Summer drinks

Have you noticed that the Spaniards drink their beer cold? I mean cold. Not chilled; cold. If you go into a bar, run by people of other nationalities, in Spain, the difference can be noticeable. That idea of crisp, cool and refreshing is one of the reasons why telly adverts associate friends laughing together, eating together, swimming at the beach and drinking beer together with summer. Beer isn't a traditional Spanish drink, it didn't really take off  till the 1970s and it wasn't till 1982 that beer took over from wine as the biggest selling alcoholic drink. 

Spaniards notice when Britons, and other Northern Europeans, put ice in their wine. Odd really considering that Spaniards pour their hot coffee and tea over ice all summer through.

When you're out and about, when it's too late at night to drink beer or wine, and we move on to mixed drinks nearly all of them get ice. When the Spanish mix a copa - spirit and mixer type drinks like rum and coke or vodka and lemon - ice is the order of the day. Sometimes there is so much ice in a gin and tonic, gin tonic in Spanish, that it might cause nasal frostbite. It also serves to disguise a less than generous serving of gin.

Vermouth, wine spiced with a mixture of herbs, is as traditional a drink as wine itself. For vermouth to be vermouth one of the spices it has to contain is wormwood; that's what makes vermouth taste like vermouth. It's more or less analogous to sparkling wines from the Champagne region being champagne and sparkling wine from Norfolk being sparkling wine. The most well known Spanish sparkling wine is cava which comes from specific areas, generally in Cataluña. By the way it's pronounced cavva not carver. Vermouth is so Spanish that it gives the name to a period of the day, just before lunch, la hora del vermut. The red versions usually get a twist of orange, the whites get a twist of lemon, olives too and, of course, an ice cube or two – a splash of soda water, sifón, is optional. Drink vermouth for an immersive cultural experience. 

And let's not to forget anis. It's an aniseed flavoured drink more or less like pastis, raki, ouzo etc. There are a couple of local producers near Pinoso, in Monforte del Cid. Anis comes in sweet and dry versions and a dry anis diluted about four to one with water and with an ice cube added, locally called a paloma, was a very common summer drink. That reminds me that I should get a bottle in.

Sangria always confuses me. So far as I know sangria is a Spanish (and Portuguese) alcoholic drink made from wine, slices of fruit, gaseosa (a sort of fizzy sugary water a bit like the cheap lemonade of my youth) with some sugar and a touch of liqueur (often Spanish brandy). The reason Sangria has me confused is that, certainly in the past, Spaniards hardly ever drank it. They left it to the tourists but, nowadays, you'll often see plastic cups of the stuff, ready prepared and labelled as sangria on market type food stalls. What Spaniards tended to drink, and it is quite similar, is tinto de verano, red summer wine, which is just cheap red wine, gaseosa, ice and, usually, a twist of lemon. In the way that the modern world has of marketing some inferior product masquerading behind a name it's difficult to decide which is which among the industrial ready made mixes that belittle both the original products.

Just before I move off booze a special mention for calimocho. This was the drink of poor young people who wanted to get drunk at one of the outdoor street drinking sessions (park up your car, best if it's got huge speakers, play reggaeton and drink calimocho) called botellones. Obviously this is about as true as Britons wearing socks with their sandals or Germans having no sense of humour. Indeed a Spaniard told me the other day it was their preferred drink! Calimocho proper uses the cheapest wine available, think Don Simon cooking wine in cartons, mixed with Coke - Coca Cola that is. Nowadays, on Friday and Saturday evenings, outside supermarkets, what I see are young people pouring vodka into the big bottles of Fanta instead. 

As well as the iced coffee and tea the other, alcohol free, summer drinks are granizado and horchata. Britons often refer to granizado as Slush Puppy but that's a bit like using the word crab to describe the things that were once called crabsticks. There is a vague similarity. Spanish granizado is made by mixing whatever gives the flavour, usually lemon or coffee, with sugar and water and then cooling and stirring the mixture continuously to give flavoured ice with the consistency of wallpaper paste. There is a significant difference to the Slush Puppy type granizado, where the flavour is added, as a syrup, to granulated ice. Granizado tastes of whatever it tastes of to the last morsel whereas, with the syrup versions, you end up sucking on ice pellets. There is a version that you see from time to time, called agua de cebada which is made from an infusion of barley grains (cebada) strained and sweetened. I haven't seen any for ages.

