Slippery when wet

Spaniards seem to like napkins more than Britons. Now I'm not trying to say that we Britons don't like napkins or that there is something intrinsically right or wrong about using napkins. Go into a British restaurant and there will be napkins. They give you piles of them in McDonald's because, as the bun disintegrates, you will end up with a palmful of slimy hamburger patty, lettuce and ketchup and you will need them to clean up. If my family home was anything to go by the English use them only when we are being a bit posh; Christmas or when friends came to dinner. Normally though, especially at home, no serviettes, no napkins. Spaniards on the other hand put napkins out as naturally as they put out the cutlery and bread when they are setting the table and there is no Spanish restaurant, bar, barbecue, picnic or home without them.

Order a beer in a Spanish bar and you probably won't get a beer mat - sometimes yes and more and more frequently but not usually. The beer on the other hand will be cold so water will condense out on the glass and, after a while there will be a little puddle of water on the bar or table. But fear not, there will be a handy dispenser full of serviettes and you will be able to mop up the liquid. Only you won't or at least you couldn't but more and more you can.

I've just realised, pushed by an article that I read in el País, that it's ages since I've seen the sort of napkins that were everywhere in Spain at one time. They were a bit like the old Izal hard toilet paper and about the same sheet size too. They usually had a pattern around the outside in blue or red - sometimes chains, sometimes rhomboids, sometimes aeroplanes and the name of the bar in the middle. They came in spring loaded dispensers that were called miniservis and the serviettes were called servilletas zigzag (or sulphite glazed paper napkins to anyone in the trade). When you tried to pull out one you would be rewarded tenfold. No matter though because they actually seemed to repel liquid rather than to soak it up so you needed the whole ten to redistribute your puddle. It was similar if you were eating tapas with your fingers. By the time you'd finished you would have a whole pile of these sodden, grease, oil or sauce covered bits of paper piled alongside your plate.

Nowadays the normal serviettes are more like Andrex than Izal. This struck me as I was pulling an effectively absorbent black napkin from the little box in front of me in a bar the other day. They were held in place by a daintily painted pebble. Very pretty. Not as trendy though as the unbleached yellowish napkins that you get in the gastrobars on the coast or in big cities. There was, though, one advantage to the old slippery sided napkins. When they were put under food on a plate, like a sandwich or a croquette, they acted like grease-proof paper forming an effective non stick barrier between plate and food whereas the new sort tend to sort of attach themselves to your food in a most unpleasant way.

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I have used the terms serviette and napkin interchangeably. I thought, for sixty four years, that napkins were cloth and serviettes paper but, in checking for this blog post I found that although there used to be some distinction in the way distant past that hasn't been the case for a few hundred years.

How much?

My foot hurts. It's been a bit of a problem since I made the wrong choice of footwear for wandering around the Benicassim Festival site. The blisters were very big but that was ages ago now and, although the blisters are long gone, my heel still hurts. More worryingly it's getting worse rather than better.

I thought strapping it up or cushioning the heel may help. I went to the chemist and wandered around the displays. I found a couple of silicone heel cushions and, according to the box, they were just what I needed. Then I bought some lint, twenty individually wrapped pads, and a roll of sticking plaster. Total price 23.80€. Of that nearly 12€ was for the lint. Bit of a shock.

To be honest it wasn't a surprise. I just didn't like it. For years I've thought that the stuff they advertise on the telly that you have to buy from pharmacies (and lots of medical stuff can only be bought at pharmacies) is exorbitantly priced. You know the stuff; the spray for your aching knee which means you finish the marathon, the capsules that stop your nose running so you can be feted by your work colleagues for such a brilliant presentation or the haemorrhoid cream that allows you to throw away that blow up cushion. For all I know things may be equally expensive in the UK but I don't remember any angst the last time I bought lint or a roll of plaster in Huntingdon.

