Heat and Dust

Have you seen those photos of the Greek Islands? Blue and white paintwork everywhere and the boats apparently suspended in mid air on a transparent crystal clear sea. It's the light that makes those photos so stunning and it's the same sort of light that we have here. A popular late 19th and early 20th Century Spanish painter, Joaquín Sorolla, is most famous because of the way he captured the Mediterranean light. I often think of Sorolla when anyone comments on the limpid, flawless blue sky in even the most mundane of my snaps.

So, when we first came to Spain I envisaged a house with big French windows, with gauze like curtains moving gently on a whisper of warm breeze making and unmaking pools of light on the tiled floor. Obviously we would wear, white, probably linen, clothes as we Virginia Woolfed our way through the days sipping on ice tinkling lemonade or a more alcoholic gin and tonic. Nobody sweats in those images, we would just luxuriate in the brightness of it all.

Actually of course, nowadays, being good Spaniards, we walk on the shadowed side of the street, we look to park the car in the shade so that the steering wheel will not singe our hands and the seats other parts of our anatomy as we return to it and we would always choose to eat inside, in the air conditioned interior of a restaurant, rather than out with the flies and the dust in the street. It's alright to have a drink in the street but always in the shade. And whilst you're there the most important thing about a beer is it's temperature. That's one of the reasons Spaniards drink small beers and not pints (well that and the metric system). Eating outside we leave to the tourists. We're sometimes taken aback when guests want to sit in the sun or eat outside. We're not really good Spaniards though, or at least I'm not. Maggie would do the Spanish thing and drop all the blinds on the house and leave us in permanent twilight if she had her way. Windows and doors would stay firmly closed until the sun had dipped out of sight or at least until it starts to cool down a bit. I'm still for a through draft and a bit of natural light in the house. We're also lucky that, up here, at 600 metres the evening temperatures drops into the teens which makes it easy to sleep without taking to the old Spanish trick of sleeping on the terrace. Of course it's also the summer heat that means that Spanish events, like theatre or pop bands, don't start till lots of Britons are thinking about whatever the summer equivalent is of cocoa and a bedtime book.

It really is a splendid light and, as I've said before, I like the heat. Yesterday I polished my car and as I collected the various implements with the job done I noticed the fine patina of dust already on the car. I smiled. Just as it snows in Stockholm in winter it's warm and dusty in Culebrón in July.

The Rolling R Review

Imagine one of those dance studios. A wall of mirrors. Lithe dancers, six pack stomachs, firm buttocks and all that brightly coloured, body hugging clothing.

Same idea, a mirrored wall but there's a bloke with a pronounced belly and a red nose, maybe for alcohol, maybe for the sun, sitting, facing the mirrors, on a cheap plastic chair with the sort of posture that Mr Plant would have reprimanded him for as a youth. Every now and then an acrid smell, it may be sweat from Mr Tubby or it may just be the room, wafts through the hot and airless atmosphere. It's Covid time so the fat bloke is wearing a face shield. Sometimes he blows a raspberry, well more or less, sometimes he gets hold of the side of his mouth to try and get his lips to flap in the wind. Gargling sounds. Strangled sounds. Flapping tongues.

It's me and I'm with a speech therapist trying to learn how to do the rolled R that is more or less essential to speak Spanish. Something I haven't mastered in all the time here. The therapist has said four sessions may do it. Maggie says I'm wasting money. I don't care. I've thought about doing this for years. To be honest it didn't go well. I have a video to prove it. Worth a try though and three more sessions to go.

This part I added in August 2020.

It took me a while to get the sound but I can now make it reasonably easily. We'd booked in four sessions but after two and a half the speech therapist said she was stealing money from me, she'd taught me the sound and it was just my job to practise. So every day I work through barra, berre, birri, borro, burru, carra etc. and raba, rebe, ribi, robo, rubu etc plus other real word exercises.

