Life in Culebrón

As far as I remember the first ever time we got involved in a tapas trail was in Sax which is a small town about 20 km from here. It was probably in 2005 and I remember it well because afterwards we went on to a meal in the village hall organised by the Culebrón Neighbourhood Association. Certain members of our party had had a little too much to drink and they were unable to fully participate in the village AGM afterwards leaving me as the sole speaking British representative. Tapas trails, rutas de tapas, are a simple idea. Somebody, usually the Chamber of Trade or the local Shopkeeper's Association persuades a number of bars and restaurants in their town to sell a bite sized snack and a drink, usually either beer or wine, for a bargain set price. They persuade other sponsors to cough up a prize. Then they produce a route map cum leaflet and, within the set dates, punters skip from bar to bar eating the tapas and drinking the drink. Each time the participants have something on...

We don't have a shop in Culebrón. Not a one. Pinoso has a reasonable range though. Small businesses predominate. The sort of place where the goods are kept in the back, where you have to ask for things, where screws are counted out and where they punch the extra holes into the belt. Window displays are generally utilitarian rather than artistic. Larger Spanish towns generally have modern, corporate retailing with big out of town shopping centres and recognisable names. But in amongst the town centre chain stores with their modern window dressing, background music, careful lighting and English language slogans there will be any number of small, anachronistic businesses. Maggie summed it up neatly when I mentioned the news story I'd read. "Ah, the corset shops." There they are. Shops that smell of leather or paper. Shops with a hotch potch of stationery yellowing at the edges and maps showing the Soviet Union. Shops with boxes of ribbons, knicker elastic, needles ...

As I drove home this evening I scanned the countryside for bonfires. I listened for the whistles and bangs of fireworks. There weren't any of course. It may have been Bonfire Night in the UK but there is no celebration here to mark the failiure of the Gunpowder Plot. From what I understand Guy Fawkes Night has basically died out in the UK anyway. For me, as a boy in West Yorkshire, it was a big event. We spent weeks beforehand collecting wood and sitting around telling ghost stories, eating potatoes charred on the outside and raw inside after their ordeal by makeshift camp fire. There was toffee, bonfire toffee, sticky enough to challenge even the strong young teeth I had then. The Parkin didn't come till later, in the kitchen at home. The big night on the 5th involved setting off any fieworks we had managed to scrounge together. When they were exhausted the bonfire became the focus of our attention for a while. It's amazing how one side of your body, the part facing ...

When I put the clocks back later tonight I'm going to retune the telly. The way the frequencies are divided up between mobile phone services and TV networks is being changed so it's either a laborious retune (splendid design Samsung people!) or lose channels. TV is one of the few things we generally get as well here as anywhere in Spain. My phone provider sent me one of those super offers the other day. For just two euros more per month I could have 40 new TV channels, increase the ADSL speed to a maximum of 100 Mb and get double the number of download gigs on my mobile phone. I tried to sign up. None of the advantages were available here in Culebrón - no 4G, no fibre, not even the TV channels. That's what you get for living in the countryside. ADSL at 3 Mb maximum and a dodgy mobile signal. When I worked at the furniture shop my boss had a go at house selling. I used to take the pictures and write the blurb for the sales sheets. Lots of people who lived up some unm...

Wikipedia tells me that Don Juan Tenorio,written by José Zorrilla in 1844, is the more romantic of the two principal Spanish-language plays about the legend of Don Juan. The other is the 1630 El Burlador de Sevilla probably written by Tirso de Molina. So now you know. It's a Spanish theatre tradition to perform El Tenorio on All Saints Day as part of the Bank Holiday "celebrations". In turn this has made it one of the most lucrative of Spanish plays. It's a pity poor old  Zorilla sold the rights soon after he wrote it. He thought it was just another pot boiler. I fear that a play written in the mid 19th Century, based on an older 17th Century work, is going to be a bit of a push for my Spanish. But blow it. Something traditional that we still haven't done being performed in Jumilla just 35k from home with the most expensive tickets priced at just 10€. Why the hell not? It must be worth a punt. We can always sneak away at the intermission if needs be. Maggie ...

