation and very easy for the firms to abuse I would have thought. Employ someone for eleven months until the summer holiday period, kick them loose with no need to pay them whilst they draw the dole and then take them on again when they have a nice tan. The other side is that people who have these contracts are unlikely to do much job hunting whilst they are temporarily out of work so they are a dead weight on the public purse. Apparently most of us on these contracts are women and lots of us work in food production, education and tourism.

Obviously my personal situation is a little strange. I'm sure that my boss would keep me working over the summer if I wanted to work. The truth is that it suits me and him for me to take a couple of months off. I avoid work and he doesn't have to employ somebody at a slacker time of the year. It has never crossed my mind to claim the dole.

I'd just better not get sick when we cross the border into Portugal over the summer.