The problem is, and the therapist recognised that this is true, I don't have the same problem as Spaniards who have trouble with the sound. If they have problems with the rolled R, and she can teach them the sound, then that sound becomes the normal. Every time they use an R at the beginning of a word or RR in a word, they use that new, learned sound and it is reinforced as being correct and soon becomes habitual. But I don't have trouble with the R at the beginning of a word or the RR in a word. I am not Jonathon Woss. I pronounce the R fine in English. The problem only arises when I'm speaking Spanish. I have to pronounce words differently in Spanish - the lisp in Barcelona or cerveza for instance I can manage perfectly well by using the English TH sound. If I want the  double LL sound I can use the J from just or the LL from million but for the R I don't have an English sound to commandeer. I have to change the sound as though I were a performing animal. I do it as a trick. So the sound tends to be overemphasised. I've also noticed that I'm taking a breath before making it. I'm relying on tenacity to see my through. I'm reading through the list, which takes about twenty minutes, twice a day and, with a bit of luck, I'll soon sound as Spanish as an average Scot.

Getting the new Brexit version TIE

Maggie and I went for our new TIE cards, Tarjeta de Identidad de Extranjero, Foreigner's Identity Card, today. The idea of this entry is to explain the bare bones of the process for someone who has to do it and who already has one of the green residence forms or cards.

Now that we are no longer European Union Citizens we Britons can get this ID card, we have been able to since Monday. We don't have to, at least for a while, but we can. The advantage is, in a country that uses and demands ID all the time, we will have a credit sized card that will save us the bother of carrying around our passport and other floppy bits of paper. I think, though I'm not sure, that it also allows us to sign in for certain online transactions.

The process was pretty straightforward. I saw, online, that there were some appointments available and didn't hesitate to book them up straight away. Getting appointments for lots of the official procedures has been difficult for months, no doubt partly due to we Britons finally sorting out our missing paperwork as the getting Brexit done dates came and went and came and went. I was happy to get an appointment at all and amazed when I managed to get appointments for both Maggie and me within half an hour of each other on the same day. If you have a go and you find there are no appointments available try again later. They seem to come and go quite often.

The paperwork we needed was pretty simple. There's a form for the process available online, we also had to pay the 12€ fee beforehand, which we did at a local bank. As well as the two forms the Foreigner's Office wanted a copy of the form that shows your official address, the padrón, a copy of the green document that all we British immigrants call the residencia (mine was one of the A4 sized sheets), a photo and, of course, sight of the British passport. Hardly anything. There was a trick to come though but I was ready for it.

We found the Foreigner's Office in Alicante easily, parking was easy too and it was on "our" side of town. A bit before the appointed time I queued up outside. It was a short queue of maybe seven or eight people, I showed my appointment card to the security guard and he let me in. It was amazing the number of people he turned away because they didn't have appointments. Once inside I went through the security scanner and then tapped my appointment code into a machine. The machine spat out a sort of delicatessen counter ticket and the number on that ticket flashed up on a TV screen in the waiting area telling me where to go. I went to my appointed desk in the appointed room and handed over my paperwork. In the official list of required paperwork there was mention of passport and residencia - there was no mention of copies but I've been to a lot of government offices in my 15 years here and I've learned to carry more paper than they ask for. So, when they wanted a copy of the passport and a copy of the residencia I pulled them out of my bag, rabbit like. The biggest problem was my fingerprints. I had to give my fingerprints for the biometric data chip and it appears I don't have one or any. As I said to the bloke I must remember to use that finger on the trigger if the time ever comes. I tried lots of time, maybe forty times before they got the prints they needed. That done, paperwork stapled together, the man gave me a paper slip which told me where to collect my new card in "about" three weeks. I was out within about 20 minutes.

Maggie had a similar experience though the security guard wasn't around for twenty minutes or so, probably breakfast time, I kid you not, so she was a bit late getting in. And Maggie's top hat didn't work so well - she pulled out the residencia but not a copy of her passport so she had to go to the nearby bar to get a copy. Even then she only took about 40 minutes to complete the process.