And last, but not least, horchata. Horchata is associated with the Valencian region and particularly with the town of Alboraya. They sell horchata in supermarkets and in bottles in most bars but you should really buy it in a horchateria or horchata shop - sometimes the ice cream shops do horchata too. There the horchata will be home made. The chufas, we Brits call them tiger nuts, are mixed with water, left to soak, crushed and sieved to produce a thick liquid which is then mixed with water and sugar. Again it gets cooled before serving.

I set out to just name a few summer drinks and, as always, the topic has got away from me. I'm trying to stop here but then I remembered that, as well as the hundreds of other drinks available there are two more local offerings that deserve a mention. One is simple grape juice or mosto. The other is Bitter Kas (Kas is a trademark but the drink is always ordered like that) which tastes like Campari without the booze.

Now I'll go.

On the power of explanation

It’s the same with almost anything. The first time it’s all a bit hit and miss; the next time it’s usually better. I’ve just realised what you’re thinking about. That’s probably true too, but that wasn’t where I was going. I was thinking more about the tram in Alicante as an example. I’ve ridden on the tram a few times, but it’s nearly always several months, or even years, between the rides. I knew there was a button to buy a ticket for the central zone, but I couldn’t find the damned thing amidst all the text on the machine. It turns out that it’s TAM, Tarifas Zona A Metropolitana. I'd only just worked out the system as we pulled into our destination station. I even wondered about not paying.

Years ago, I had a "neurological incident," and after a few days in hospital, I ended up going to the neurology outpatients department at Elda Hospital. The first time I turned up in the outpatients area, where they have lots of the specialist services, I thought I’d descended into the seventh circle of Hell. There were people everywhere. After a while, though, I worked out the system and, despite the hustle and bustle, I realised that it all made perfect sense.

I had to go to the ear, nose and throat (ENT) department recently. They’re in the same part of the hospital as neurology, and I’d remembered enough of the drill to be completely unfazed by the experience. I just sat down, near the appropriate door, read my book, and waited to be called, quite sure that would be the system.

Obviously, some situations are more important than others. The ticketing system for the queue at the Foreigner's Office isn't that different from the ticketing system for the delicatessen counter in the local supermarket. One, though, is essential if you wish to stay in the country legally, and the other makes for a tasty snack. It obviously helps if, like Lizarran or Wetherspoons, the organisers put up big notices to explain the system.

After my visit to the ENT people, the unpronounceable otorrinolaringología department (easier to say otorrino), I needed more tests. They said they would phone me. Nowadays, I know that great big long phone numbers aren’t some prince from Equatorial Guinea trying to steal my money, but a call from either Corte Inglés or the Health Service. I presume it's a number based on a central "switchboard" and various extensions. As I have no current dealings with the department store, the choice was easy. I used to get flustered by these calls; nowadays, I’m much better at keeping it slow and steady. I was, of course, driving when they rang, but I remained cucumber like - I asked questions: Is that 8 in the morning or the evening? When I went through a sort of confirmatory checklist with time, place, department, etc., it was the person ringing me who wasn't quite sure. "I'll ring you back with the department," she said. And she did.

So I’m there, in the specialist outpatients clinic before the cock has crowed. The gatekeeper is quite a strangely shaped woman who speaks a language that escapes me. Pointing and the odd word of comprehensible Castellano makes me plump for an information window. I wait there, I show my health card, and I’m given some bits of paper. Most of the other people have similar bits of paper. Being among a group of people all going through the same process makes it easier. I can see that the first port of call is for a blood test. As I wait, someone wearing white scrubs, leaning out of a door further down the corridor, shouts, “Anyone for cardio? You can do it in any order.” I look at my bits of paper; one has “cardiogram” written on it. The penny drops: three bits of paper, three tests.

