Rocking and Roving

I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Land Rovers. I have no idea why. I think it's forty three years since I first drove one and maybe twelve since I last did. I still notice them though. Terrible vehicles really. Noisy, thirsty, probably environmentally disastrous, clunky, with awful visibility, uncomfy seats and the way they tramp about at the back at the least provocation can be terrifying. That hasn't stopped me liking them.

Land Rovers stand out yet blend in. The one in the Rocketman film gets a spot in the trailer. The one in Four Weddings was just so right, so upper crust. Our local quarry has a fleet of them, David Attenborough uses them. There are several  pictures of the Queen, in a headscarf, in front of Land Rovers. I suspect there is no news story about a forest fire or an earthquake that doesn't feature a Land Rover doing its bit. Production stopped in 2016, after 67 years, so I suppose they will slowly cease to be so ubiquitous as any number of much more anodyne but sophisticated vehicles take their place.

This reminiscing was brought on by the simple fact of seeing an oldish Defender, probably from around 1998, parked in our local supermarket car park. It had an old style of Spanish number plate, retired in the year 2000, which tell you where the vehicle is from. J for Jaén, the Andalucian province full of olive trees in this case. That was a second thing. I've recently taken to playing a song over and over again called Andaluces de Jaén. The song is based on a poem written by Miguel Hernández who died in prison, he was on the losing side, after the end of the Spanish Civil War. He was from Orihuela which is just down the road from us. Obviously enough the poem/song is about the people, the Andaluces, from Jaén. Ostensibly about growing and collecting olives but I suspect it may have a somewhat deeper meaning than that!

The time I first realised that a battered Landy is nearly as axiomatic a sign of deep, deep, Spanish rurality as the small white van and bright blue overalls was in 2006, in Cazorla, also in the province of Jaén. We were sitting in a square in the town as Land Rover after Land Rover went by. They may, in fact, have been Santanas because, between 1958 and 1994, Land Rovers were built under licence in Spain. To be honest it's immaterial whether they were built in Solihull or Linares because they were instantly recognisable as Landies.

Looking at the prices, even for old and battered examples, it's unlikely I'll ever be able to buy one but if anyone has one and feels environmentally guilty you could always salve your guilt by gifting the motor to me.

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Andalusians from Jaén,
proud olive growers,
tell me in good conscience who,
who grew the olive trees?
Andalusians from Jaén,
Andalusians from Jaén.

Neither the Nothingness grow them
nor money, nor the lord,
but the silent ground,
work and sweat.

Together with pure water
and together with the planets:
all three gave beauty
to the twisted trunks,
Andalusians from Jaén.

Andalusians from Jaén,
proud olive growers,
tell me in good conscience who,
who grew the olive trees?
Andalusians from Jaén,
Andalusians from Jaén.

How many centuries of olives,
with captive feet and hands,
all day long, sun and moon,
weigh on your bones!

Jaén, stand up, brave,
on your moon stones,
don’t become a slave
with all your olive groves.
Andalusians from Jaén.

Andalusians from Jaén,
proud olive growers,
tell me in good conscience who,
who grew the olive trees?
Andalusians from Jaén,
Andalusians from Jaén.

Dolly Parton "It's a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I'd be a drag queen".

We'd wasted the Saturday. We'd tried the new pork pie shop but not much else. In the evening though we were spoiled for choice. There was a choir from Valencia singing Habaneras in the Municipal Gardens and then, an hour later, the selection of the Carnival Queens in the Town Hall Car Park. If we'd thought about it there was no need to rush. Spanish things generally start a bit late, unless you presume they will start late in which case they will start without you. This time though there really were no worries as the councillors listening to the Habaneras were an essential part of the Carnival Queen process. Mind you, somebody keeps a seat for them. Not so for we humble folk.

The car park had been turned into a spectacular setting for the Queens event. A fashion model type runway, a big stage with some giant centrepiece, a couple of big screen tellies and two very competent young women being Eurovision Song Contest style comperes. The stars of the evening were the contestants, the girls for Reina Infantil, the Junior Queen, and the young women for Carnival Queen.

The staging and stage management were equally spectacular. The frocks were very Hollywood, the crowd was appreciative and smiling was the order of the evening. It was intriguing watching the man at the mixing desk pressing his headphones hard to his  ears, presumably listening for the OK from lights and sound, before giving the nod to the handler at the start of the runway to let the participants walk. No real losers either. The ones who miss out on the title form the court and go to all the same events, they just don't get the title.