Now, if the document turns up, as promised in three weeks, just one more trip to Alicante and we're in business.

This part was written on 30 July. I rang, yesterday, to see if the card was ready and they said it was. I was told there was no appointment system and just to turn up at Calle Campo de Mirra, 6 between 9am and 2pm. That's what I did. There was a bit of queuing but basically it was hand over the bit of paper I'd been given at the end of the first session, show my passport, hand in the green residence form, give a couple of fingerprints and leave with my new TIE card.

Putting the customer first

We're back to cold showers. The gas water heater has gone on indefinite strike. The little led panel is running through its full range of codes, E9, F0; I think that's a zero not a command.

So, I thought that this time we'd call the official service people, their number is on a sticker on the water hater. I'm not particularly good on phones nowadays. I tend to cut across people and they definitely cut across me. I understand why George Clooney, as Billy Tyne, says "over" or even "over and out" when he's talking to Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Obviously it's a bit more difficult again in Spanish. Hand movements and facial gestures may be available via facetime but not in an ordinary phone call. And ask my pal Harry what radio professionals say about dead air. A two second silence in a radio show sounds lasts a lifetime. I always feel the same about a pause on the telephone. Keeping speaking is essential. It can lead to appalling language errors. That's why I use WhatsApp a lot.

So I ring the Junkers people. I remind myself that slave labour was generations ago. The phone offers me a service in English. I press 1. The woman speaks to me in Spanish. Never mind. I keep cool and I talk slowly and calmly. It goes well. "I'll get someone to phone you back from Alicante," she says.

All day I carry the phone. We country folk don't get good coverage. It's OK by the palm tree but terrible alongside the aljibe. Nobody phones. I'm careful to keep the phone on full volume, with vibrate as well, in my back pocket. Nothing. No, they haven't rung the fixed phone either. Some eight hours later I decide I should phone a local plumber. He doesn't answer but I leave a message. Three hours later Maggie does the same to the same plumber as he know her number. He still hasn't answered.

This morning I phone another local plumber, the sort with a new van and logos on their polo shirts. No beer gut. "Ah, it sounds like spares," he says, "you'll need to go to the official service people, they won't sell me spares". He tells me how expensive they are and even over the phone I can hear him suck air through his teeth.

By now I know there's a part of the official dealer network based in Alicante and finding their number is easy. I ring. We go through the details. "Ah, you phoned our head office yesterday, yes, we're coming to you on Monday, that's when we do that area". I sniggered. That's because I couldn't do that "Why the hell didn't you tell me that yesterday and not leave me thinking that something had gone wrong" speech. Glib was easier. "It's good that we like cold showers," I said. I was lying. Maggie doesn't.

I wrote this days after the rest of this post. The Junkers people turned up as promised and within twenty minutes of the scheduled time. It was a replacement part. 160€ and we have hot water again.

On our cistern

When I was a schoolboy I was told how the Vikings, the Saxons and the Normans were responsible for lots of English place names; things like  -thorpe from the Norse for a village, as in Mablethorpe, and  -ham is from the Saxon for the same thing, as in Birmingham.

In 711AD North Africans invaded what is now Spain and they controlled at least part of the peninsula for the next 700 plus years. Obviously enough, during that time, they made their mark on the land and its people. In the Spanish language lots of words begin with "a" or "al". That's because the Arabic for "the" is "a" or "al".  Over times  the sound sort of fused - like the old advert,  Drinka Pinta Milka Day, or how, when I've finished this, I'll get a cuppa. If you know Spanish you'll be able to think of myriad words that begin in "a" like azúcar, almohada, albahaca or almirante. If you don't know Spanish think of some of the place names that you know like Almeria, Andalusia, Alhambra (like the theatre in Bradford). No?, alright then, think Alicante airport (ألَلَقَنْت or Al-Laqant).