I do my cardio, the ECG, but the conversation between the two women, as they push my results into an envelope, “We’ll let them sort that out,” isn’t that reassuring.

I go back to blood tests. I always confound blood nurses; I appear to have no veins. I can only presume that ancient ancestors lived in Transylvania and developed the feature as an anti-vampire measure. At one point, I have three medical people giving me different instructions: “Make a fist, raise your arm, tense your arm, relax.” I make the vampire joke; they grimace, but the blood eventually flows. More than once in the past, blood has been taken from the veins on my hand or between my fingers.

Last one: X-ray. I’m waiting, I'm reading. Another person in coloured scrubs asks me what my name is. Ten minutes later, she asks me if I’m waiting for an X-ray. I say yes. She asks me why I didn’t hand in my piece of paper. I could say because nobody asked me, or because that isn't the same process I've just followed in two other departments within five metres of where I am now sitting. But I don’t, and I get my X-rays easily enough.

Only once, in a medical situation, have I ever got snotty about this. In Huntingdon, in an NHS hospital at 9 p.m., I told some doctor-type, who was only speaking to me in single words, that “right” and “trousers” did not amount to instructions, and that while he may go through the same routine thirty times a day, I didn't, and he should show more respect to his patients. He needed to be a bit more Wetherspoons, a bit more Lizarran, and a lot less Alicante tram.

P.S.: I asked Microsoft Copilot to draw the picture. AI obviously has trouble with the spelling of anestesiología.

Liquid Gold

We all know about wine tasting. Spit or swallow. You may have temporarily forgotten but, if you're mature and British, you'll know the wine tasting competition in Tales of Terror with Peter Lorre and Vincent Price. If it temporarily escapes your memory then YouTube remembers it.

Maggie, who I live with, appreciates wine. One of her many cultural endeavours is visiting bodegas (wineries). She makes me go along even though I'm more beer and brandy man myself - apart, not shaken or stirred Mr Bond. The normal routine is that you pay for a bodega visit and see a few vines, some steel tanks, some big rubber hoses, some oak barrels and, finally, the wine tasting. That's the bit most people, except the designated driver, like best. You get to drink three or four or five glasses of wine from the bodega, usually with a bit of ham and cheese to nibble. There are lots of variations and each of the wineries tends to have a different emphasis. The quality of the explanation and what you get shown also varies, but almost all the flaws are swept away by the wine tasting. Don't think bar though, think education. The tasting session will involve lots of information about what makes a wine better or worse and ideas about the process of wine tasting.

Some time ago, I found out that the Estrella Levante brewery in Espinardo, Murcia did tours and tastings. Now beer sampling sounded more up my street. The tasting session at the brewery was really well organised, with a sort of placemat that had tips about tasting the beer, a scoring system based on several characteristics and other ways of deciding about the quality of the stuff you were pouring down your throat. The placemat wasn't exactly astrophysics, but it certainly added to the audience participation in the tasting session.

Now, wine and beer tasting sound perfectly routine to me, but last weekend we tried something new and went on an oil tasting session. Not, you understand the Castrol type product but olive.

If you're a wine drinker and if red, white or rosé is no longer precise enough you may have got into the habit of asking for the Lithuanian Chardonnay, the Australian Petit Verdot or maybe an Argentinian Malbec. Apparently, it's similar with olive oil. Oil buffs don't just check that it's extra virgin - instead of virgin or refined oil - they worry about the variety of olive. The quality oils are made from this or that olive, and just like wine, or whisky, there is also blended product. The oil we are talking about for tasting is only the best, that's virgin extra; the stuff that is extracted in the first pressing of olives harvested recently and directly from the trees. There are lots of other olive oils that are cheaper and come from the second pressings or use some sort of chemical extraction process, but the pukka stuff, the quality stuff, is extra virgin.

There are at least 1,000 olive varieties. I nearly remember the names of two; Picual and Arbequina. The Arbequina gives a nice, easy-to-use, smooth sort of oil; the Picual is a bit spicier, a bit more bitter. Nowadays, if I'm visiting someone in Spain, I know that olive oil as a gift will go down well, and also that there are loads and loads of mills spurting out quality product alongside the everyday stuff. 