It's not the same for prescription medicine. My experience with prescribed medication is that it's affordable. The amount you have to pay depends on your financial and medical situation. Lots of people with chronic problems or work related injuries pay nothing whilst pensioners pay 10% or 60% depending on their income and they are also protected by monthly caps. Workers pay 40%, 50% or 60% of the actual cost of the medicine with no caps or limits.

Every now and again, I hear or read that the average Spanish salary is such and such an amount and it always makes me guffaw. At the moment they say it's just a bit short of 27,000€. I can only surmise that there must be a lot of very well paid Spaniards balancing out the miserly Spanish salaries I'm aware of.

Last week though I heard something that sounded much more realistic. It said that the most frequent salary (the sort of pay packet that most people get) in Spain is around 16,500€. When I went checking the most recent figure said that is now nearly 17,000€ year. Take off the tax and whatever and that translates to somewhere around 1,000€ per month take home pay.

You will be surprised to hear that I just happen to know the salary scales for teachers working in language academies. Non school teachers are unusual because their working week is shorter (34 hours) and they have longer holidays (10 weeks) in a country where a 40 hour week and 4 weeks holiday are still very common. Anyway the highest salary for that sort of teaching work is a bit under 15,000€. I never had an employer who paid the full rate but that's another story.

Your average Spaniard on that most frequent salary, or a language school teacher, paying rent or a mortgage might have to bind their injured foot with old rags so maybe I should think myself lucky!

Don't it always go to show

Maggie and I may be among the last few people in the world who are awoken by a clock radio alarm. A thirty year old clock radio at that. The wake up programme is Hoy empieza todo on Radio 3, a contemporary culture and music station. We don't listen for long, even if we're very slothful it will only be about twenty minutes though the programme stays on in the background.

I change the bedclothes on Friday. As I fought with the duvet cover the main presenter on the programme was talking to the organisers of a "pop" festival that runs in Miranda de Ebro in Burgos about 700km from home. They said that they were giving away a package of two tickets, travel and accommodation for the festival and to enter all you had to do was to make a comment on their Twitter account.

Now I've never quite mastered Twitter but, eventually I posted something as to why I wanted to go. I said I was old (and may die before the next one), because I was poor (and I wouldn't be able to afford to go with my own resources) and because I was English so that understanding anything around me was more or less impossible. I added that one of my delights was complaining and that at a festival at two in the morning I could complain mightily about my aching back.

Yesterday evening someone from the programme sent me a message via Twitter and asked whether I would go to the festival if I won. The messages went back and forth in very dodgy Spanish on one side but the last message said "Me das un email y un teléfono para gestionarlo todo?" - can you give me an email address and a telephone number so that I can arrange it all.

I presumed that I had just won something. I broke out the gin that I'd promised myself I wouldn't drink.

This morning, three minutes before the clock radio burst into life, I got another Twitter message. "Lo siento Chris, al final en la última ronda no os ha tocado! Quizás el año que viene." Sorry Chris, in the end, in the last, round you didn't win. Maybe next year.

Very disappointing.

A clean pair of heels

There's a shoe museum in Elda. You have to ring a bell to get in. They have some very odd (sic) shoes. Elche has hundreds of shoe factories. Nowadays lots of them have signs with Chinese script characters over the door but the product still carries the label "Made in Spain."

If Elda and Elche are the most important centres this area, in general, has a tradition of shoes and leather goods. The tiny village of Chinorlet about 3km from us has a factory that makes handbags. Our next door neighbour has a company that produces bows and buckles and the like to stick on leather goods.

