Benicàssim

Spain is full of "pop" festivals. I think the biggest is now the Mad Cool Festival in Madrid but the one we were at over the weekend, the Festival Internacional de Benicàssim or FIB, certainly used to be the biggest. There are lots more - Primavera Sound, The Barcelona Beach Festival, Bilbao BBK Live, the Rototom Sunsplash Festival, Low Festival, Sonorama, Arenal Sound and many more.

We were last at Benicàssim in 2008. That time we were in a very small tent and we slept on stones. Although we still tell stories about seeing Enrique Morente, Calvin Harris, Leonard Cohen, Morrissey or La Casa Azul we decided that we would never do it again. At least we would never camp again. We were too old, too bone breaky. So now, with me drawing my pension, Maggie decided we would go back and we'd stay in a tent. She called it glamping. I didn't argue. I like festivals. I have to be honest that I much prefer the first bands on. I like them because everything is more comfortable - no moshing, the dope smoke comes in wisps rather than clouds, beer spilling and glass throwing is at a minimum, the bars are empty and the toilets are passable but, even better, the bands try really hard in the hope that they may become enormously rich and famous. There may be only be a few score people watching them but, maybe, one is an A&R scout. And, for the audience, there is always the possibility that as someone in that elite audience years later you will be able to say -"Ah, yes, we saw Bowie (or Beyonce, U2, Rihanna, Bob Marley, the Fugees, Elton John, Madonna etc.) in the back room of a boozer in Scunthorpe in 1965", changing the names, places and dates as appropriate.

We've looked at going to Sonorama, in Burgos, and BBK a couple of times but, by the time we look the hotels are already full. With sharp rocks to the forefront of our minds we've generally gone to just one day of a festival and chosen local events or ones where we have found somewhere more sybaritic to stay. The Low Festival has been a favourite and I used to enjoy SOS 4.8 till it disintegrated but we've also done much smaller festivals like EMDIV and The B side because they are local.

So, back in Benicàssim, near Castellón, about 250 kms from home. Maggie likened the glamping to life in a refugee camp. Living under canvas, cramped, very public with rubbish everywhere and an inadequate infrastructure. I think I'd prefer to be at the worst festival than, say, at Bidi Bidi in Northwestern Uganda but the comparison was solid. Obviously she didn't really mean it and I wouldn't want to trivialise the human suffering that refugee camps represent but I could see the parallels even if we had nothing but good weather, we were unencumbered with dependants and our washing machine was waiting for us back home. On the other hand it is true that, if you are used to an en suite bathroom and you need a toilet at 6am then having to slide onto the floor, pull on some shoes, unzip the front door of your tent, go ouch!ouch! with the sharp stones, weave between the disgusting detritus on the ground, say hello to the all night drinkers and walk hundreds of metres to get to the toilets that have had a more or less endless stream of backsides parked on them for 96 hours and which, despite the best efforts of a couple of cleaners, are less than spotless and come with a sort of toilet paper laden impromptu paddling pool on the floor, can feel like a bit of an effort. At least at 6am there is no twenty minute queue.

Showering was an even more public spectacle. Most, though not all, did it dressed in swimwear. There were plenty of showers, maybe a hundred, all fed by cold water but with a lot of abandoned shampoo bottles and toothpaste and fag packets floating in the gutters. Some of the showers dribbled onto the concrete floor constantly whilst others didn't work at all. I was impressed with the unerring accuracy of the one stream which always drenched my towel wherever I hung it.

I was talking to a Spaniard from Navarre, from Tudela. He was a hardened festival goer in his early 20s but he complained that he was finding it hard work. He grumbled about the distances between the tents and the campsite facilities, between the campsite and the festival site, about the distances on the festival site, about the poor beer and about the unremitting heat. It never got above 33ºC whilst we were there which is hardly hot for Spain. Bit of a moaning Minnie in my opinion but it certainly wasn't comfortable and the blisters on my feet are still making it difficult for me to walk after two days at home. Be that as it may we got to see a lot of bands and we met some very pleasant people. Oh, and there was beer too. Some of it, a certain quantity of it, interfered with my vision!