When we went to the Deortegas almazara (oil mill), near Yecla, we tasted oils made from five different varieties of olives - Arbequina, Picual, Cornicabra, Hojiblanca and Frantoio. We also tried a blended oil. Just like the Estrella brewery, this almazara provided us with a placemat with some hints as to what to look for. The oils were presented in little blue glass bowls, and we were told that cupping the glass to warm the neat oil before we drank it would release the full range of aromas. The blue glass is to hide the colour, as there is, apparently, a common belief that the greener oils are better, whereas in reality, it's not the colour but factors such as taste, smell and viscosity that mark the quality. Indeed good oils can vary in colour from light yellow or gold through to geen. It simply depends on the variety, time of harvest, and the region where the fruit is grown. Once we'd drunk the oil, we also tried the same oils on good white bread. The idea is that bread is the most neutral carrier for the oil. It was noticeable how the bread affected the taste.

We've done lots of oil mills in the region before, and we've often sampled their wares, but this was the first time that we've done a structured cata (tasting). I thought it was good fun. I also thought how interesting it would be for visitors. An added plus was that unlike the wine catas, where I always seem to be the driver, on this occasion I could join in without worrying about causing accidents or taking breath tests on the way home. So a good activity for Methodists as well as vegans.

The photo at the top shows the fanlike attachment that goes around the olive tree which acts as a net to catch the fruit when the tractor shakes the tree.

The almazara we visited was Deortegas though I'm sure there are many more.

How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix

We were in the village hall; we'd finished eating; alcohol was involved. I was still managing to speak relatively coherent Spanish. Someone who works for Pinoso Medios de Comunicación (MCM), was talking to her pal. She was showing him something from a Facebook or Twitter page - sorry, I know, I'll try to say X from now on. I forget why I became involved in the conversation - maybe I was invited, maybe I muscled in drunkenly but, muscle in I did. The Facebook or X thing was mine. I vaguely remembered it. I had been complaining, in a gentle sort of way, that the local media were a mouthpiece for the current administration and responsible for promoting a Trumpton type image for the town - peace, harmony and tranquility.

MCM Pinoso has an FM and Internet radio station, an X feed, a Facebook page, a website and it publishes to the town hall website. There used to be a television station in analogue days. Now there is some sort of agreement with a local TV firm to broadcast special events from time to time. There may well be other outlets I've forgotten about but those are the main ones.

In the days when mobile phones were almost unknown, and the Internet was creaky, the town hall in Pinoso had the radio station, a local analogue TV channel and a monthly magazine called El Cabeço, named for the salt dome hill that overlooks the town. There was also an independent newspaper, one printed on paper with ink that stained your fingers, called Canfali. The newspaper was weekly. It covered the Vinalopó Medio; a geographical area that includes Pinoso and towns from Petrer and Monforte del Cid down to Hondón de los Frailes. I don't think Canfali had much of a circulation and one week it simply wasn't available and never re-appeared. A little later, a retired local school teacher tried running a local website with news, opinions, and quite a lot of reader participation but that folded too. There was a Facebook-based newspaper type publication called El Eco de Pinoso and I remember at least one locally based website trying to be a sort of Internet newspaper for the town - there were probably others, but none of them ever really became equivalent to a local rag. 

So, the only real survivors of the digital carnage, at least in Pinoso, were the media funded by the local town hall. They tried, for a while, to keep Cabeço, the print magazine going. It had always been free, but as it thrashed around in its death throes, they tried charging for the print version as well as giving it away free on the town hall website in pdf format. The truth is though that a monthly magazine just doesn't fit in a world where my mobile phone based news feed often picks up over 200 "proper" news articles per day. The regional newspaper, at least the one I know about, is called Información, I think it's Alicante based, and if there's a murder or something newsworthy in Pinoso that newspaper will pick it up.