Pinoso too has a history of shoe making.  In the middle of town there is a small square dedicated to the shoemakers, (just like there are places dedicated to marble and to wine the other big industries of Pinoso). A local firm, Pinoso's, always has a stand at the celebration of the town's identity, the Villazgo celebrations, where you can don an apron and pose with a shoe last looking like you're doing something very footwear. When I taught one of my students said that her family had a firm that produced a part of the soles for shoes and another was a sort of shoe broker selling designs overseas. Just beside the library, on one of the principal streets of the town, there is an anonymous building which always attracts my attention when I walk by because the powerful smell of epoxy resin that issues from its open window. I have no idea what they are up to but unless they are the glue sniffing unaccompanied minors that the far right party Vox is always going on about then it's something shoe related.

So Pinoso is still a shoemaking town. I don't quite know where the factories are though. I had a vague idea there was one near the sports centre, Maggie thought so too, and maybe on the industrial estate. I asked a Spaniard I know who seems to know almost anyone local over a certain age. He wasn't quite sure where the companies were either - maybe on the industrial estate he said but he also wondered if it were more backstreet workshops than big factories. I asked if he thought a factory on the corner of Calderón de la Barca and Camino del Prado was shoe related - "Could be," was the response.

Sometimes it's amazing what you don't know even after ages and ages even if you're home grown.

Dancing the night away

We've just had a bit of a debate about where we were going to go this evening. The wine harvest fiesta in Jumilla is in full swing and tonight they have a Queen tribute band. Down in La Romana there's a Moors and Christians parade with music and bull running later. Chinorlet, the nearest village to Culebrón, is also partying for the weekend. Tonight they have a children's parade and then a band. In fact, within 45 minutes maximum travelling time we could go to Elche, Aspe, Cañada del Trigo or Fortuna instead. Oh, I nearly forgot and one of the outlying villages of Pinoso, Paredón, is at it too. In fact August 15th, a bank holiday for the Assumption of Mary, is the day when there are more fiestas in Spain than on any other day, the official count is more than 1,000.

Jumilla is probably our first choice but the tribute band are not due on till half past eleven which means a start nearer midnight in reality. My guess is we wouldn't be home till maybe 2.30 and we're a bit old to miss out on our nightly Horlicks. Maybe we should go to the less exciting La Romana and pop in to see the live band in Chinorlet at eleven? Given the inevitable late starts we'd still be home by around one which would leave time for a soothing hot beverage before bed.

The fiesta programmes reminded me of the importance of music in these events and of one sort of music in particular. The band on in Chinorlet (Permanent population 192) is called Kalima, last night in Caballusa (where just four families live all year round) there was a singer called Leandro. At the recent Pinoso fiestas (the official population of Pinoso is only just over 7,600) there were several bands. We did go to see the top twenty band Dvicio but we missed most of the rest including Trio Amanacer, Me and the Reptiles, Grupo Zafiro and Orquesta Athenas. We could make amends for missing Athenas by seeing them in La Romana tomorrow. La Romana has another orquesta, Orquesta Shakara the day after.

Spain, obviously enough, has every sort of musical grouping you can imagine. There are individual musicians doing the rounds, there are groups that do rock or pop or indie or grime, there are brass bands, string quartets, opera singers backed by pianists and flautists, there are folk groups, bagpipe bands, symphony orchestras, Colombian Cumbia groups, Mexican Mariachis and lots of Brazilian Samba bands to name but a fraction of the styles. There is, though, a species of band that exists predominantly to do fiestas and verbenas (verbena is a loose term but it usually means a bar, food, dance and music area which constitutes part of a larger, city wide fiesta) and that's the orquesta. Guess the English translation.

The orchestras have a simple enough mission - they have to ensure that everyone from the smallest child, to the least nimble grandma and even the sulky teenagers get up and dance. They fulfil their mission with a mixture of timeless classics and this summer's hits. It's a while since I've seen one to be honest but they have a style which is sort of trashy and glamorous at the same time. The men often have a bit of a belly whilst the women wear tight clothes with sequins and short skirts or shorts. Obviously that's a massive over-generalisation - some of the men are bald and wear sequins too! The repertoire is international though Spanish hits predominate even if they were originally sung by foreigners like Shakira or Luis Fonsi. I've just read four different lists of "indispensable" songs for orquestas and, apart from the incredibly successful and timeless Paso Doble tune Paquito El Chocolatero there wasn't a single song that was present in every list. That doesn't mean that all the lists weren't very similar with the same styles and names turning up again and again. A very danceable style called reggaeton was definitely over represented and Rosalía, the fusion flamenco/pop artist seemed big this year too.