We have one of those words in our back patio, we have an aljibe. An aljibe is a construction to hold water, a cistern. I suppose that at one time in the past it would have been the main source of drinking water for the house. This is not a well, it's a structure that collects rainwater, like a water butt. It holds about 11,500 litres of water or around 2,500 gallons. The down drain pipes from the roof lead directly into the aljibe so, when it rains, we collect the water. We don't use it for drinking water, we use it to water the garden, and we raise the water with a pump rather than the more traditional pulley and bucket. It was only relatively recently that I realised that the shopping centre down in Elche, which is called L’Aljub, is simply aljibe written in the local Valenciano language rather than the more common Castilian Spanish.

Our aljibe started to leak. The bricky who came to have a look said that it was because tree roots homed in on the water and forced their way through the concrete. It was true, hanging with my head well inside the pit I could see the straggly roots. The bricky put me right when I called it an aljibe. "It's not an aljibe, it's a cistern," he said. I presumed he would know, being local and a builder and such, but I can't find any Internet source that agrees with him, nobody except José Miguel makes any distinction. For instance the translation of the Wikipedia article says of the etymology of the word: the term aljibe ("algibe") comes from the hispanic arabic, alǧúbb, algúbb, and this from the classic Arabic جب, gubb, which means cistern, well or pit.

I don't really mind what the name is but I do often think about the careful husbandry of water inherited from those North Africans as I'm watering the garden and I feel quite righteous in not using good clean drinking water for the job.

Usually it's green paint and buff coloured stone

The province of Alicante, the one we live in, like all the provinces of Spain, has its own particular characteristics. Unlike lots of Spain Alicante is not choc a bloc with cathedrals, medieval quarters and massive stone built historic town centres. It doesn't even have characteristic colour schemes for the houses (well it does but they are not as eye catching as, for instance, the indigo and white of Ciudad Real or the ochre and white of Seville). We do have plenty of impressive buildings but they tend to get lost in a general unremarkability. Say Alicante to any Spaniard from outside the area and the first thing that comes to mind will be beach. If you've ever had holidays here, in Benidorm or Torrevieja or Calpe or if you live in Elda, Monóvar, Aspe or Sax then I'd be more or less certain that whatever you appreciate about your town it is not the architecture.

That's not to say that I don't like our province. Look in any direction from our house and you see hills and pine covered mountains. Out here in the countryside there are lots of orchards of peach, apricot, almond, stacks of olive trees, grape vines all over and a host of other crops from wheat to artichokes. I know that the first impression of Alicante for Northern Europeans, as they look down from the aeroplane window, is that the landscape is dry and everything a yellowy, orange, dusty sort of colour but here, on the ground, it looks pretty green to me.

I like the unending summer heat here, despite the flies. I like the way the province groans and swelters in the bright, bright sunlight with such tremendously deep skies. And we do have that beach and that flashing blue sea. Something else I like is the strange distribution of houses and hamlets. Alicante is out of kilter with much of Spain because the houses are scattered, higgledy-piggledy, across the countryside. In most of Spain houses are gathered together in villages and towns with hardly any people in between.

Not long ago agriculture was what there was in inland Alicante. People lived close to the land they worked. Then things began to change. Other sectors became the big employers and agriculture now only employs about 4% of the workforce as against around 20% in industry and 75% in services. We have lots and lots of unworked land around here. To oversimplify and overgeneralise the families that worked the land moved away. The blokes, and it is blokes you see, who drive the tractors and still work the land are old and battle scarred. They may still rope in the family at harvest time but basically the farmers are dying in harness and their children prefer to work at a keyboard, in air conditioned shops, factories and offices. The houses the farmers owned in the villages and hamlets often still belong to the families (unless they were sold on to we rich foreigners) but they are only opened up occasionally - maybe for a party or a couple of cheap weeks in the countryside. 