Back at the village hall. The friend of the MCM person was saying that, in the old days, in El Cabeço, there was room for the opposition political parties to have their say, to disrupt the hegemony of the one remaining news outlet for Pinoso. I had joined the conversation late, the whisky was going down extraordinarily easily and I didn't remember my X message particularly well. I'd probably complained that MCM failed to report on the non-political local stuff, that it had nothing to say about the roadworks here or there, that the information about who was the new director of the local town band or the town basketball team was scant, that there was nothing on planning applications and even births, deaths and marriages was missing. I also probably suggested that the reporting of crimes and misdemeanours was a bit Truman Show to give the impression that Pinoso was free of drunken drivers, traffic accidents, break-ins and robberies. In fact, I probably moaned that there was almost nothing that wasn't town hall sanctioned. To put it simply - whitewash. It was only when I listened a bit better that the other person was arguing a suppression of any news that wasn't promulgated by the local ruling party - a political news blackout on anything that the local mayor wouldn't like.

The counter argument is that in these information-rich days, it's dead easy to subscribe to the social media of the other political parties, to find a different point of view but most people who look at the town hall media outlets don't approach the information published there thinking of political bias - they're just keeping up to date and they would no more look at the opposition political party media outlets any more than they look at the media outlets branded as being property of the ruling local party.

I don't think I'd necessarily go with the view that MCM is Pravda inspired but it could certainly try to be a bit more of a news outlet and report on some of the dissent especially given that I suppose we local taxpayers keep it afloat.

You'd think I'd know my name and address

My name's a bit tricky for a lot of Spaniards. My mum calls me Christopher, most other people use Chris. Cristofer exists as a Spanish name, as does the more traditional Cristobal. There are a lot of Cristiáns and Cristinas who use Cris as the shortened version. Nonetheless, Chris, said with an English lilt, is usually too much for most Spaniards, at first pass and, often, I have to revert to pronouncing my name a bit like Kreees or Kreeestoffair for it to be understood. If I'm only booking a table or something it's not really a problem, any old name will do, but lots of people are surprisingly picky about how it's spelled.

My middle name is John. This is a clear misspelling for most Spaniards because the H isn't in the right place. I'm not sure that there is a way to spell this, my middle name, using Spanish spelling rules. The usual best try is to spell it as Jhon. On any number of official documents I am Jhon. 

John also comes after my first name - Christopher John - so, obviously, using the Spanish naming format, which is a name plus two surnames, my first surname is John. I have got used to responding in a medical situation or a government office when they call for a Señor John. Sometimes, when I've helped acquaintances with a hospital visit I know that I'm with Jane Brown or John Smith but I'm not nimble enough to recognise Señor Susan for Jane Susan Brown or Señor Alfred for John Alfred Smith.

My family name is Thompson. The spelling isn't at all Spanish. I used to be able to say that my name was the same as the brand of TV because there was a famous maker of TVs here called Tomson but they seem to have disappeared from the scene. I can also say "sin ton ni son", which is a phrase that means something like "without rhyme nor reason". That both explains the phonetic structure of my name and lightens the mood. Usually, though, this is a completely redundant conversation because they push a scrap of paper my way and say "write it down".

Spaniards can be despotic in the way they change names to be Castilian names. Until quite recently Catalans called Carles, would be called Carlos and Neus would become Nieves. It still happens but less so. Mind you the King of the United Kingdom is nearly always referred to as Carlos III of Inglaterra. His lads are called Enrique and Guillermo.

My address is a problem too. I live in Culebrón. Culebrón is something akin to the English villages of Pratts Bottom or Bitchfield. The name means something. People are apt to comment. Culebrón means a soap opera, and people think it's another one of my little jokes. Once they've got over that, we have to go through the rest of the address. Basically, our address is just the house number and the village name. Doing this over the phone or filling in an online form can be difficult. Many of the databases have a required field with options like street, avenue or place. If this is being done over the phone the operator usually simply chooses one at random. If I'm filling in the form I try any number of the variants that I've seen over the years. The result is that we live at several different addresses: Culebrón Street, Culebrón Close, Culebrón Court, etc.