Most of the young people were as concerned about how to keep their phones functioning as anything else and proved infinitely resourceful.  I was equally impressed with the effort that so many put into sorting out their outfits for the evening. The effort that some of the young women, put into their hair and gluing on the facial rhinestones astonished me. My only preparation for the evening was to sniff my armpits before concluding that my t-shirt was good for another few hours.

Festivals suit my short attention span. With three or four stages on the go all with overlapping bands I can watch someone do three or four songs and then move on without feeling guilty. With some of the bigger acts it's much more likely that you will see the full set but not always. We wandered from The Kings of Leon to Jess Glynne for instance. Eclectic or what? It's difficult to say how many bands we saw, working on needing to hear three songs minimum to say that you saw a band, it was probably close on 30 which isn't bad at all. There were very few of the "usual" Spanish Indie bands, presumably because there are so many British Fibers, but the range was still pretty good. From the very neat George Ezra, to the surprisingly impressive Fatboy Slim or the very annoyed Action Bronson to Alien Tango where the guitarist flaunted his Murcian heritage by wearing the traditional baggy shorts or zaraguelles.

I'm really glad that Maggie forgot just how uncomfortable we were eleven years ago.

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Lineup: Kings Of Leon, Lana Del Rey, Fatboy Slim, Franz Ferdinand, George Ezra, Jess Glynne, The 1975, Vetusta Morla, Marina, Action Bronson, AJ Tracey, Alien Tango, Barny Fletcher, Belako, Bifannah, Black Lips, Blossoms, Cariño, Carolina Durante, Cassius, Cora Novoa, Cupido, DJ Seinfeld, Ezra Furman, Fjaak, Fontaines D.C., Gerry Cinnamon, Gorgon City, Gus Dapperton, Hot Dub Time Machine, Kodaline, Kokoshca, Krept X, Konan, La M.O.D.A., La Zowi,  Mueveloreina, Mavi Phoenix, Octavian, Or:La, Paigey Cakey, Peaness, Project Pablo, Sea Girls, Soleá Morente & Napoleón Solo Superorganism, The Big Moon, The Blinders, The Hunna,  Yellow Days, You Me At Six.

Putting two and two together

I was in the UK for a couple of days a little while ago. I noticed the car number plates. Actually I notice car number plates as a matter of course. No idea why but I do. I particularly noticed that Britons still have a liking for those personalised plates. I can understand that to a point. If you're called Simon and you have money to burn and you buy 51 MON then that's pretty good but, for the life of me, I couldn't work out why people had paid (presumably) good money for the strange letter number combinations. Why is LFC 24V in an auction with a buy now price of £1750 and a bid of £750?

Anyway, in Spain, you have no choice. You get the next number and letter combination in the sequence. You can't buy and sell number plates. Up to the year 2000 the plates used to indicate where the car was registered with one or two letters to identify the province. Not any more though; now it's just a sequence of three letters and four numbers.

I thought the sequence was AAA 0000 then AAA 0001 etc. till AAA 9999 when it would become ABA 0000 and so on. But I was mistaken. There are no vowels in Spanish number plates and, as soon as someone told me, I realised it was true. And the reason? Well a bit of prudishness maybe. Apparently the Dirección General de Tráfico (look at that you understand Spanish) isn't keen on words like ANO (anus) PIS and GAY (crikey you really understand lots of Spanish) on number plates but also they were against the idea of personalisation; so no EVA (Eva is the equivalent of the name Eve), or LUZ or TEO or POL (all normalish names) as well. There are a couple of other letters that don't get used for their potential confusion - Ñ and Q - and the combinations LL and CH because of their former linguistic use.

Oh, and whilst I'm on number plates I pointed out one of the blue plates with white numbers on the back of a car the other day to Maggie. They are used to identify taxis and the VTCs (Cars with a driver) like Cabify and Uber. I suppose they were introduced as an identifier for the restricted zones of cities, for bus lanes and the like but they also make it easier for taxi drivers and the police to spot the "illegal" taxis of the airport run.

And just how do you get to be extra virgin?

