Life in Culebrón

I think that we do pretty well at getting out and about. In fact the last few days have been a bit of a culture fest. Just tonight we were at the Yecla Jazz Festival. On Saturday it was the open doors day in Petrer when we visited the Castle , a Civil War machine gun emplacemen t and some other stuff. Oh, and earlier on Saturday we went to an animal rescue centre outside Villena that majors in apes and monkeys . On Sunday I popped in to see the  Fallas  "monuments" in Elda and, spurred on by all this activity, I also got around to booking a couple of events for this season at the Teatro Chapi. And right on our doorstep I signed us up for a visit to the local salt workings. I even got to the cinema twice last week and, if the second film hadn't been so incomprehensible to me, I might have made it three. I mentioned the Fallas event to a Spanish chap I was talking to this morning. He'd never heard of it. Moors and Christians in Elda he said; didn't even kn...

Last week it rained a lot. Even here in sunny Alicante it rains from time to time. Fortunately it didn't do what it did to lots of Southern Spain, it didn't come down in tremendous sheets, causing floods that destroyed everything in their path. It rained in a very English way. Heavy, persistent rain rarher than a tremendous downpour. The weather has improved since then. Blue skies from time to time but generally it's been quite grey with the occasional shower. It's stayed relatively warm though - in the high 20s - but I'd be mightily disappointed if I were here on holiday especially with the cool evenings. We've closed  the workroom windows which have been open since we we wedged them that way back in June. We've also taken to closing the front and back doors to stop the cool draught passing through the house. When I changed the duvet cover yeterday morning I considered substituting a slightly thicker and warmer quilt. The towels in the bathroom a...

Pinoso doesn't have traffic lights and parking is free. In Culebrón we don't have much tarmac let alone street names. Yesterday I went for a job interview in Murcia. I hadn't been looking for a new job it's just that a job website I'm signed up to sends me offers matched against keywords. From time to time I apply for something that looks interesting. Like being a tourist guide. But jobs are in short supply in Spain at the moment and I never get any sort of response. There's no effort to applying though, just push a button and my CV wings its way to wherever. I never bother with a covering letter. I'm not expecting to get an interview so I don't put any effort into the process. There was effort in writing the original CV of course and every now and then I update it but it's low maintenance. So the surprise was that the firm came straight back to me after one of these occasional button pushes. It was for English teaching of course. The on...

I quite like figs. Not that they are likely to replace plums or cherries in my affections but, from time to time, as something a bit different, they're nice. They were the sort of fruit that I would buy, every now and again, in a pack of three or four, when I was in Waitrose. We have two black fig trees in our garden and one of the smaller trees that gives green figs. They produce thousands and thousands of fruits. Being a bit lazy I'd not raked up the fallen fruit this season and the smell of rotting figs was becoming quite pungent. So yesterday I spent the better part of two hours raking up all the fallen stuff. It's not a pleasant job because the sap from the leaves and what not is a skin irritant and in grovelling around under the fig trees I always bump my head or back against one of the sturdy branches a couple of times. And scraping squashed figs from the soles of your shoes afterwards is quite time consuming and sticky too. Nonetheless, when I'd finished a...

One of my little jokes is that I like paying Spanish taxes. I say it gives me the right to complain about Spanish politicians. Now I'm going to argue that after eleven years here I have a right to express an opinion about Spain. I wrote a little essay for a Spanish class I do and I posted it on this blog. It was no more than a writing exercise for the teacher but when it was done I thought it was a whimsical look at things I noticed in Spain - good coffee, bad tea, uninformative notices - little inconsequential things. Perfect for the blog. Nobody much comments on my blog but I got one about that article. At first the chap (I think it's a man) was just putting me right. I said there was no good British style tea to be had in Spanish cafés and he told me about the varieties, methods and what not of making a range of teas all of which were available in Spain. Fair enough, not the same point but fair enough. As his reply lengthened though it changed tone. He doesn't seem...

I don't have any work between the end of June and the beginning of September. No pay either so it's not quite as good as it sounds. And with Maggie working mornings our options about getting out and about have been a little more restricted too. This is one of the reasons that I've got through quite a lot of books over the summer. That and because I prefer short books. Reading ten books with 200 pages is only like reading a couple of big thick books. Anyway I get bored with one style, one set of vocabulary and the same basic theme. Generally I've read books in Spanish - partly to try and improve my language but also so that  I have a bit more local culture under my belt. After all you don't need to have read every Kate Atkinson or Stieg Larsson to be able to have a conversation about their style. Talking about what you have read is a common enough conversation so the more points of reference I have the greater the possibility of maintaining that dialogue. The onl...