I should add that Pinoso, our mothership town, has two names. Pinoso in Castilian and El Pinós in Valencian. We've had people visiting us in their own cars who don't recognise that the two names have the same root.

Then there's the postcode. Unlike the, almost individual, postcodes of the UK the Spanish system is much more like the US zip code. One code covers a biggish area. Murcia, for instance, with a population of nearly 500,000 people, has 18 postcodes. Pinoso has one. Given the option that postcode, 03650, is the one I use. However, that same database which assigned us a new street/close/avenue has another potential little trick up its sleeve. The official postcode for Culebrón is 03658, but when we use that postcode, the mail is sent to the Salinas Post Office, 20km away, where it disappears. The autofill forms on the Internet are often unforgiving - if Culebrón exists on the database then its postcode is 03658 and however much I want to put in 03650 the computer says no. The tussles provide another variant address.

Let sound be unbound

I don't know if you've noticed but Spain can get quite noisy. 

There is a sort of noise that is common in social situations. There are a lot of people, everyone is talking, so to be heard above the general din, one needs to talk more loudly. By degrees the noise level increases so that shouting becomes necessary. It happens in places like restaurants all the time. It is often made worse because, especially around here, the buildings are made of materials that have no sound deadening effect whatsoever and buildings tend to be very echoey.

Then there is the sort of noise where people are not competing with the general hubbub, they are competing with each other. Even in a general conversation, Spaniards do not follow the British custom of waiting until one person has finished before they wade in with their point of view, anecdote, or counter-argument. Britons do push a little, conversationally speaking, especially when the debate warms up but, basically, we do our best to take it in turn. Spaniards don't work like that. Before the speaker has finished, the listener has anticipated the end of the phrase and responded. I was listening to an interview on the radio and the interviewee never drew breath while the interviewer moved from one question to the next. It wasn't that the interviewee didn't respond to each and every question it was simply that it was an unending conversational stream. I reckon it must be taught from birth, like the ¡Viva! response or how to use a fan.

There has been a bit of disquiet in the village about certain events and particularly the organisation of the annual fiesta. When a new village "mayoress" was appointed, she organised a meeting to discuss the fiesta. Lots of people, us included, went to the meeting. Nearly everyone there had a view about something fiesta-related and wished to share it with everyone else. Often, two or three people would start their interjection at the same time - extra volume was the chief tool in making sure that their views got the first look in. Meanwhile, little knots of people were having off piste conversation arising from what had already been said in the general forum. The result? At any one time, there might be three or four, high volume statements being addressed to the room and maybe four or five private conversations going on at the same time. 

Given a following wind, a room with good acoustics, and generally favourable conditions, I can, just about, hang on to a full-tilt conversation in Castilian Spanish. When there is a lot of extraneous noise, and especially if, in the heat of the moment, someone resorts to their Valencian mother tongue then the street version of sodomized comes to mind as the appropriate adjective to describe my chances of comprehension.

Spaniards also talk to each other when they are bored with what's going on around them. We go on quite a lot of guided visits and I find that oftentimes the guides are less than inspiring. In a castle – instead of interesting stuff like the link between the architecture and defence and attack tactics, or about the comforts and discomforts of castle life, it's dates, facts, and figures. At the Bronze Age site there is nothing about the sort of food people might have prepared in the ceramic pots you're seeing or how the village social hierarchy was possibly organised. Instead it's the chemical composition of the clay that made the pots and a series of dates related to the burial plots. The sort of guide who repeats facts, who is repeating a well worn script, is on autopilot. They are the sort of guide who doesn't have time for those who dawdle over an information board or want to take a picture. Very soon, the guide stops waiting for the people who don't move briskly enough and will begin their next list of facts before the tardy visitors catch up. The knock on effect is that the audience members who arrive half way through an explanation lose interest and start their own conversation. It's my theory that the higher the volume of the crowd on any guided visit, the more boring the guide. 