I find it vaguely amusing how the Italians seem to get there first. Here the tiny strong black coffee is called a solo but buy one in Teignmouth in Devon or Alberona in Foggia and it'll be an espresso. Expensive British coffees have Italian names. Another example is Spanish ham, the Jamón Serrano. Commonplace here but, when I want to describe it to visiting Britons, I find that I need to describe it as Parma ham so they know what I'm talking about. Spaniards by the way call the British floppy boiled ham York Ham - jamón York.

Spaniards are often particularly narked about oil. Oil in Spain means olive oil. The default is olive oil. If, for some strange reason, you want another type of oil then you have to be specific - corn oil, sesame oil etc. Even if the Mediterranean Diet is besieged on all sides by hamburgers, pizzas and kebabs the oil is still an essential part of the Spanish diet. Obviously enough it's easy to buy Spanish oil here but it's not difficult to buy Italian oil. What upsets Spaniards is that they believe, and it's true, that lots of the oil sold as Italian is actually produced in Spain. Spain produces about 45% of the World's olive oil and Italy about 20% but, again, Italian oil has a much better reputation than Spanish oil so the Italians can sell more than they produce. To meet demand the Italians buy olive oil from other places and bottle it up as Italian. I should say that the saffron producers of Novelda do much the same with product from Iran but I'm Spanish nowadays so we'll have none of that disloyalty.

We have an oil mill, an almazara, in our village, in Culebrón. From sometime in November through to as late as January lots of local producers, from Britons and Dutch residents with baskets of a few kilos of olive through to local farmers with trailer-loads of fruit, queue up to sell their olives to the mill. Watching the process it all looks very straightforward. Onto conveyors, through presses and into bottles. The oil from Culebrón isn't sold in nice bottles with nice labels. It's sold in big five litre plastic bottles with a very basic label. The last time I looked it wasn't even labelled as extra virgin (that's the one that's just cold pressed fruit) and I'm sure it would be if it were so there must be either second press or processed oil added. It is, though, a good product at a very reasonable price.

I haven't really noticed the price recently but, over the years, we've paid between 13€ and 20€ for five litres of Culebrón oil.  The price goes up or down each year dependant on the quality and abundance of the crop. What always amazes me when we pop over to the bodega to get a few bottles of wine is that other people are buying the oil in industrial quantities. I presume that some of it is for restaurants and the like but Spanish cooks do use a lot of oil. All you need to do is to watch any cookery programme or go to get a cheap meal (which will be dripping with the stuff) to see how.

There's a newer oil mill inside the Pinoso boundaries called Casa de la Arsenia out Caballusa way. Their marketing strategy is completely different to Culebron's. They do sell oil in mid sized two litre containers, either organic or not, at around 6€ or 7€ per litre but their marketing goes into the classy looking half litre heavy, opaque green glass bottles with gold lettering and a strange name. One variety uses the arbequina olive which has a very light flavour and the other uses picual which has a much more intense taste. The price on their website is 12.50€ for the half litre bottle. So five litres of that oil would cost 125€.

Last year we went on a wine and oil trail in Yecla. We had breakfast at an oil mill, a mid morning snack at one winery and a sweet course at a second bodega. Interesting and inventive sort of day. The oil mill, Deortegas, had several different oils most of them based on different olives but there were also some flavoured with, for instance, wild mushrooms. The usual thing when tasting oil is to dip bread into it but we talked to a couple of blokes who were tasting their oil directly from glasses. The bread changes the flavour they said. Spaniards take oil seriously.

And finally the hoe

Maggie told me the other day that she hasn't read my blog for ages. I may be putting words into her mouth but I think the suggestion was that I'd really run out of material. Being pragmatic I wondered if I could start again - talk about the differences in bar or restaurant etiquette or why Spaniards think we're odd drinking coffee with a sandwich. So I started to look back at the early blog entries.

I see that, in February 2006, I brought a hoe from the UK to Spain. I took the handle off and just brought the blade part back. I remember I was surprised I didn't get more grief about the hoe head in my bag. On that very trip a jar of marmalade in Maggie's bag was dealt with much more harshly. Being singularly unimaginative I was hard pressed to envisage the damage that a jar of marmalade, even Olde English thick cut, could do to a Boeing 737 but the security staff at the airport seemed to be well aware of the destructive potential of the orange preserve. On the other hand they did not pre-judge the innate violence in grubbing out weeds with a well honed hoe.