Amongst the complaints levelled against the current and recently victorious, PSOE, administration is one that it's good at fiestas and gardens and not good at the things that count like road repair and rubbish removal. I don't agree but I've heard it lots of times. Equally I've heard the explanation that fiesta spending has actually decreased during their time. I've never inspected the accounts closely but I think that's perfectly possible in that some events (a big concert with a big name Spanish star last year for instance) probably run at a profit, there are always low cost events and whilst there are some that look very flash they are often very participative and cheapish to mount.

As I remember it, before we got this Socialist administration, the opening speeches for the annual fiesta involved the Mayor, flanked by the Carnival Queens and the appropriate councillors, introducing the guest speaker, the Pregónera/o, who addressed the crowd from the balcony and then declared the fiestas open. It's an obvious way to do it. They do it more or less like that for Blackpool Illuminations. But, as soon as the socialists took over it all moved to ground level (I like to think it was a political gesture but it may have been simple logistics). There was a little dais but it was only so the key participants could be seen above the heads of the crowd. There was a big TV screen and the town's press people had made a short promotional video about the town and fiestas. The Carnival Queens and their Court were escorted into the square on the arms of local personalities through a corridor of past Carnival Queens and Fiesta Committee Members. There was lots of music, lots of fanfares and clapping and then it was back to the guest speaker to eventually do the bit they needed to do. The big difference was that it was participative. The event was conjured almost from fresh air with existing resources used to the full.

The do on Saturday followed basically that same pattern. True there was acres of staging and dancers and lots of lights but I suspect that a lot of the outlay was borne by the participants not by we ratepayers. Of course there's a downside to that. Just as any US Citizen can be President of the USA, as long as they can raise the finance I suppose any young woman can aspire to Carnival Queen provided they can afford the gala dresses and the traditional costumes. It can't be an inexpensive undertaking looking at those frocks. Cheaper than being President though - Hilary's campaign cost about $1,400,000,000 and Trump's about $957,600,000.

There are a bundle of photos in the June album

Bread

There used to be an advert with a lad pushing his bike to the top of a steep hill to deliver his Hovis bread. The tagline was "as good today as it's always been". The clear suggestion was of pedigree, that Hovis was real bread, proper bread, the sort of bread that our grandparents ate and that was good for you. Hovis always stressed that their bread was, "made with wheatgerm". I remember being taken aback when I heard that the word wheatgerm was maybe a bit of sleight of hand. It's true, a loaf with added wheatgerm is better, health-wise, than a loaf made from processed white flour but, apparently, Hovis is basically a processed flour bread spiced up with a bit of wheatgerm. The stuff you really want, for all that colon cleansing fibre, is wholemeal where nothing has been removed from the wholewheat grain.

For years, in Spain, I thought that bread sticks - the sort of bread that onion toting, beret wearing, stripy T-shirt clad Frenchmen, add flavour to under their armpits - were the typical Spanish bread. Actually, in any period piece on the telly, where the olden days is the theme, then the chunks of bread are hewn from a mound shaped rounded loaf. I've been told the Spanish sticks were copied from the French.

Of course there is sliced bread too, pan de molde, it usually comes in the shape we Brits recognise as a loaf, like Mother's Pride. Pan de molde is usually horrid, over-sweet, over processed. I'm sure someone likes it but I don't. The generic description seems to be Pan Bimbo, Bimbo being a trade name not related to Pamela Anderson's Baywatch character. Pan Bimbo is white, Spanish bread is white - well it used to be. Nowadays all sorts of bread is sold sliced in packets and it comes in all sorts of variations.

I'm not sure of the chronology, and I'm not going to spend time researching it because that's not the point of the piece. As I said, in general, Spanish bread is white. I'm sure that other types of bread have been around for ages and have been available from craft bakeries, but they were not, generally, available. Then, a few years ago all sorts of different breads started to appear in supermarkets and in franchised bakeries. At first it was just things like Pan Gallego and Pan Rústico - Galician bread and Country bread - but the range started to extend - ciabatta, rye bread, multi cereal etc. Odd outlets, like petrol stations, began to sell bread and the big difference was that this wasn't the age old story of a baker leaving some sticks with the local butcher or bodega - this was bread, baked on site, from frozen dough. I think that there was also quite extensive use of those baking bread flavoured scents. None of this was like the stuff my boyhood pal Fluff made when he was serving his bakery apprenticeship and getting up at 4am. None of it tasted like the still warm fadges I got from Arnetts's bakery in Hull at around 2am on a Saturday morning in my student days.