An interesting afterthought. Someone once told me that Spaniards don't dress up for funerals because, during the dictatorship, they had no choice. Not dressing up nowadays is an almost unnoticed demonstration of basic freedoms. In the book I'm currently reading Almudena Grandes describes how people, in the 1950s, chose tables distant from other tables in cafes and talked in low mumbles in case what they said were overheard. It wasn't that they were plotting but it was always possible that something they said may be overheard and used against them by some potential snitch looking to curry favour. Nowadays no such threat exists so it's possible for the sound to be unbound.

6: The Routine I Forgot

I only remembered this routine because the date to do it popped up in my diary last Sunday. "Six weeks since I sprayed the palm," it said. We didn't have a palm tree in Huntingdon so I think I can safely say it has a Spanish flavour.

The single palm tree we have in Culebrón has grown a couple of metres since we moved in. Our garden is a bit like a concentration camp for plants—it houses mainly the dead and the dying—but the palm tree seems relatively well. Of course, it's menaced, like all palm trees, by the picudo rojo, the palm weevil. The picudo lays eggs in palm trees, and the larvae bore into the palms, eventually killing them.

When the town hall first warned of this weevil they also offered programmes to remove infested trees (burning them can spread the weevil), they also recommended a person to check the health, or otherwise, of anyone's trees (I keep calling it a tree but I understand that palms aren't technically trees but some sort of grass-like plant). The bloke who came along, Javier, is still the man I ring up every 18 months or so to shimmy up the tree and hack off the excess branches. He said the palm was healthy and told me about Crispulo, who would spray the tree to keep it clear of the picudo. I used Crispulo a couple of times, but by then, my internet research suggested the chemicals and biological treatments that could be used to keep the palm healthy.

At the time, anyone could buy those chemicals and spray the palms, so I set myself up with long wands and spray packs because the treatment needed to be applied every six weeks. At first, the advice said there was no need to spray in the winter, but that changed soon after I started. As did the availability of the chemicals. At first, you could spray if you did a short course on how to spray safely. Then the amount of chemical you could buy at any one time was restricted, and finally, the chemicals were not exactly outlawed but limited to specialist use and users.

I've read lots about this weevil and how to keep it down. The internet, as always, provides whatever answer you want—people will sell you all sorts of things that they say will keep the tree safe. I've been very tempted a couple of times to go for one of the easier solutions but the two professionals, Javier the tree man and a bloke who looks after the palmeral attached to the palm museum in Elche, have both told me that the biological treatments are usable but nowhere near as effective as the old-style chemicals. Advice that I've read from regional governments and other reliable sources also basically opts for the chemicals, maybe with the biological treatments as useful for the cooler months. I was shocked when I checked the price of the biological controls - both the larvae eating worms and the fungus. Trouble is coming, though, because although we have only one tree and I only spray every six weeks, my stash of out-of-date chemicals is about to run out. I suppose after that I'll see if Crispulo is still in business. If not, maybe I just have to hope that the tree is now tall enough and that the picudo can't fly that high. Apparently, the stumpy Canary palms are much more liable to be infested than the tall Washingtonia palms and as ours is midway between - well, maybe.

5: Routines - the odds and ends

This is the fifth, and hopefully the last, in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly. As usual I've attempted to add in the Spanish angle.

If there is a culture of car washing on Sunday in Spain, I've never noticed it. Most Spanish towns have by-laws to stop people washing their cars in the street. Most Spaniards live in flats anyway, so their access to the water to wash the car is a bit restricted. Instead they take their motors to a car wash. Even though we have space and water I do too.

There are tunnel washes in Spain, the ones with the brushes that tear off aerials and wing mirrors from time to time. We have one in Pinoso and it seems popular. The most common type though are the pressure washers available on the majority of filling station forecourts. Box is the word used by Spaniards for pits in motor racing, and for the bays in the emergency area of a hospital. It also seems to be the most popular word to describe the places that you pressure wash a car. 