Our garden has a spectacular and never ending ability to grow weeds. Lots of other things grow too but weeds seem to grow much faster and stronger than the oleander or the figs. I brought the hoe head back because Dutch hoes are not on general sale in Spain. Spaniards use something called an azada, more like a trenching tool, to grub out the unwanted greenery. Basically, with an azada, you have to bend, strike and pull whilst, with a Dutch hoe, it's a much more upright stance and more push than hack. I find the hoe easier to use.

Next time spade sized forks. No, not really. It took me a while to locate one but you can buy garden forks here even if they're not common.

Livestock

Very early on we decided that rural postal delivery was a bit hit and miss so we rented a Post Office Box in town. That makes the letterbox fastened to the outside of our gate a bit redundant.

The other day the village mayoress sent a WhatsApp message to say that she'd left copies of the programme for our village fiesta in everyone's letterbox. Now, if we don't use the letterbox, the wasps do. Both Maggie and I have made the painful mistake of putting our hand inside only to have one of the black and yellow critters sting us. Not yesterday though. In full Balkans genocidal mode I dosed the letter box with fly spray before attempting to extract the programme. To my surprise a lizard zoomed out. Google says it's unlikely I did it any damage. Not so the unfortunate wasps that had built a little nest in there. As in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song  - Four Dead in Ohio - there were just four wasps at home. It was a very small nest. I suppose the rest were probably hanging around the swimming pools of the better heeled.

This morning, I'm coming out of the supermarket. A mother is loading up her children to the car parked next to mine. "Look, a grasshopper!," she says - actually she said it in Spanish but you get the drift. I stared in the general direction but saw no beast. We have tens of them, probably hundreds, in our garden anyway. We also have millions of, and I exaggerate not, ants in our garden. Bumper year for ants. Anyway, I'm driving home and, in the rear-view mirror, I notice there is a grasshopper sitting on the rear headrest.

Just to add that the legion of cats that are living with us, some of them temporarily, bring us lots of animal gifts. Usually in bloody bundles but, last night, Bea brought home a shrew which we managed to wrest from her grip and herd into a closed room where the cats forgot about it. Maggie eventually caught the tiny beast and released it into the corn stubble opposite.

Honestly I started writing about garden hoes

You'll remember we had a general election in April and regional and municipal elections at the end of May. The trend was that the socialists, the PSOE, did well, the far left, Podemos, did badly, the traditional right, PP, plummeted and the centrists, Ciudadanos or Cs, did well but not as well as they hoped. The new far right party, Vox, won a substantial number of seats but without the huge surge they were expecting.

The municipalities have now been sorted out with their councils constituted, the regional governments are nearly all done but the first attempt at forming the new national government won't start till July 22nd. Greased lightning it is not.

Spain, has generally, since the return to democracy, had a two party state. More accurately two big players plus a number of important regional movements and some smaller national parties. Recently the maths had changed. Deciding who might govern a city, a region or a country became some sort of "what if" arithmetic challenge.

Now I'm not up to keeping tabs on all of the regional and town hall discussions but the impression I get is that this sort of manoeuvring is going on all over Spain. The fragmentation of the vote has tended towards a version of political Sudoku that has allowed people to get into power simply by perming their seats in the most illogical way often with a contemptuous disregard for voter intention. You know the sort of thing. A party takes a thrashing, it loses half of its old seats but by banding together with some strange bedfellows it can cling on to power. The obvious "winners" have not been able to consolidate their moral victory with a clear majority of seats in the local council or regional parliament.

Our town borders on Murcia so we notice what happens there. Murcia is a good example of this political wheeler dealing. Since 1995 Murcia, the Region, has had a conservative government. In the recent elections the socialists got 17 seats in the regional assembly narrowly beating the conservatives with 16. The conservative PP had 22 last time. Podemos went down by four from 6 to 2, Ciudadanos went up from 4 to 6 and Vox came from nowhere with 4. Given your point of view you could decide to stress the move to the left (the PSOE won), to the centre (loss of seats for Podemos, more seats for Ciudadanos) or to the right (new seats for Vox, a still solid vote for the traditional PP right and an increased vote to the right leaning centrists of Ciudadanos). You can also choose to complain about the proportional representation system, Cs got 6 seats with 150,000 votes yet Vox only got 4 seats despite getting 143,000 votes. Then you start to look for alliances.