Anyway, whilst I've been typing we've decided and it's nearly time to go. Jumilla it is and Queen  - so songs that we'll know. No Soldadito Marinero, Princesas, No rompas más, Cannabis or A quién le importa to add to my cultural education this evening then.

Valencianos have a reputation for liking fireworks

I don't quite remember when but it was long before we lived here. We were in Spain for a holiday and a couple of friends, Pepa and Jaime, invited us to stay in their flat in Bétera near Valencia.

Bétera was having its annual fiesta and we went into town one evening to take part. I think there was a parade, there were stalls and a fair, we ate some tapas, we drank some beer and all sorts of normal fiesta things.

The next evening we went back to the fiesta and to the town centre. We didn't park in the same place. We walked much further than we had the night before. I didn't know why. As we walked through the streets in the centre of the town most of the windows were boarded up, there were no cars in the streets. The whole town was odd. Either Jaime and Pepa didn't explain very well or we didn't have enough Spanish to understand what was going on.

We waited in the main street with hundreds of other people. At the appointed hour someone lit the blue touch paper and suddenly there was a wall of fire advancing down the street towards us. I don't think we'd been expecting that. How it worked was that there was a principal cord running down the centre of the street and there were other fireworks hung on other ropes that went from the buildings on one side of the street to the other so that they criss crossed that central cord. As the waterfall of fire advanced the crowd fell back, the more foolhardy close to the fireworks and the wiser further back. Wading through the fire zone, just behind the main fire-front, were some blokes dressed in overalls and crash helmets carrying fire extinguishers. They were there to pluck up the fallen or to guide the panic stricken to safety and, if needs be, to put out anyone who was on fire. The cord ran into a square but the fireworks stopped a few metres short of it so that, once you were in the square, you were safe. The fun was that all the people who had been in the street, and all the people who had been in the square before the fireworks started, had to fit into an ever dwindling area as the fire pushed us all back. A bit like that scene in Bambi. It was a tad sardine like and Harvey Weinstein would have been busy but as the fireworks fell silent and fizzled out we were still alive and unscathed.

When it was over Jaime made us run back to the car insisting that we only had minutes to reach safety. We had no idea why. As we headed back we passed several groups of people who were putting the finishing touches to their own version of the uniform of overalls, crash helmets and gloves with lots of duct tape to seal the joins. They didn't have extinguishers and fire blankets though. They were arming up with Roman Candle type fireworks and, at one or maybe two in the morning the signal would be given that they could engage in all out warfare on the streets of Bétera. We saw something very similar years later on the streets of Elche on the Nit de l'Albà - the Night of the Dawn. That's why the properties were boarded up, that was why there were no cars and that's why we were parked well out of harms way.

The Cordá, for that's what it is called was on last night, the 15th August, in Bétera. The subsequent firework fight is, I think, called la Coheta 

Every year, since we've lived here, it crosses my mind that we should go back to Bétera for the event. It was one of the maddest fiestas that I've ever been involved in and it's been one of my stock stories for over thirty years, right up with that one about being on the wrong side of the fence, with fighting bulls, in Ciudad Rodrigo. So I set to looking up the details of times and things yesterday. I found some videos on YouTube of lots of people on the streets but they were all booted and suited. Then I found a form to apply for permission to be on the street for the Cordá. I didn't bother to read any further but it was obvious enough, now you have to apply to be potentially set on fire by a curtain of fire and you can't just turn up on a whim. 