I never really took to La Unión the small town I lived in last year. One small plus though was that a local firm, operating under the Zafiro Tours franchise, organised day trips by coach. The model was simple. An early morning start, a guide or guides to show us around before lunch then maybe a bit more visiting in the afternoon before the inevitable dribbling and snoring on the trip back to La Unión. The all in price was usually in the 30 to 40€ bracket. The first time I did it I thought it would be a bit of a hoot going on a coach trip with a load of older Spaniards. I imagined myself chatting away whilst we gawped at this or that before troughing down on the local delicacy. It never quite matched my expectations. I was always a bit of an outsider but it wasn't because people were unwelcoming. More my fault than theirs. The trips though were good. Interesting destinations and good guides. So I kept going. Obviously as I no longer live in La Unión the trips aren't ...

I've been living in Spain for ten years and five days now. We've owned the house in Culebrón for all but three months of that time. Despite that we've lived in Santa Pola, Ciudad Rodrigo, Cartagena and La Unión. We've rented six different flats all because of where we have found work. So it's nice to be finally living at home and paying just one electric bill, one phone bill and not having to move here and there for weekends or bank holidays. Culebrón, or more accurately Pinoso is, nonetheless, the most British of all the places I've lived in Spain. Now don't get me wrong Spain is just outside the door. The mountain view is Spanish, the crops in the field are Spanish, the traffic is Spanish, the opening times are Spanish but Britishness crowds in here in a way that it hasn't in any of those other places. I say Pinoso by the way because that's where we go to buy bread and beer. In Culebrón we live right on the edge of the village and we only reall...

We live in the province of Alicante. Along with Castellon and Valencia these three provinces make up the Valencian Community. Back in 1238, on October 9th, King Jaume I to give him his Valencian name or Jaime I in Spanish successfully took Valencia City as part of the Christian reconquest of Spain. The Moorish invaders weren't actually cleared from all of Valencia till 1305 and the last bits of what is now geographically Valencia weren't added until 1851. Nonetheless, when the powers that be were looking for a day to celebrate being Valencian they settled on October 9th. In the days when public holidays used to take us by surprise our pal Pepa, who is a born and bred Valencian, told us that on this day the tradition is to give little marzipan sweets wrapped in a silk handkerchief. Wikipedia tells me that this is because October 9th is also San Dionisio's day who is the patron saint of lovers (odd, I thought Valentine had that job sewn up). I remember going in to Pin...

We've just been to Menorca an island about the same size as the Isle of Man and the most easterly point of Spain. Ryanair had an offer on cheapish flights and, as we've only ever done Mallorca in the Balearics, it seemed like a good opportunity. We went for a long weekend. I have this marking system for films that I go to see. The scale is from one to five. I work on the assumption that if someone manages to finance and release a film in ordinary cinemas it will be perfectly OK. So the natural score for any film is three out of five. If it's better than expected it gets four or very rarely a five and if it's not so good a two or even a one. The problem with this system is that some perfectly well made Hollywood romcom will get the same score as a well made art house film. To solve the problem I added a couple of grades, three plus and three minus, to allow for a bit of personal comment on a film. Basically three plus is for a well produced film that I enjoyed and th...

As I drove the first few of the 35kms from work to home there were big black clouds on the horizon. Sooty black clouds. There were flashes of lightning criss crossing the clouds. The rain that has been threatening to fall for the last few days was about to arrive. True there had been a fine mist of rain this morning but generally it was still fair to say that we hadn't had any rain since May. As the car ploughed through rivers of water, as the temperature dropped from the high twenties to around 15ºC I thought that at least it was something for this blog. I stopped thinking about the blog as I put the wipers onto their highest speed, turned on all of the fog lights and moved the heater controls from air con to heat to clear the misted up screen. I stopped thinking about the blog and worried more about the driving. I couldn't see anything out of the windscreen and the torrents of brown water pouring off the fields had spread sheets of large sump breaking rocks across the r...

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...