The majority to control the Murcian Regional Government is 23 and so the parties have been dealing. It looked as though the PP and Cs were going to form the government with Vox backing them at vote time. But there was a problem in other locations, away from Murcia, and Vox, suspecting that they were being diddled out of any power, suddenly decided not to support the PP. That meant the potential coalition in Murcia has fallen apart for today at least. Exactly the same is happening in Madrid.

Oh, and something else that I really don't understand is the part that Ciudadanos has been playing in this game. Being simplistic about this the Cs have usually been considered to be centrist. But, for some reason best known to themselves, Ciudadanos this time has decided to be right wing. They campaigned on the right and they have said that they will never do deals with the socialists. It's not a stance I understand. It seems to me, given that the vote is so fragmented, if they stuck to the centre they would be in the perfect place to deal. Without compromising their principles, without letting down their voters, they could ask both the left and the right if they'll give them the things they want, the things they promised their voters. Whichever side offers the best deal gets their support.

I'm sure I read something about that in Politics for Beginners, Chapter 1.

Oh, and honestly. I started to write about weeding by pushing rather than pulling but some strange force gripped my keyboard fingers.

Always too slow

I hate that old person thing. It's six in the morning; I'm wide awake, it's pretty obvious that I'm not going back to sleep and, eventually, I get up out of sheer boredom. Particularly with the better weather I'm nearly always up quite early though, if I were given the opportunity, and if my body didn't betray me, I'd stay in bed reasonably late. I don't know if you recall the old music hall song  which had a character called Burlington Bertie who rose at 10.30 to walk down the Strand, with his gloves in his hand? Bertie's routine just wouldn't mesh well with the traditionally ordered Spanish day.

I think everyone knows that Spain, historically, has a split day. That's changing and modern working hours in larger cities follow all sorts of models very similar to the rest of Europe. The traditional Spanish timetable though is still alive and well. Again there are variations but the split day involves four or five morning working hours through till lunch at 2pm and then an evening session through till eight or nine. So with Bertie's 10.30 start, and presuming that he has a shower and gets breakfast and what not, he probably won't be on the Strand till around one in the afternoon. Both the Courtauld Institute of Art and Somerset House are on the Strand. Easy for Bertie to pop in to but, if he, and they, were in Spain he'd probably have to make a choice. Both places would, almost certainly close at two, and they'd be throwing out from one forty five. Doing both in 45 minutes might be a tad rushed.

So, the weekend. If Maggie works on Saturday morning, as she does alternate weeks, then basically Saturday is lost. The morning is gone and lots of fairs, fiestas and things in general close down for lunch. Museums do too and they don't do the Saturday afternoon session because they work Sunday morning instead. If I want to go anywhere I could do it alone of course, as I could on every other day of the week, but that isn't my preferred model.

Same on Sunday. If we're not out of bed till 10 the day conspires against us. Any deviation from the task of getting out and moving - a cooked breakfast, a long Facebook session - and the morning is scuppered. The only way to do anything, to "enjoy yourself" is to be grimly determined to get up and get out.

Obviously there are lots of things that don't work to that timetable which we can get to and I'm quietly ignoring the way the Spanish adapt their timetable to the summer by starting lots of things quite late in the evening. Notwithstanding, it is very true that lots of events do require a planned commitment or they simply escape.

The Mark II RX Spade - S

I was talking to someone about older cars the other day. Cars used to come without carpets, without heaters, without synchromesh on first and, sometimes, with just three gears on a column change. The range for any given model was simple. Then the choice widened  - standard, deluxe, maybe a GT or whatever but they were still set packages with set prices. When I bought the Mini, ten plus years ago, the idea had changed. You chose an engine package and then added things at extravagant cost

I've been wondering about buying a car and, faced with fawning reviews from most Spanish websites, I resorted to tried and trusted British sources. When Autocar and What Car and Which magazine recommended a car it probably got added to my list. You'd think that the only difference between a Suzuki Vitara sold in the UK and the one sold in Spain would be which side to get into to get hold of the steering wheel. That wasn't the case though. I think that the British Suzuki Vitara 1.0 Boosterjet SZ-T and the Spanish Suzuki Vitara 1.0T GLE are, for instance, the same car. It doesn't help that several of them have very long names such as the Mazda MX3 2.0 Skyactiv-g Evolution Navi 2wd 89kw.