We've just had a bit of a holiday. You know the sort of thing where you drive hundreds of kilometres, 1617 in fact, stay in lots of hotels, wander from bar to bar and church to museum and put on weight in lots of restaurants. We were in Lerida, in Cataluña, and we wandered around the Valle de Arán up in the Pyrenees and we even spent fifteen minutes in France. On the way home, with the garbox on the Mini sounding like it was going to fall apart, we stopped off to see the place where the Ebro, the river with the second greatest volume of water after the Duero and the second longest after the Tajo, flows into the sea. We were there principally to go on the Tren dels Llacs, the Train of the Lakes, but we didn't. It went like this. I'd read somewhere about this train. It sounded a bit like the Settle Carlisle line. A line with lots of bridges and tunnels to cross difficult terrain for a train. There were pictures of old diesel locomotives, apparently often referred to a...

Maggie and I have a slight difference of opinion about aircon in cars. It's fine, I don't really mind it but I always find it a bit odd. The jet of cold air supercools wherever it is directed whilst the sun, streaming in through the glass, cooks other body parts. I prefer the windows open. It's not as cool, granted, and it's not always the best option but, generally, I prefer the feeling of space and being able to breathe. Usually, of course, when we travel together we have the aircon on. I must have been feeling uppity because, a few days ago, the windows were open. As we went along at maybe 80k the sound of the cicadas in the countryside was as plain as the hotel neighbours groaning through the wall. Cicadas are pretty loud and insistent for small beasts. I didn't understand the idea behind a few. My father, exasperated by my questioning and my inability to grasp the abstract concept, told me that a few was 13. I still sometimes think of a few as being 13. ...

It was a  Bank Holiday weekend (of sorts). You could tell this because the day off, the Saturday, was overcast and cool. We went to Valencia or, to be precise, we stayed in Alfafar. We behaved as tourists should. We went on a boat ride on l'Albufera, the freshwater lagoon, with just a dash of salty sea water, surrounded by lots of rice paddies, to the south of Valencia city. We dutifully ate rice cooked in a paella for lunch. We even tried to find the beach. I'd not booked a room until a couple of days ago so our late choice of hotels, so close to the coast, was a bit limited. I basically took what was left. As the electronic wizadry guided us past IKEA, past Media Markt and past the MN4 shopping centre it dawned that the hotel was in the middle of some gigantic retail zone. So instead of passing our evening wandering the streets of an ancient city centre we strolled the corridors and courtyards of a shopping mall. In fact we went to the flicks, Operación U.N.C.L.E. - passa...

The other day, when I would have gone to Valencia on the train if I hadn't left my phone on the kitchen table loaded with the train tickets, I did a bit of a tour around Alicante as compensation. In Fontanars de Alforins I saw a phone box and I thought I'd phone Maggie to tell her what I was up to. I didn't know her number (it's on the memory of my mobile, why bother to learn it?) but I do know the house number. The instructions on the public phone looked very complex and, when I tried to push a 1€ coin into the slot it didn't seem to want to go in, so I gave up. I read an article today that says there are twelve phone boxes in the Plaza del Sol in the very centre of Madrid. On the day the journalist checked just one of them had been used and, at that, just three times. The remaining public phones throughout Spain are due to be phased out from December 2016 unless the Government does an about face. The article said there are 25,820 phone booths left in Spain...

Every year, in Pinoso, we have fiestas the first days of August - a mixture of events, a funfair, stalls, parades, taunting young bullocks and temporary discos. It goes on for eight or nine days. Last night was the official opening of the 2015 edition. There is a new councillor in charge of the organisation after the elections back in May. It's still the same party in power but the councillor with the responsibility for the fiestas has changed from Eli to César. The programme, the remarkably glossy, 90 plus page long programme was very late out, just two days before kick off and that caused a bit of grumbling. When we first got to Pinoso the pregonero or pregonera, the person who makes a speech and then officially opens the fiestas, used to deliver their opening address from the balcony of the Town Hall. It's the usual routine for the majority of the small towns and villages acrosss Spain. It's the obvious thing to do. Flanked by the mayor, appropriate councillors t...