The landscape is criss crossed by a maze of back roads; those lanes are used by tractors and locals by day and by drunk drivers avoiding possible police patrols at night. The roads are usually narrow, twisty and some are pothole scarred but most are perfectly usable. They get narrower in spring and summer as the abundant grass encroaches onto the tarmac. The herds of goats that once kept the verges well mown are now few and far between too. Alongside the roads are little hamlets and clusters of houses. Nowadays most of the houses are deserted or they get that very occasional use. Of the ones that are occupied all the time it's probably true to say that foreigners make up a disproportionate percentage. Spaniards and Northern Europeans have different ideas about the delights of town versus country living.

In one way those villages and hamlets are just a repetitive pattern but they are one of the things I really do like around here. Suddenly, in amongst the vines and the almond trees, there will be a cluster of stone built houses with faded paintwork, abandoned farm implements and the shady spot where generations of locals once sat to tell tales and share their lives.

Bring out your dead!

On the last fourteen weeks I've only filled the car with petrol twice, I've read nineteen books though and watched more TV series than you could wave a stick at. I've weeded the garden so often that it is as weed free, and generally tidy, as it has been at any time whilst we've lived in Culebrón. I've even re-painted all but one of the exterior walls. Our area of Spain has been relatively mobile for the last two or three weeks but even then we've generally limited ourselves to a couple of outings to local bars or eateries with just one trip to the coast. We could have gone further, anywhere within the province, but we've chosen not to stray more than 60 kilometres from home. Basically we've done as we were asked, we've stayed at home.

Today though it's all more or less over, for us. We can now go where we like - masks, general hygiene, keeping distance and local regulations permitting. It's back to some sort of normal. The State of Alarm has been lifted.

I asked Maggie if she fancied going somewhere today, given that we could. I wondered about the Murcian coast. She didn't remind me of the death toll in Brazil but she did remind me that the sensible thing was to stay home, unless we had some reason to go out. It's one thing to go to see a fiesta or a museum or a theatre performance, to go out with a purpose, and to go out just because the shackles have been loosened. And just in case you don't think Maggie has it right here is a quick, and imprecise, personal view of the World Health Organisation figures.

I know that, in comparison to the the Antonine Plague, which killed between 5 and 10 million, (and we're complaining about statistical inaccuracies!) in the Second Century Roman Empire and the Spanish flu, which did for between 17 and 50 million, in 1918, Covid is nothing. A mere sniffle in the historical register. That given it's still true that Europe looks to be a bit poorly - 18,313 new cases and 1,726 dead in the last 24 hours. Mind you I'm not a health statistician so that may be the equivalent of a bad weekend on the roads for all I know. But, back at the Covid figures; the Russians and Turks are up there for new infections though the UK remains way out in front for deaths with Italy and France making up the top three and pushing us off the podium. Nonetheless, it's all looking a bit better, a bit healthier. 

The Americas are where it's all happening now (apart, obviously from Tulsa where Trump thought it a good idea to have an election rally yesterday). Brazil and the USA are currently running neck and neck in new infections but, yesterday, more people died in Brazil than in the US. If the Chinese are further ahead in quantum computing than Google and IBM (in projects headed up by Spaniards apparently) I presume that Donny can take some solace that the US is far and away the world leader in total Covid 19 dead. People are dying/have died in shedloads in Trump's United States and Bolsonaro's Brazil but Peru and Mexico don't look too cracky either. Interesting that countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua, run by madmen, have almost no reported deaths. Africa's numbers don't look "too bad" given that the head of the league table there for deaths, South Africa, is about equivalent to Ireland and over in Asia India doesn't look that good, number wise, but, given the population there I suppose they are doing remarkably well.

As for me I've just started book twenty - and it's in English for a change - and I'm wondering about that last wall.

Food heresy

People, in general, seem to be very interested in food. Spaniards certainly are. I think I've said before that the first time I ever managed to catch the drift of a conversation in Spanish, when I presumed that the discussion would centre on Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or, perhaps, the novels of Kafka it turned out to be an impassioned debate about the pros and cons of adding peas, or not, to some sort of stew.