It's not just cars. Our old microwave was only half working. I'd been looking at Which online for cars so I thought "Why not use their microwave reviews?". Which rates the Russell Hobbs RHMDL801G. The model doesn't exist in Spain. Plenty of Russell Hobbs to be had but not the RHMDL801G. Fair enough, Russell Hobbs sounds a bit British which may explain the problem but Panasonic has an international sort of ring. Not if you want the NN-CT56JBBPQ though.

Obviously sometimes names are changed for good reason. The old Vauxhall Nova means something like "It's not working" or "It doesn't go" in Spanish. Not the best name for a car. The Mitsubishi Pajero needed a name change for the Spanish market too - Mitsubishi naming their car a wanker wasn't going to improve sales! Lynx deodorant, the one that used to have a remarkable effect on women is called Axe in Spain. No idea why. Strange though.

When the weather is fine

Summer began at six minutes to six last Friday. Just a few minutes later we arrived in Santa Pola on the Mediterranean coast. It was pure chance, we'd been nearby doing some shopping and we thought why not?

We didn't do much. We parked next to the beach, walked around the corner to an area that has been developed with bars, cafés and restaurants alongside the marina and had a drink. The sun was shining with that early evening hazy shine. Some people were wading in the water, others were swimming. The sea was sparkly. The expensive and not so expensive boats in the marina bobbed up and down and made those tinkling, ringing sounds that moored boats do. The bar was comfortable, modern looking with light filtering through blinds and awnings. It was a bit pricey with slim young servers and ice cold (alcohol free) beer. Say what you will about far off exotic lands but the Med takes some beating when it's on form. It was one of those moments.

A couple of days earlier I'd already been to the coast, showing a pal around my old stomping ground of Cartagena and, this weekend, we went to see friends near Altea. In fact, one way and another we've spent the whole weekend close to the beach. On the train back from Alicante to el Campello the night-time beach glittered with the life of small campfires raised by friendship groups to celebrate the summer festival of San Juan.

I've written before about the magic of the Mediterranean summer in Spain. It really is something. It's not just the sun, it's not just the brilliant blue skies and the pure white light. It's not the heat or even the ice cold beer but summer here is something really special. It has sounds, it has smells, it has a temperature and a way that the atmosphere behaves, how the air shimmers. It even has a dress code.

Summer engenders a behaviour, it fills the telly with adverts of people eating and drinking together but the truth is that you only need to pop to the coast to find that's a reality and not just some ad agency marketing tool.

Ninety days to the 23rd September when it all ends. Ninety days I hope to enjoy to the full.

Money for old rope

I've been a hostage to opticians for years. I have bad eyesight. When I was very young my mother and father insisted on pointing out sheep and suchlike. I would stare into the middle distance, puzzled. My parents thought I was well down on the learning spectrum until the problem was diagnosed when I went to school. Nearly 8 diopters in the worst eye said the optician on Monday.

Generally I wear contact lenses, old rigid style ones that are relatively cheap and reasonably durable. I still need specs though and my four year old ones are very scratched and the hinge is a bit wobbly so they need replacing.

I bought a lens hood for one of my Canon camera lenses last week. The one with Canon written on it cost 35€ which I thought was taking the mick. To be honest I was not that cock a hoop with 15€ price tag on unnamed version that I eventually bought.

Canon obviously charge for their name. Their RF 28-70mm F2L USM is a pretty good camera lens though even if it does cost 3,249€. For your money you get 19 elements packed in a sturdy barrel with all sorts of little motors built in as well as precision threads and what not. My arithmetic says that each element in that Canon lens, complete with their name on the barrel, costs 170€. The optician wants 240€ for each "mid range" lens. And 80€ for the plastic frame. 560€ for a pair of specs.