When the Consum and HiperBer moved premises in Pinoso, when Día got its face-lift, the bread sections in those supermarkets got much bigger. There are breads with seeds on them, there are regional breads like the Andalusian molletes and even the everyday bread got a face lift. Take your choice of a variety of formats - normal stick, family stick, mini stick - there are breads that say integral (wholemeal), masa madre (sourdough bread), pan de salvo (bran), pan de espelta (a trendy wheat variety), pan de cristal (I have no idea; it's bread that has nearly as much water, by weight, as flour), pan de aceite, as aceite means oil I suppose it's bread using olive oil rather than whatever they usually use, oh, and the old favourites Pan Gallego (crusty outside and big air holes, sourdough fermentation), Pan Rústico, also called Pan de Pueblo (thick crunchy crust, soft inside, long lasting). You get the idea - a variety.

Basically the whole bread selling thing in Spain has become confusing. Even though consumption of bread in Spain has dropped from 57 kilos per person per year in 1988 to 32 kilos in 2018 bread is still an absolutely essential part of any Spanish meal. There is now some really good bread available in taste, in style, in nutritional properties. There is also lots of stuff that purports to be traditional wood baked bread which is, instead, made with chemical yeasts, preservatives, saturated fats, processed flour and baked from frozen dough. The stuff that says home made, wholemeal bread is actually dyed with caramel and produced in articulated lorry sized quantities by robot mixing machines and conveyor belt ovens. So, from July this year we'll have new laws about labelling bread which will take over from the last set of rules drafted in 1984.

I'm going to use a fair bit of Spanish in this next section on the basis that anyone living in Spain and reading this post might use the information when they go shopping. It's also a bit technical, formal and probably a little bit tedious. So non Spanish dwellers please skip to the last para. It's not my fault, writing about new regulations is hardly the stuff of bodice rippers or doctor and nurse literature.

Some of the big things in the new regs are:

• Ordinary bread, pan común, the bread made from mixed flours with water laced with yeast has to be fresh, made that day. If the bread has not been made today it has to be clearly labelled that it is not today's bread. 
• Casero, home made, will have to mean that it is made by people on a human scale with a qualified master baker on hand. 
• Masa madre, sourdough, can only be made with flour, water and salt with the yeasts being naturally occurring in that mix. No more adding yoghurt or vinegar to speed up the sourdough process
• Fermentación lenta, slow fermentation, has to mean that. At least eight hours at temperatures around 4ºC for the dough.
• Wood baked, pan de leña, will also mean what it sounds like. Burn wood to heat the oven and it's good. Blow the scent of wood smoke into the mix and it's not.
• Brown bread, pan integral, which is still not particularly popular amongst the majority of Spaniards, means that from July wholemeal bread has to be made from whole grain and the grain has to be named. There is still a bit of a labelling get out in that if they use a mixture of processed and wholegrain flour they can label the bread as elaborado con harina integral, made with wholegrain flour, and specify the percentage (would you like to place a bet on the different sizes of typeface?). Instead of calling this integral it can also be called de grano entero, whole grain.
• Breads made with cereals like rye (centeno) or oats (avena) and a whole lot more, can only be labelled as such if they have the percentages of the cereal required by the new law. The percentage depends on the cereal. Multi cereal bread, pan multicereal, has to have a least three different cereals and have at least 10% of each of those cereals. 

There are other labelling requirements, for instance it can't just say vegetable oil on the side of the bag, it must say palm oil or sunflower oil or whatever. The salt content will also be reducing but that's on a sliding scale over time so that bread doesn't become too bland for consumers overnight. Oh, and they're reducing the VAT rate to 4% which may mean a few cents off the price.

Lets's hope it all works out and we get more and more yummy bread.

Think Walden Pond

Maggie often comes home and tells me about a house that she's shown or a new house on the books of the estate agency she works for. At the best I'm vaguely interested. The other way around I often start a conversation with "I'm reading this book about ....," and Maggie is just as responsive. So, if I can't tell her I'll tell you. Don't think of it as a book review though, think more of it as a bastardisation of the book alongside my own ramblings.

The book in question was written by a woman called María Sánchez. This is the sort of Spanish name I approve of. It's like one of the names in a Learn Spanish text book. There are plenty of Spanish names that are easy to say like Fernández or García but there seem to be many more which don't exactly trip off the Anglo tongue: Úrsula Corberó, Sandra Sabatés, Lidia Torrent or Isabel Díaz Ayuso for instance. Maria's book title is dead obvious too, at least in Spanish - Tierra de mujeres. It's not quite so easy to translate effectively into English, the idea behind the words isn't quite the same. Land of Women, Women's Land, Soil of Women etc. don't capture the multiple meanings about the ownership, or the place and number of women wedded to the earth, to the soil, to the land. It happens the other way round too. T.S. Eliot's "At the still point of the turning world." can be translated into Spanish as the point that doesn't move or the point that is quiet and peaceful but there is no single word to give the same double meaning as in English.