Spanish food tends to plainness. Spicy is, generally, not seen as good. Recipes are often traditional and made from the ingredients to hand. It's permissible to argue about whether tortilla de patatas should have onion or not but basically the recipe is eggs, potatoes, oil, salt and nothing else. Woe betide the TV chef who thinks a clove of garlic or a couple capers might spice it up a bit. That's why Jamie Oliver got so much stick about chorizo in paella. Paella and arroz (rice) are interchangeable words in some situations but paella has fixed versions. If you want to cook rice with things in it that's fine - to each their own - but if you want to call it a paella the ingredients are limited and unalterable. The Spanish thinking is that you should not tamper with perfection. That perfection may be in anything; there are strong opinions about everything from black pudding, ham, cheese, cherries and oil through to how to serve suckling pig or what the perfect squid sandwich looks like.

Given this interest and passion for food the quality of the fare in run of the mill restaurants is really surprising. The menú del día, the daily menú, the set meal, is a Spanish institution. It's becoming less fashionable in big cities but it's still available all over the place. They're cheap enough and they're usually fine. There are (routinely) three courses and the price varies but let's say that they're about 10 or 11€. I can't remember though the last time that I ate a menú that really impressed me. Let me say again that they're fine. Perfectly edible, occasionally imaginative, extremely good value and plentiful. For me a bloke in a restaurant in a restaurant in Elda summed up the usual situation. To the habitual question, from the server, asking if the food had been good the chap avoided the equally inevitable reply and said "normal" which translates as fine, fine in that not wishing to get involved way, fine with the provisos of mass catering, fine in the way that someone with persistent arthritic pain answers the question as to how they are.

The prompt for this post came because we had our first menú for over three months this Sunday, in Santa Pola. The 12€ included a salad which was fine, a bit overcold and lacking in the usual spoonful of tuna top centre. The mushrooms in a such and such sauce sounded great but turned out to be deep fried McCain type jobs. Blindfolded I wouldn't have known what I was eating but they were fine. I had the cachopo as a main which is a dangerous choice - it's basically a battered steak, cheese and ham fritter - they can be quality food and yet so many times they taste like something out of a freezer at Iceland. The watermelon was nearly frozen but fine and the coffee was okey dokey too. Uninspiring, forgettable and perfectly acceptable. I wouldn't ever go back to the eatery out of choice but if that were all there were then, well, fine.

Now lots of people would disagree with me and I plead guilty to being old and grumpy. We have a local Indian restaurant. People keep reporting how good it is both face to face and in the social media. We thought it was average to poor when we first tried it within days of its opening. We listened to the rave reviews and we thought, maybe, they'd needed to get into their stride so we tried again. I thought it was poor. Covid 19 strikes and the restaurant is quick to take advantage of the rules and pushes its takeaway menu. The reviews from Brits are eulogistic. It must be me, I think, so we spend with them again. Terribly boring and rather unpleasant was my critique. Now maybe it's just me. Then again no, because, every now and again we bump into a restaurant, and it's never a menú place, where the nuances of the food are important, a place that reminds me of that conversation about the rightness, or not, of peas in a stew.

Lines on a map

Amazingly it is now 13 years since Maggie took up a job in Ciudad Rodrigo. Ciudad Rodrigo is a small town in Salamanca province in the autonomous community of Castilla y Leon. It's just 30 km from the Portuguese border. When I needed a service on my Mini, not surprisingly, the Spanish Mini Internet site directed me to the nearest Mini garage in Spain, in Salamanca city, nearly 100 km away. The nearest Mini dealer was actually in Guarda, in Portugal, just 70 km away.