It's quite difficult to shop around amongst opticians. Spanish opticians aren't keen to give you their fitting information or prescription and even if they do the second optician always suggests that they can't trust the first's work. Obviously that changing lenses in that funny goggles thing and saying repeatedly - better? worse?, requires years of training.

No ice cubes for me

Sometimes visitors put Spain on the other side of the North South divide. The Third World side. Guests ask us if the water is safe to drink. On one, very embarrassing, occasion a house guest wanted to know the price of some towels on a market stall so we asked on her behalf. Using her fingers as euro markers our guest offered half the amount to the stall holder. The trader snorted and turned away. Maggie and I inspected the shine on our shoes.

There is a similar sort of appreciation of Spanish traffic law. Somebody who lived near us used to always drive the wrong way up a one way street to leave his habitual parking space. "Oh, it's Spain, everybody does it," he said. That's not true. Most Spaniards obey signs and the like in exactly the same way as most Britons do. He was applying his own prejudices to the situation. The other day I turned down a drink, an alcoholic drink, "No, I've had a couple and I'll have to drive in four or five hours so I'd better not". My travelling companion said something like "Well, they don't bother much here - do they?". The answer is yes; they bother a lot.

There are two sets of Spanish alcohol limits. One, a more lenient limit, applies to people like me, your normal everyday non professional driver. The other is for lorry, coach, or delivery van drivers and the like - professional drivers. The same, lower, limits are applied to people who have passed their driving test within the last twelve months.

Then there is another division. There's a lower limit that gets you fined 500€ and puts four points on your licence and a higher limit that costs you 1,000€ and six points. Exceed that higher limit and you're looking at bans, driver re-education, community service and even prison time. The level when it becomes an offence is 0.25 miligrammes per litre of breath (0.15 mg/l for professionals and novices), it becomes a more serious offence at 0.5 mg/l (0.3 mg/l) and it gets deadly serious at 0.6 mg/l. For comparison the English, Welsh and Northern Ireland limit is higher, at 0.35 mg/l and even in abstemious Scotland it's 0.22 mg/l. The Spanish drugs limit is much easier. Zero. Anything above zero and you have a serious problem.

I've been breathalysed here four or five times here. All of them routine checks, all of them negative. Sometimes the checks were no big surprise - driving away from a pop festival at four in the morning but the Wednesday afternoon stop of everyone going through the toll gate on the underused section of the AP7 near Torrevieja was a little unexpected. The one where I had to remove the ignition key with my left hand whilst a man pointed a pump action shotgun at me was not an alcohol check! Also negative.

Last year the Traffic Division of the Guardia Civil did more than 5 million alcohol or drug tests. About 1.3% gave alcohol positives or around 95,000 drivers. The alcohol tests are random. A control is set up and every red car, or every car with just one occupant, or every third car is stopped - or whatever protocol they use. The drugs tests are usually done when someone is pulled over, either randomly or because of some traffic offence, and the police suspect drugs use. In that case the results are pretty astonishing. At least 35% in the semi random checks and around 55% for those stopped after a traffic violation test positive - cannabis, cocaine and amphetamines are the drugs of choice and in that order of precedence.

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I was very unsure whether to add this section. The best and safest amount of alcohol for driving is absolutely none. It's not just about fines and rules. The problem with alcohol is that it makes the driver less able to control the vehicle. Alcohol makes the possibility that a badly driven car will kill someone much more likely.

For most people 0.25 miligrammes of alcohol in a litre of breath doesn't translate into anything meaningful. How sober, tiddly or well drunk is 0.25 mg/l? I did find an article which suggested that a tercio (a 33 cl bottle) of a common Spanish beer (5.5% alcohol) would put most men just over the limit and that it would take that same "average" man about two hours to metabolise the booze. The same bottle of beer would put the "average" woman well over the lower limit and possibly on to the more penalised 0.5 mg/l limit. In her case she'd need nearly three hours to metabolise that bottle of beer. A glass of wine (how big is a glass?) might just leave most men under the lower limit whilst women would probably be in breathalyser trouble. And whilst it would take that woman about two hours to clear the alcohol from her system a man would do the same in eighty minutes. However accurate those figures are they do tend to suggest that the limits are very low. Definitely best to stick to the DGT slogan "At the wheel, not a drop".