I was telling Maggie. "Well, it's like Britons always say, Health and Safety wouldn't allow this in the UK - now they don't allow it in Spain either". Actually, I suppose that improves our story. When men were men and Spain was Spain and all that. Or it could be that I've misremembered the whole thing.

Taking and keeping

I've complained before about our occasional tussles with "authority" here in Spain and how it's quite tricky to complain or fight back. It's not just the language. Some of the processes can be a bit Kafka, a bit Catch 22.

You may remember that the tax people questioned my 2014 tax returns. It cost me 118€ to defend myself, not a lot but 118€ that I could have invested much more wisely in, for instance,  throwing the money in the dust and trampling on it. Their final response after a couple of months was "we will take no further action". They didn't say "whoops" or "sorry" or "here are your expenses" and I rather suspect that we will go through the same rigmarole for my 2015 returns in a few months.

We also had some trouble with the Land Registry, the Catastro. The Land Registry sets the rateable value of houses and this figure is used by the Local Town Hall as a way of fixing the local taxes which, in the end, pay for street lights, parks and gardens and council worker's salaries. An agency called SUMA collects the tax for most of the Town Halls in Alicante province. The Town Halls sets the tax as a percentage of the rateable value. Lets pretend that rate is half a cent on the euro. If your house has a rateable value of 50,000€ then you have to pay 50,000 lots of half a cent or 250€ in local tax.

Our problem was that the Land Registry thought we owned a good percentage of our next door neighbours house. When the Catastro finally sorted this out the rateable value of our house was reduced by about three quarters. Like the tax agency the Land Registry showed no sign of regret when they acknowledged their error. With backdating and what not we have paid this inflated price six times in the last three years.

I expected that, when SUMA sent us our local rates/council tax bill for this year, it would reflect the new, revised, lower Catastro rate and that there would be a refund for those six over payments. But no. The bill was exactly the same amount as last year and they want us to pay the inflated price for a seventh time. I went to talk to the collection agency.

"Ah, well, you see on their last letter the Land Registry say that this rate applies from the day after you receive this letter". I agreed, I'd read that at the time we got the letter, Maggie had read it too, but both of us had failed to grasp the significance. We should have contested the ruling and asked for the corrected rateable value to be backdated to when the error had first been made.

I grasped at straws. "Well the bill for this year should be proportional then," I said. "No, the IBI, the local tax, is due on 1st January for the year and, on that date, the rateable value of your house was the older, higher value".

I'll see if we can fight it of course but I suspect that we are, in the vernacular, buggered. There is something immoral though in a Government Agency recognising that there has been a mistake but not refunding the couple of thousand euros that it has collected under false pretences.

August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk

If I were to ask you whether you'd expect summer in Spain to be warm or cool what would you say?

Exactly.

I like it warm. I like the unremitting heat of the Alicante summer. Sun every day, no rain for weeks or months, the sound of flip flops on the street and the telly full of people having outdoor parties and frolicking in the sea with orgiastic fiestas in every town and village.

So summer here is as mythical as Christmas in England. There it's snow, robins, family camaraderie, goodwill, never ending mince pies and the warm feeling of gift giving. It's sort of true, it can be true but most of it is some sort of aggrandisement of the truth.

People of course love to complain. In winter we complain about the cold and in summer we complain about the heat. This always amuses me slightly. Anyone who knows Spain knows that there are bits that are, generally, cool and rainy. The coolest (temperature wise) place I can find for yesterday was Covatilla near Bejar in Salamanca where it was just over 20ºC but Covatilla is a winter ski resort so it's at the top of a mountain. The warmest couple of spots for yesterday, in the whole of Spain, were Xàtiva and Yeste at a bit over 40ºC. Both are within an hour (or so) drive  of Culebrón. In general, Britons think of Spain as being a sunny place. White people come here to lie on the Mediterranean beaches and go, by turns, pink and then red. So my amusement is because people seem surprised that it's warm.