Anyway, back at the page face. The book is largely about demanding recognition for the significant role that women have always played on the land, in the countryside, as shepherds, herders, planters, collectors, labourers and the like alongside their role as homeworkers. One of her key arguments is that the men get the praise for the horny handed sons of toil role whilst the women are only recognised as the sweepers of floors, the laundresses of overalls and the bakers of bread. There is no mention of Jill Archer or Annie Sugden but, as the author is a vet, James Herriot's Christmas cake baking heroines get a mention.

I've talked about rural Spain in the past. Partly because we have a friend who is politically active about rural issues and lives in a very rustic bit of Teruel and also because of where we live. Pinoso, is hardly urban, Culebrón less so. Here agriculture is important and everyday but where there is other work too and we are close to major centres of population. Part of Maria's argument is that we are all very quick to accept a view, forged by city dwellers, that lots of Spain is empty, a nice place to go for the weekend to relax, a place where we (Spaniards in this case) all came from but where none of us (Spaniards again) would like to stay too long. A place full of country bumpkins, good with their hands maybe, people who know all the gossip about their neighbours as well as being able to name birds, plants and trees the people who live in a place where doors can be left unlocked and where neighbours pop in all the time leaving trays of fruit, veg. and fresh baked pastries but who have been left behind by the modern world. Plenty tractor drivers and very few JavaScript developers.

She suggests that view needs a reappraisal. That rural Spain needs services more than it needs poetic praise and bucolic representation. Spain, lots of Spain, doesn't have much population but that doesn't mean it's empty. Just because it's not built up, or full of people, doesn't mean that it's abandoned. Sometimes the farming is extensive rather than intensive. There are places where the combines and the logging trucks roam, where the monster tractors equipped with tree shakers and catcher nets roar but equally there are places where herds of goats belch and fart overseen by a solitary figure and his or her dog and where families stop for a bucolic lunch with their backs against the olive trees that they have spent all morning beating with sticks to collect the crop. One fills supermarket shelves with cheap and accessible product and the other produces the high value local cheese and specialist olives of more "select" outlets. Both are alive and well, both have their place.

There was lots more too, it was a short book, fewer than 200 pages, but it was interesting given our situation. I suppose less so to someone enjoying the 3am traffic jams in Madrid. Well, according to one of the possible candidates for Mayor of Madrid that's one of the things that Madrileños enjoy.

Confucius it ain't

In fact it was the English poet Lady Mary Montgomerie Currie who said "All things come to those who wait." In my case what came, after a wait of 12 years, was a branch of my bank in my home town.

You may wonder why that's a bonus. The root of the problem is that we still use a lot of cash in rural Spain. Spanish banks like to charge for services and you can avoid some of those by using your own bank. There's nearly always a maintenance fee unless you pay in over a certain amount each month and there can be charges for both paying in and for withdrawals.

I originally banked with the Caja Murcia, a savings bank, obviously enough, centred on Murcia. Murcia is pretty far to the right on the map of Spain and Ciudad Rodrigo is on the left, or if you prefer the technical term, the West, butting up against Portugal. I moved there in 2007. Not surprisingly there weren't a lot of Caja Murcia branches. The costs of taking money out of non Caja Murcia bank machines was mounting up so I opened an account with Banesto which was a national rather than regional set up. They had a branch in Ciudad Rodrigo and another in Pinoso. But the bank system in Spain was just about to teeter on the edge of total collapse. Banks and savings banks got bought and sold, merged and closed left right and centre. By the time I moved back home to Culebrón the Banesto had become the Santander and the branch in Pinoso had closed.

My nearest Santander was 15 kilometres from home which was, occasionally, a nuisance. Then, in June 2017, the Santander bought the Banco Popular. There was a branch of the Popular in Pinoso. Good I thought, only a matter of time. I should have known. No particular rush. This week the bank finally became the Santander. So, for the first time since 2007, I have a branch of my bank in my home town.

We want to go next

I was once a Geologist. The trick with geology is time. Imagine that if, every year, a stream were to cut a groove 1 millimetre in the ground. In two years the groove would be 2 mm deep and in 10 years it would be a centimetre deep. If the stream were to follow the same line for a million years the groove would be a kilometre deep. Just for my mum make it a sixteenth of an inch a year and the valley would be nearly a mile deep.

Now the earth is about four and a half billion years old. Just in case you're never sure what a billion is nowadays that would be 4,500,000,000 years. Obviously it's not possible but if our 1 mm a year stream flowed, non stop, in the same place, from the beginning, the groove would be 4,500 kilometres deep or about 500 times as deep as Mount Everest is high.