A little less romantically Pinoso is in Alicante province on the frontier with Murcia. Maybe here I should clarify how Spain is administratively and politically carved up. The smallest unit is the municipality. Each municipality has a town hall. In our case Culebrón is in the municipality of Pinoso. We pay Pinoso town hall for lots of services like water supply and rubbish collection and it's where we go for administrative tasks like planning permissions or licences to burn garden waste. In turn Pinoso is in the province of Alicante so, for some services we have to go via the provincial capital, Alicante city, or maybe to an office in a larger, nearby town. The province of Alicante is in the autonomous community of Valencia, called La Comunitat Valenciana or the Valencian Community. Our autonomous community has three provinces - Alicante, Valencia and Castellón.

This structure of municipality, province and autonomous community holds good for most of Spain. Some autonomous communities are not divided into provinces. Our next door neighbour, Murcia, for instance is just one unit - The Region of Murcia. It's the same for other autonomous communities like Cantabria, La Rioja and Madrid and there are other variations.

This division is quite rigid. When I signed on the dole for instance I signed on at an office in Alicante province and I might have been offered jobs in Denia, about 140kms away, but I wouldn't be offered suitable jobs in nearby Yecla or Jumilla because they are in the Region of Murcia. I wasn't able to register in Murcia because I didn't live there.

So, back to Pinoso. Pinoso has nearly 8,000 registered inhabitants of whom about 500 are Britons. The very marked British presence in Pinoso owes something to the fact that Pinoso is a wild border town. Villages like Raspay, Cañada del Trigo, Gabrieles and Zarza (for instance) are a stones throw from Pinoso but they are in Murcia, in three different municipalities in fact. Equally people from Chinorlet and Casas del Señor would naturally shop in Pinoso, as the nearest town, but although those villages are in Alicante they are in the municipality of Monóvar. Under normal circumstances there's nothing to stop you driving your Berlingo in from Cañada or cycling in from Raspay to have your hair cut or get a coffee in Pinoso. Nonetheless the people who live in those villages don't figure in the Pinoso population numbers (because they don't live in the municipality) nor can they use services in Pinoso such as schools or health services. If you live on the other side of  the border, in Murcia, and you call 112 the fire engine, police car or ambulance won't come from Pinoso - it will come from further away.

Now comes the virus, comes Covid 19. Cross border travel is limited, banned in fact. I think, though I'm not sure, that there has been some sort of local arrangement between Pinoso and those nearby villages about sensible breaking of that rule - allowing people from just over the border to do their usual supermarket shop in their usual supermarket rather than have to do a 70 km round trip. But there is a limit to that leniency. 

As the confinement has started to loosen up things have started to re-open, amongst them the ITV stations. The ITV is the vehicle road worthiness test. The nearest test centres for Pinoso are in Yecla or Jumilla but both of those are in Murcia. On the wrong side of the uncrossable frontier. Going there, at the moment, is not permitted. Of course Britons being Britons are sure that it can't be that cut and dried and the questions, misinformation and personal stories abound.

There was a post on Facebook asking about going to Jumilla for an ITV during the quarantine. Jumilla is the preferred station because it is perceived as being slightly more lenient than other stations. Personally, after an incident with the steering on a Skoda 1000MB the day after an MOT in Hull in 1972, I'm all for the strictest vehicle tests, but that's another story. 

The question reminded me of an absurdity about the vehicle tests here in the Comunitat Valenciana. It was something I knew but which I'd half forgotten. I think it was back in 2004 that Valencia decided to introduce an additional test to control noise levels. My guess is that this was a weapon to fight those incredibly noisy mopeds and the like rather than to penalise your average Ford Mondeo driver but, nonetheless, the Valencian Community has a requirement that vehicles normally resident in the community must pass this noise test. The test is not a requirement in other communities. The ITV is, supposedly, a national test. Pop into an ITV testing station when you're in Cataluña and you're good for Andalucia or Extremadura or wherever. That's what Central Government says. But Valencia says that for its residents they have to be able to prove that their vehicle passes the noise test. I think it can be done separately so you could pass the ITV in la Rioja and then, within a month, do the noise test somewhere in Valencia but it's obviously easier to just get it done at ITV time. This means it's just possible that an overzealous Guardia Civil, fresh out of the academy and working Traffic, might hand out a fine for not having passed the noise test. I'm not sure what the outcome in court would be but I do know that going to court is an expensive and laborious process.