I know that the weather is bonkers. I'm not unaware of all that highest temperature ever recorded in Tuluksak, Tobermory or Tudela stuff but the truth is that the differences aren't that great - at least not for we humans. A temperature rise of 3ºC may have huge global consequences as glaciers recede, ice caps melt, krill do something odd that messes around with whales or jellyfish take to swimming in bits of the ocean that they haven't habitually swum in for a while but, for most people, a few degrees isn't that noticeable. We work on a sort of cold, cool, warm, hot scale with humidity and air movement added in the mix. A biting wind makes can turn the scarf and mittens pleasure of a chill winters day into a painful struggle. The crisp linen of a desert dry landscape is much more comfortable than the sweat sodden shirt and the ridden up underwear of some mangrove swamp.

The maximum and minimum for yesterday in Pinoso were 38ºC and 21ºC. Last year, for the same date I recorded 31ºC and 16ºC in my diary so it's currently a bit warmer this year than last. Usually I don't really notice. Sitting outside with a cold drink or cup of tea and a slight breeze or in the car with the windows down I'm happy as Larry when it's in the high 30s. Maggie on the other hand feels the heat much more. She likes the car or house windows closed and the air con pumping out refrigerated air. I have to be honest though. The other day when I was crawling under the car and the sweat was filling my eye sockets or today, as I unloaded the recyclable stuff, and little rivulets were trickling inside my shirt I did think it was a tad on the warm side. Much more though I thought about that word I nearly always use to describe the summer heat - unremitting. The relentlessness of the heat. The way that, for a couple of months, it never goes away. The manner in which it waits to pounce as you leave an air conditioned building, when the first touch of the steering wheel burns and when, as you awaken at 3a.m., you find yourself enclosed in moist, sticky sheets for the wrong reasons.

Short change

I've given up not wearing shorts. I don't like them, I think they look stupid (especially on me) and, more than anything, they seem to require that I wear footwear which leaves my feet severely compromised. But shorts are so commonplace that I've decided to stop fighting and to wear them.

We went to a barbecue last week at a posh, modern house. It was time to go so I washed my hands and face and combed my hair. I didn't think to change my faded shorts and my rolls of flab displaying t-shirt till Maggie appeared wearing a spotty dress. "Do I have to dress up?," I groaned. I did, so I did. A shirt with a collar and leather shoes. I even shaved.

We weren't out of place but I could have got away with the shorts, well maybe. Perhaps I would have needed to iron them first. Most people, even if they were in shorts, looked neat. I cultivate crumpled and scruffy. Like those 1980s Bacardi ads but without the firm flesh.

We went to see the opening speeches of the Pinoso Fiestas on Thursday. Maggie commented that lots of the women in the audience were very smartly dressed. It was then that I realised then that I have a view on dress codes in Spain.

The only place where it seems, for everyday people, to be essential to dress up is for a wedding and probably for a communion. Women at weddings wear unusually smart clothes; red carpet stuff.  Men, on the other hand, wear badly fitting suits dragged out of a genteel semi retirement. The men look uncomfortable. Funerals are different. There seems to be no need to smarten up for a funeral and I'm often a bit taken aback by the casualness of funeral wear. In fact there seems to be no need to smarten up for work, for the theatre or for the opera. This doesn't mean that Spain is scruffy it simply means that people dress as they think appropriate. Most of the time there is no imposition of a dress code or even a particular expectation. Not always of course. I worked somewhere that had a (very light touch) dress code and I saw a restaurant website the other day that said that the dress style was "formal" though I'm sure they meant neither black nor white tie. The flip side of this is that if you go out wearing a traditional cape, a dinner jacket, a lounge suit or a scarf when it's 25ºC then nobody will give you a second glance.