When I studied geology I found out about graptolites, brachiopods, lamellibranchs, belemnites and all sorts of other fossils large and small. I particularly approved of trilobites. I thought they looked cute. The first trilobites turned up some 520 million years ago and died out at the end of the Permian or about 250 million years. So the lifespan of all the different sorts of trilobites was 270,000,000 years.

There were a bunch of people before Homo Sapiens but the first Sapiens turned up in what is now Africa about 200,000 years ago. So trilobites lasted 1,350 times as long as people have existed so far. Stromatolites, by the way, make trilobites look like youngsters. They've been on Earth for 3,500,000,000 years and if you're not impressed by things you can't beat with a stick then jellyfish are around 500 million years old and elephant sharks are maybe 400 million years.

We've just had a couple of rounds of elections in Spain. The cambio de cromos, the dealing, has only just started in several areas. In Madrid the stupid internal wrangling of left wing politicians means that the conservative Partido Popular will probably get the leadership of the City Council. They can't do it alone though. In fact the PP governed Madrid, without break, from 1991 to 2015 and this time round they got their worst result ever. Nonetheless, with partners, they can govern. One of those partners is Vox, the fathead right wingers who have won their first representation at local, regional and national level this year. The outgoing mayor of Madrid is called Manuela Carmena. She actually polled the most votes in the elections but with all the permutations possible she can't pull together enough coalition votes to stay in office. Carmena put in place a scheme called Madrid Central. It's a programme to clean up the city environment. Bike lanes, pedestrianisation, not letting in the polluting vehicles etc. In the first month there was a 38% drop in Nitrogen Dioxide, 15% drop in Carbon Dioxide in Madrid with traffic flow down by 24%. And what does the potential new PP mayor say? - he will go back to less strict restrictions based on priority for residents and that he will concentrate on the problems that matter most to Madrileños such as clean streets and conservation. The Vox man said "starting tomorrow Madrid Central is over".

Those trilobites survived at least one mass extinction event, maybe two, before the one at the end of the Permian got them. There are various theories about the extinction from massive volcanic activity to a surge in microbe numbers but whatever it was it caused a destabilisation of the atmosphere and so the climate. Apparently after the Permian one it only took a couple of million years for the planet to bounce back though. To re-establish some sort of normality.

The general consensus is that there have been five big extinctions so far: late Devonian, 375 million years ago, 75% of species lost, end Permian, 251 million years ago, 96% of species lost, end Triassic, 200 million years ago, 80% of species lost, end Cretaceous, 66 million years ago, 76% of all species lost. I've heard that some plastics can take 1,000 years to decompose. As I said the trick with geology, the trick with the planet, is time. Currently humans, as a species, are a tiny blip in geological time. If fossil fuel type pollution started with the Industrial Revolution then people have been affecting the atmosphere for about 290 years or 0.145% of our time on Earth. It does seem a bit stupid though to purposely speed up the dash towards that next extinction event.

Home and away

There's a strangeness about being home and yet being a foreigner.

Last week I asked the lad who served me coffee how his birthday celebrations had gone. He'd told me his plans the last time I was in. I got the full story. Later, in the same bar and in the same session a different, and new to me, waiter asked me if I wanted another coffee. He asked in broken English - to him I was just another foreigner.

There were a lot of political meetings running up to the local elections. I went to one of them and the prospective, now elected, candidates were lined up against the wall in a show of solidarity at a political rally. A couple of them greeted me by name. We knew each other because I'd taught them a bit of English. I'd actually worked alongside another of them several years ago.

Alfredo, the barber, nods through the window - he cuts my hair and I didn't get his daughter through her B1 English exam. And so it goes on and on with example after example of knowing both Spanish and British people in Pinoso.

We've been here a while. If a road in town is sealed off, and they often are, I know how to skip around. If I need knicker elastic, tracing paper or knitting needles I know which shop to use - actually nowadays I'd probably go to the Chinese shop but I'm sure you take the point. There are new things to learn all the time. We're as local as local could be and yet we are still foreigners.

I walked past one of the three British run bars in town and there were a bunch of young (to me) people outside. They were talking estuary English. My father, who was so politically incorrect that I probably wouldn't speak to him nowadays, if he were still alive, used to describe people speaking languages other than English on the streets of England as jabbering. I wondered if he would think the same of our very noticeable presence on the streets of Pinoso?

We Britons are obvious here. Most Spanish people I meet presume I know next to nothing about Spain. I'm not surprised. From what I can see the majority of my compatriots have very little idea of the country around them. I don't mean in the sense of filling their car with fuel, buying bread, getting a drink or paying the electric bill. They are perfectly well able to get on with their lives but culturally, linguistically, geographically and historically they are clueless. It's a choice. I have never worried myself too much about football yet I know people whose very existence would be much meaner without the beautiful game. Lots of Britons here are much more "integrated" than me but there is another group who continually surprise me with how little they know of the place they have chosen to immigrate to. It's that choice though; they have chosen a sort of voluntary isolation.