Learning things in books

You will remember that I have a theory that the majority of Spaniards classify birds into just three types:

1: Pajaros are biggish birds like blackbirds and pigeons. Pajaro in English translates as bird.

2: Pajaritos are smallish robin or sparrow sized birds. This is just the word pajaro with the termination -ito which is used for diminutives. An English example might be book and booklet or pig and piglet where the -let suggests something smaller.

3: Pato is used for birds with webbed feet, swimming birds like geese and swans. Pato translates directly as duck.

On more than one occasion I have asked a Spaniard to identify a bird, for instance, what I now know is a hoopoe or, maybe, I describe a magpie and and ask for the Spanish word for such a bird. The answer to both questions is pajaro. I find this amusing. Obviously my observation is partially true at best; there are lots of Spaniards who know birds. However, I have never been one to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

So, a little while ago I read a book about Magellan sailing around the world for the first time, proving that the Atlantic and Pacific were linked. Actually Magellan was killed in the Philippines but, the at one time mutinous, Juan Sebastián Elcano brought the Victoria home to complete that first ever circumnavigation.

In the book there is a quote which I recognised as endorsing my view. Magellan's boats, or ships if you prefer, were looking for a way through the waterway which is now called the Straits of Magellan. Part of the sentence in the book says "Exploran otras dos con igual resulatado: la bahía de los Patos, llamada así porque abundan en ella los pingüinos..." or, in English, "They explore two more (bays) with the same result: Duck Bay, so called because in it the penguins were so abundant.."

So, you see, historical, geographical and literary precedent.

Warts and all

One Friday, ages ago, at the monthly few minutes of silence organised by the Plataforma El Pinós contra la violència de gènere I got talking to a couple. The bloke was a patent and trademark lawyer and he wanted to learn a bit of English.  We swapped phone numbers and later arranged to meet in a bar every week to speak to each other for a while in Castilian and for a while in English. Oh, and just in case your Valenciano is a bit rusty, a clumsy translation of the event would be The Pinoso Platform Against Gender Violence.

It's important here that I say Castilian or Castellano and not Spanish because there is no doubt that Jesús does not consider himself to be a Castilian; he's Valencian. He identifies as Catalan. At first that caused a bit of tension. He's really quite vehement in his nationalist views, but over the months it has become just one of those things that we are able to joke about. As he explains some Catalan point of view to me I am often reminded of that Clark Gable film where Mr. G ends up in a drinking match with the crew of a Russian patrol boat. Toasts along the lines of "Cheers, to Marconi, the inventor of radio", are countered with "Nostrovia, to Alexander Stepanovich Popov, who really invented radio".
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After 84 days of linguistic abstinence we will be meeting for a chat tomorrow.

It's strange about Spanish, the Castilian, world Spanish variety, not the localised Catalan Spanish. I often complain that my Spanish is crap. I use that word. It is. I make a mistake in every sentence – errors which I recognise a nanosecond after uttering them. I curse my mistakes and mentally self flagellate. Yet my Spanish is reasonably good, well it is for an old fat English bloke who doesn't mix much. I can listen to the radio, read a novel or a newspaper article and, given the opportunity, I'd be overjoyed to get back to the cinema and see a film dubbed into Spanish. I can't though listen to the radio, read that novel or newspaper article or watch that film as easily in Spanish as I can in English.

It could be interesting tomorrow. I have had even less reason to speak Spanish over the last twelve weeks than my pitiful usual and I'd be amazed if Jesús has kept up his English. I know he's been swotting for exams. I'm rather expecting a pidgin and morale sapping session. The chilled beer will though, I'm sure, be excellent.