I'm probably wrong. My wardrobe choice has been greatly reduced by the unfathomable shrinkage of many of my clothes over the years so I may be seeking justification for my own slovenliness. And I do still try to adapt, a little, to the situation by choosing black jeans, faded blue jeans or my Cliff Richard jeans. The last because my mum always reckoned that Cliff was so clean cut he pressed a crease into his jeans. It's true that some jeans are smarter than others.

The few times I've been to a classy restaurant in the evening I usually wear beige chinos and a short sleeved, checked, button down collar shirt. If there are other grey haired British men there they will be wearing exactly the same basic outfit. We Britons are well trained.

Working the whole day through

People keep asking me if I'm bored now that I'm retired. I say no. They ask me what I do and I say I don't know. What I do know is that I'm not getting lots of the things done that I mean to get done because I don't have enough time.

Probably the thing is that busy means one thing and another. When I visited the UK a few weeks ago I noticed the immediateness of everything. Buying a beer is a plish plash operation. Ask, get, pay, drink or sometimes ask, pay, get, drink. Table service, the Spanish norm, obviously slows things down anyway but even if I order at the bar before sitting it's a much more leisurely process. The format is based on trust not mistrust. Paying, getting someone to take your money, can actually be a problem at times and I often pay at the bar as I leave to speed things up a bit.

I reckon it's digital stuff that makes people want to go faster. To watch Hill Street Blues in my youth I waited for the episode each week. Now people watch whole box sets in an orgy of bought in pizza and underwear (or so I'm told). And if you don't like the conclusion to Game of Thrones then raising a petition to have it changed is only a few clicks away. Ordering something by mail order used to be seconded by a guarantee to deliver within 28 days. Amazon and Ali Express deliver tomorrow morning. Half the time you don't need to wait at all. No more going out to buy the new album just download it at one minute past midnight on release day or stream it on your Spotify account. Booking holidays, buying a bike, getting a train ticket or doing the supermarket run can all be done from your phone or laptop whenever and wherever you like.

It's true we flew out of a new and underused Spanish airport but we left the spacious calm of Corvera to arrive in the frenetic maelstrom of Stansted where we were goaded and guided forward in something akin to a giant cattle market. Even in rural Cambridgeshire that change of pace was very noticeable to me - heaven knows what it must be like in Brum or London. There was a traffic jam on the approach road to Stansted. Obviously we have slow traffic from time to time as we travel around Spain but that was the first real jam I'd been in since the last time I was in the UK.

People don't really eat on the street in Spain but buying food to go and eating it at the bus stop or as you send a message on the phone seemed to be very common in the UK. There appeared to be almost an imperative to use every moment effectively. From listening to people in Madrid and Barcelona I think there's a tendency to that there but I don't live in a big city. I live in Pinoso. And here we have a bit of time.

At the moment the stalls and stands and paraphernalia of the Fiestas are blocking up the streets of Pinoso. Streets are closed off, one way streets are suddenly two way. It's all a bit tricky. I saw someone try the normal right turn onto the Plaça el Molí to find her way blocked. The car stopped, the woman considered her options. The cars behind waited patiently. They didn't wait long really but 15 seconds delay in Huntingdon or Todmorden would have horns a go go. In Pinoso nobody tooted, they just waited. We do it all the time, wait patiently that is, as people stop their cars in the middle of the street to greet a friend or to drop off the not too nimble relative close to their door.

Slowing down can take some getting used to. I think it's worse if you, if one, is still British at heart, watching British TV and reading UK news and seeing things going quickly. I don't really. But if you compare the lightning fast selection of BoJo in comparison to the continuing, outrageous, non negotiations going on here about not forming any sort of government you have a case in point. That thing of an election one day and a new government the next isn't the Spanish way. I think it's the same with traffic reports. Here the police tell the DGT and the DGT tell the media so, by the time you hear the traffic report on the radio or Google maps knows to route you a different way, the tortured metal and smashed bodies have been dragged aside. Meanwhile in the UK someone phones the radio directly.