He hasn't been on at me for a while but there used to be a Spanish bloke who read and commented on this blog. He blamed me for the hubris that lots of Europe lays at the door of we Britons but he also took me to task for my British perspective on things. That's true. I do. I must. Just in the same way as his viewpoint would be a Spanish one. Our backgrounds are coded in through years of experience. I remember, years ago, in Cuba. I forget where we were, Trinidad maybe or Cienfuegos. We were beginning to get the idea that everything in Cuba was in short supply even if you had dollars. "Do you have alcohol other than rum?," we asked. "Of course, for tourists we have everything," said the owner. I missed the irony. "Okey dokey, she'll have a red wine and I'll have a beer, please." The man came back and put down two rums - "Here's the beer and here's the wine," he said. It's often not a good idea to presume that you've got the measure of a place.

The Spanish health system, the medical system, traffic law, the voting system and the way that parliament runs are exactly similar to the UK. Well they are in broad-stroke yet they are completely different. The British first-past-the-post voting isn't the Spanish party list D'Hondt method of proportional representation. Actually even the mechanics of how you vote, crosses on paper and lists in envelopes is different. The effect is the same though and both produce democratically elected governments. Externally verified end of secondary schooling GCSEs are not the same as the internally marked ESO, the certificate recognised as the successful completion of obligatory secondary education, in Spain. Both have a similar purpose and similar recognition by employers or higher education establishments too. Nearly everything has a different equivalent from electricity bills to the etiquette of using a knife and fork.

All of this is because someone commented on one of my blog entries. The one about washing up. I could write the blog with any number of perspectives. I've generally written it based on the things that happen to us or around us. I've wondered about making it more current affairs and I've wondered about doing the sort of information pieces that I used to do for the TIM Magazine. In the end though I decided to stick with the mundane and everyday with references to those wider issues as I bumped into them. The entries are often too wordy but, in general, I think I'm happy with it. I'd be interested in any views you may have about the blog in general though.

Washing up

I've never owned or used a dishwasher. I still wash up in the sink and I follow the routine that I read on some poster on the wall of the fifth form classroom I used at school. I got my first ever OAP payment today so fifth form was quite a while ago. The poster advised to rinse as much junk off as I could with cold water then to fill the sink with water as hot as I could stand. A good dose of quality detergent. Glassware first, plates and dishes next - washing the cleanest first - and working through to the pans and oven-ware. Cutlery when I pleased. Use common sense and change the water when it becomes necessary was the only other guidance on the poster. Useful poster I thought. Much better than the Wilkinson Sword one about how to shave. Until technology invented the Gillette Mach 3 a few years ago wet shaving was always a very bloody business for me.

I don't spend a lot of time watching Spaniards wash up and I presume that, nowadays, most of them use dishwashers. They still advertise Fairy Liquid on the telly though and I know from the ads, and from seeing Penélope Cruz washing the murder weapon in the film Volver, that Spaniards probably don't wash up like me. I suspect that they think that washing up in a soup of detergenty food filled water isn't a particularly good idea. They seem to rinse and wash under a running tap using one of those sponge scourers loaded with detergent.

This revelation came to me as I was brushing up the white mulberries from our path using the British pile and shovel method I described in a blog ages ago. Ah, the exoticism of a life abroad!

Cats

We've just had a few days in Tangier. I'm sure that, in my youth, when Simon Templar went there, we used to say Tangiers. Anyway whatever it's called the city we went to is the one in Morocco, just opposite the southernmost tip of Spain at Tarifa. Between 1923 and 1945, it was a city jointly administered by Britain, France and Spain as an International City. I'd had a vague hankering to go there since I read a Spanish novel which was set in Tanger (Spanish name). So, when I saw a flight from Valencia for 12.99€ one way (even after all the usual Ryanair tricks and ruses it still only cost 40€ there and back) it was a done deal.

One of the several things we noted wandering around Tangiers were the cats. There were hundreds of them. Some were skinny, some were clearly unwell, some looked like cared for pets. Whatever their status they were left to their own devices. It's not the same in Spain. Spanish street cats stay well away from people whom they don't trust at all. As a general rule Spaniards do not approve of castrating or sterilising cats. They see it as something cruel and unusual. The Town Halls have vague sterilisation schemes, supported with paltry amounts of money, but the main forms of cat control are disease and motor cars. This means that there are plenty of wild cats in Spain generally to be seen at dusk skulking around the communal big bins in the street. I wouldn't like to give the impression that cats are not kept as pets in Spain but they have nothing like the same status as dogs. If a family does have a cat it's often a sort of half pet, half domesticated, fed from time to time, if there is anything left over, but generally expected to fend for itself, pet. There are pampered cats too but there is nothing like the same division into cat people and dog people here that there is in the UK for instance.

