Life in Culebrón

I had a lot of trouble getting a job when I was a young man. One day in the 70s after another disastrous interview I was on the milk train back from London to Halifax. It was early morning when the train made an unscheduled stop in my home town of Elland presumably waiting for the signals or somesuch. Beeching had done for Elland as an official stop. I jumped out of the train (no conductor controlled doors in those days) and despite the protestations of the British Rail staff legged it over the semi derelict platforms and pushed through a hole in the wire that I knew from my boyhood adventures. It saved me the four mile hike back from the official stop in Halifax. Yesterday we decided to travel to Valencia for one last outing before I go back to work on Monday. We agreed to use  the train. Quite by chance we'd been in the station at Villena a couple of days before. That's where I got the idea. It was interesting looking at the routes of the slower trains that run on the w...

What's tortilla to you? Is it that Mexican pancake or is it a thick and unfolded potato (and onion) omelette? Tortilla Española or tortilla de patatas is a Spanish classic. Basically you fry some spuds cut into slices and maybe some onions too. With or without onion is a debate - cubed or sliced potatoes too. Whilst the potatoes are softening you beat some eggs into a bowl - usually adding a pinch of salt. Then, when the frying is done, you drain off the oil and add the potatoes (and onions) to the beaten eggs. You return the mix to the frying pan, cook on one side till the "pancake" starts to firm up and then you either flip it over, a la Shrove Tuesday, or you use a plate or lid over the frying pan to help  you get the sticky side back into the pan to fry. When it has set to your preference you slide it out of the pan and set about eating it. Of course you could set it aside to cool, Tortilla is nice cold too. It goes well in bread rolls. I'm not absolu...

I go to the flicks as often as I can. As with everything else I write in this blog I've mentioned it before. My life just isn't exciting enough to sustain a flow of new adventures. All films at the cinema are dubbed into Spanish. I've discussed this several times with Spanish chums and students. They try to argue that the Spanish versions are as good - better for them. They're wrong. Changing the language just mashes up the film. Nonetheless I still love going to the pictures. How much of the film I understand is down to chance. I never catch all the nuances or get all the puns and subtleties but it's rare for me to be completely lost. It does happen from time to time and when it does I come out of the film disappointed and angry in equal measure. The easiest films to understand are British ones followed by other European fare. Hollywood films are usually relatively straightforward but action films are an exception. I miss the vital links amongst the expl...

Maggie thinks we should be greener. She fancied solar panels to provide at least some of our power. Good idea. After all it's pretty sunny where we live. Just by chance a cold caller got in touch and it was Maggie who took the call. So, this morning, a man came to talk to us about solar panels and other green solutions. He told us it didn't make economic sense. Plan scotched. If solar power was Maggie's concern mine was a the palm tree. The palm tree that I've been spraying religiously to protect it against the dreaded boring beetle thing. The palm tree is fit and healthy - so fit and healthy that it's growing into the power lines. Just a bit of bad luck and either the tree gets fried or it blacks out our house and the two next door. For various reasons I don't want to talk to the power company but our neighbours came up with the bright idea of moving the tree rather than the power lines. I checked with the environmental people at the town hall to m...

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'v...

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 financ...

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 w...

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 Fle...

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 eve...

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 flamen...

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 wi...