So, when someone behind a desk tells me it may take a few months for a pal to exchange their UK driving licence for a Spanish one I just say right and I'm surprised when my friend thinks it's a long time. When they told me the waiting time for a new car was three months I didn't think of it as being overly long till a couple of Britons expressed surprise.

No, I'm keeping very busy thanks.

Blood, fuet and tears

What goes into a paella is a bit of a moot point. Valencian paella usually contains white rice, meat (usually chicken or rabbit) garrofó (a sort of bean), saffron and rosemary and, of course, olive oil. There are plenty of variations but most of them replace or add to the meat with, say, snails, seafood or fish and the beans with maybe artichokes or cauliflower. You may remember that, a couple of years ago, Jamie Oliver the British chef, suggested a paella made with onions, carrots, parsley, red pepper, tomato puree, chicken stock, frozen peas chicken thighs and chorizo. He received death threats from enraged Spaniards. They were appalled by the recipe in general but especially about the inclusion of chorizo. I suppose it is a bit like calling something made from quorn and onions in a soy  sauce gravy topped off with mashed yams a Shepherd's Pie. I doubt though that the British newspapers would be able to mine the rich seam of national outrage in defence of the Shepherd's Pie.

Unless I'm very much mistaken chorizo is now commonplace in the UK. So popular, so common, that the pronunciation is no longer the chorritso of a few years ago to something much closer to the Spanish - Choreetho. Chorizo is made by coarsely mincing pork meat, adding seasoning and paprika before pushing the mix into sausage skins which are hung to cure in a nice dry place. Apparently this type of curing without smoke and without salt and where the meat sort of gently rots down is called fermentation curing. Anyway, however it's made chorizo is plentiful in Spain. Any supermarket will have it in a variety of shapes and forms. Some is cheap and some isn't, some is spicy and some isn't, some is obviously produced in huge factories and delivered in articulated lorries and some is made carefully by someone who would be happy to do a radio interview about it.

Stick with me whilst I drift.

In choosing a book I generally work from reviews and lists published somewhere - "Our top ten picks for the beach this summer", "Fifteen new Spanish writers you should get to know" and so on. It is remarkable how many of these books seem to be set in Catalonia or to include Catalan themes. I read the latest Isabel Allende the other day. Nowadays she's a US citizen but I still think of her as Chilean. Her story, about Spanish Civil War refugees taken in by Chile, was full of Catalan words and characters. The book I've just finished was going to be about Catalonia because it was originally published in Catalan. The story is set amongst country folk in the High Pyrenees. There was lots of description in the book and I noticed that in amongst the myriad food references several places smelled of cheese and fuet.

Fuet is a thin, dry cured, solid, pork meat sausage flavoured with black pepper, garlic and, sometimes, aniseed. It has a white appearance, as though it has been sprinkled with flower, though the white is actually a fungus. I'd never particularly associated fuet with Catalonia though, when I thought about it, the name is obviously Catalan. So chorizo is a sausage and fuet is a sausage.

Spain has lots and lots of sausages. If I were to buy chorizo I know there are choices to be made. Any old pig or the little Iberian black jobs? Fed on commercial feed or raised free range on acorns? Basically the cheap stuff or the quality product? On the other hand I just buy fuet. In the same way as I would never associate hot dog sausages, Wieners, with quality meat I've always presumed that fuet was in the same sort of class, made from the the scrag ends. If I were to think about, and I never had till I read Irene Solà Saez's book, I would imagine fuet being produced in an enormous factory stacked with giant killing machines where all the workers wear hairnets and white wellies and smoke a quick ciggy at break time. The sort of place that, every now and then, is infiltrated by undercover journalists who film heartless workers laughing as they do something disgustingly barbaric to terrified blood spattered pigs standing in their own excrement. But, maybe not. If the Pyrenean houses named Matavaques and Can Prim smell of fuet and cheese there must be quality stuff to be had.

Practical research is called for.