We've got a couple of house cats that we've had for a while: Beatriz and Teodoro. We've had other cats before only one of which has survived to old age. These two we got from a woman, called Irene, who runs a cat shelter and re-homing scheme called Gatets sense llar, which translates, from Valenciano, to something like Homeless Kittens. Bea and Teo came to us at a very young age so our house is their home. They have their territory centred on the house and they don't stray very far which, as we're surrounded by open country, is nice and safe.

We're not far from a farm and, in time honoured tradition, the farm has cats. Farm cats are not coddled; they have to be self sufficient. They are constantly flea, tick and worm infested and, of course, hungry. We put out food for our two and so we become an easy source of gourmet dining for the farm cats. They invade our garden. We chase them off. We're not very good at it. We're a soft touch especially with the cats that are a bit more approachable or trusting than others. It's happened too many times now that a cat begins to trust us and we take a liking to it. We start with scraps and left overs and then work up to feeding it on a regular basis. After a while we abuse its trust, give it a name and, when it's not looking, take it to the vet for de-paratisation and a quick sterilisation. On one occasion we did that for a cat, Gertrudis, only to find that she hadn't trusted us enough to introduce us to her two hidden kittens until they were well grown and in need of a solid meal.

The farm cats are a sub colony of another group that lives across in the village. This means, that unlike the cats that have grown up with us from kittens, these cats call a range of places home - our house, the bin by the farm and a couple of bins on the other side of the road that separates us from the main part of the village. There is also a woman in the village who is a softer touch than us and feeds dozens of cats. Taken all in this means that the cats are prone to pop across the road for a chin wag, for company, for sex and to see if there is anything tasty on the menu.  One day as they cross they don't make it and we never see them again. There are lots of other theories about how and why cats disappear, from being taken by owls to being poisoned, but I'm a big believer in the the motor car catslaughter theory.

So, recently, two small, basically white, cats have taken to calling. Our cats don't like them but the stand offs have been low key. We followed the well worn route of scraps to regular feeding. It became obvious that one was pregnant and we didn't send her packing. She ignored the prepared nests of cloth and paper and had the kittens by the fence, hidden by thick foliage, whilst we were away in Tangier.

"We'll have to adopt them," said Maggie as she busied herself with leaving for work this morning. I hope she doesn't mean all of them as in all of them. That would be five more which I don't see somehow. Best not to think about it for a while.

Food habits

Patricia and Jason have just opened a new Bed and Breakfast business here in Culebrón - the Sunny Vista Casa Rural. They've done a really nice job on it too. It looks great. As a double celebration, for both the opening and for Patricia's birthday, the owners hosted a party. Never ones to miss out on a knees up Maggie and I turned up at around 3.30 pm, in the middle of Spanish lunchtime, when most locals would be eating at home. Later I was both surprised, and pleased for the Batram's, that so many of the villagers put in an appearance.

Forty some years ago I had a Spanish couple stay with me in Peterborough. They flew into Heathrow so I took them for a pub lunch in Windsor. "You'll have to try British beer," I said, to Jaime. He literally spat it out. "It's hot," he said, "like broth." For the rest of the holiday he would only drink lager. He never complained about the taste of that terrible, 1980s, fizzy, British lager but he did complain about its temperature over and over. Oh, and he was nearly as peeved at all the spicy food we ate like English mustard, horseradish, chilli sauce, curry and brown sauce. More recently my pal Carlos took a holiday in the UK. He and his family enjoyed themselves. Carlos was really impressed with the concept of pies and he thought gravy was a splendid invention. They couldn't understand why there was no bread on the table though - there nearly always is in Spain. He said they had to ask over and over again. We all have our ways.

Back at Sunny Vista I was talking to someone alongside the table loaded with food: quiche, potato salad, coleslaw, ribs, cocktail sausages, crisps, nuts, salads, burgers, enormous prawns, chilli con carne and lots more. Several of the Spanish neighbours were there too, plate in hand, eyeing up the food. I explained a few things - sausage rolls for instance - but I thought most of it was obvious enough. I realised afterwards, when someone asked me if there was any ham (Spanish type ham), that they thought it was quite an exotic spread. They were as lost as I am when friends in the know order up lots of Indian side dishes and I have no idea what they are.

Food is a common topic of conversation here. Spaniards like eating and generally have a poor opinion of British food. When I'm asked, by Spaniards, about food in the UK I used to rack my brains for the traditional foods, the sort of stuff that I ate when I was a lad, the sort of stuff that my dad liked. Shepherds pie, apple crumble, bangers and mash, steak and kidney pudding, trifle, cauliflower cheese, corned beef hash, Irish stew and the like. But that's not really what Britons eat nowadays is it?  We eat food from everywhere.

We Britons have been happy to plunder the world for food for ages. Chicken chasseur, Wiener schnitzel, sashimi, goulash, paella, souvlaki, chana dal and the rest are there on the supermarket shelves. Finding a Vietnamese, Lebanese, French, Greek, Mexican, West Indian or Italian restaurant is child's play in the UK. The student Spag Bol and the Thai green curry are just another recipe in the "Come around to dinner," cookbook.

Indian food, for instance, is hugely popular amongst Britons. My guess is that your average, middle class Indian, living in Mumbai, wouldn't recognise the food on offer in most UK High Street Indian restaurants. Indeed, whether it's a High street restaurant, a Waitrose ready meal or a Jamie Oliver recipe the food with an Indian name is really, very much, British food. It's the same with the rest. Even if chilli con carne were Mexican (it's from the USA isn't it?) then the British version would be British. That's probably why a full English is so disappointing in Torremolinos.

That's not true of Spanish food - Spanish food is till largely something that past generations would recognise. Not that I'm suggesting Spain is some isolated culinary backwater. Spain has lots and lots of Michelin stars and there are gastrobars in any town with any population. Domino's, McDonalds and KFC are everywhere. Most Spanish youngsters seem happy to eat pizza and pasta till the cows come home. Generally though, away from high class restaurants, the multinational fast food chains and cosmopolitan cities Spanish food has maintained its traditional flavour.

And that's why there was so much Spanish attention to the food on offer at Sunny Vista yesterday.

Looking for an easy life

Ages ago quite a famous teacher of English here was being interviewed on the radio. The reporter asked him how long it took to become bilingual. His answer was the sort of answer you don't want to hear, particularly if you've just bought one of those "Learn Arabic in three months" or "Swahili in ten minutes a day", type courses. He reckoned about 3,000 hours or about four hours a day, Monday to Friday, for nearly four years. As he stressed that was study type study not just listening to the radio or reading magazines. He did have faster methods which, surprisingly, involved spending money on his courses, materials and schools.

The interviewer went on to ask how many of this bloke's students had become bilingual. To be honest my neuron deficient brain doesn't recall exactly what he said but it was some hideously low number - 10, 20, maybe 100 - out of about 25,000 students. He did go on to say that only about 2,000 had crashed and burned; absolutely incapable of picking up the most basic stuff. He reckoned the vast majority abandoned learning when they'd reached a level they were happy with, be that beer ordering or engaging in a heated discussion about environmental politics.

I recognise what this bloke is talking about. I've been trying to learn Spanish for ages but it's years since I've done any real study. I can't remember the last time I sat with a text book trying to memorise verb tables or understand maybe disjunctive pronouns or demonstrative adjectives. I still pretend to be trying to learn things. I often write down a new word that I've read or heard, I read books in Spanish and go to the cinema to see films dubbed into Spanish. My Spanish is alrightish but sometimes I can hear the mistakes I'm making as I fail to make myself understood and I sometimes don't understand. I still shy away from conversations if I can.

Recently I've become very aware of my inability to pronounce the R with sufficient vigour for most Spaniards. They hear the equivalent of "Is this chew weseived?" when I'm trying to say "Is this chair reserved?". Spanish is a language where the link between the letters and the pronunciation of the word is inviolable so the wrong sound in a word can cause profound difficulties. English speakers are used to dealing with inconsistent pronunciation. We read that some ancient band was happy to record a record without any psychological angst at the changed pronunciation of two words spelled the same. Pronouncing so, sew and sow the same (but not if it's a sow) doesn't lead to disbelief amongst the population of Bradford. Spaniards though do wonder how reed and read and red and read can be word pairs. What we perceive as a very close reproduction of the Spanish word can, at times, be almost incomprehensible to a Castilian speaker.

Anyway, unfettered by work I thought it was about time to put a bit more effort into my Spanish. I've found someone willing to exchange some Spanish for English and I'm paying someone to correct my conversational Spanish. It won't work of course. The language hasn't magically seeped in in fourteen years and it won't this time either. Just like the interviewee said what I really need to do is to put in some graft but I'm a bit off hard work so that won't be happening. I don't suppose it'll do any damage though.