I try, when possible, to do all my shopping errands on one day. The most time consuming, by far, is the weekly supermarket shop. We have four chain supermarkets in Pinoso and a couple of smaller grocery shops. None of them has one of those self service auto checkouts, so we still wander around the shelves, with a basket or trolley, and then go to a manual checkout where we unload to the belt, wait for the items to be scanned and then reload the trolley or pack everything into bags. Although most people take bags with them you can still buy plastic bags at the checkout in Spain. You may see it as an advantage or a disadvantage that being served at a till in a small town means that there are a lot of check out conversations - it's nice if you're the one having the conversation and not so good if the person in front has a long medical history or family trauma to relate.

If any of the supermarkets have an internet service up and running for Pinoso, I'm not aware of it. The supermarkets are only big enough to be food shops plus a few other household items. The nearest superstore, the sort of place that sells underwear, car tyres and muesli would be the Carrefour in Petrer, some 25km away. Most of the supermarkets have some sort of loyalty card/application, but not all.

Our home cooking too has a Spanish bent. Maggie cooks the lunch for Mondays but I generally cook the lunch the rest of the week. Our rural power supply was 2.2kW when we first bought the house. That should mean that if the 2kW kettle were on when the fridge kicked in, then the main circuit breaker should pop. Luckily, there is a lot of elasticity in the supply, so we had very little trouble. We later increased the supply to the maximum permitted without getting all the wiring rechecked, at 3.45kW. Nonetheless, we knew that the electricity was limited, so we chose a gas water heater and gas hob to reduce the load on the system. The gas comes in bottles or cylinders. Even today, piped gas is not particularly common in Spain. It's much more available than it used to be, but in the seven houses and flats I've lived in, none of them has had piped gas. It's easy enough to get cylinders delivered, but we've never bothered. We just take the empty cylinders back to any of the several places where you can exchange depleted cylinders, and money, for full ones. The blokes (I've not see a woman doing it yet) who deliver the gas are called butaneros and the jokes and witticisms around them are exactly analogous to the milkman stories of the UK.

Tuesday is usually cinema day for two reasons. It's the day when we pensioners get a special price at the cinema, just 2€, and when our closest cinema in Petrer shows films that are subtitled rather than dubbed. If there's an English-language film worth the trouble, then Tuesday is a good day to go. Even if there is only stuff in Spanish, it's a good day to take advantage of the low prices. There are other cinemas and other times to go, but Tuesday is a favourite. Mind you our nearest cinema, next door to the underwear selling Carrefour, so the same 25km away, is showing a more and more restricted range of films. Hollywood pap amd nothing much else which means we often go to the cinema in Elche - a round trip of 8okm.

And that's it. Now I have to think of something else to write about.

4: Routines around Spanish

This is the fourth in the series about the very ordinary things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to write in the Spanish angle. This one doesn't quite fit into the "job" bracket but, well self imposed rules are easy to break.

If you've ever read any of my blogs, or talked to me, you'll know that I jabber on about my hand to hand combat with Castilian Spanish all the time. My joints may ache, my breathing may suggest that the end is nigh but I'm not giving up indeed I'm working on the principle, so clearly outlined in that old Anglican hymn, Christian answer boldly. While I breathe, I pray. 

The impetus to learn Spanish came from the difficulty I had in buying a beer the very first time I visited this country. For years, I didn't really put much formal time into that learning - going to a one hour a week evening class in Spanish at the local tech doesn't really add up to much over the year. The real point of those early years is that it's when I put in the hours and hours of sheer drudgery that is learning a language as an adult; grinding through unending vocabulary lists, memorising hideously boring verb tables and trying to understand bookfuls of arcane grammar rules. 

As a part of this language struggle one of my regular jobs, that isn't really a job, is that I meet someone in a bar in Pinoso every week. We've been doing it for years now. The original idea was that it would be a language exchange. The truth is that my chum speaks hardly any English and he probably never will. He's never applied himself to it. That should be to my advantage, as we spend most of the time in Spanish, but he isn't really interested in how I speak Spanish. He's much more interested in pursuing whatever we're talking about. I always come away from the sessions cursing my gaffes and errors

As well as the meetings in the bar I pay for a Spanish lesson using the italki platform – one of several networks of online language teachers. I know lots of people are loathe to use online teaching but I see nothing but advantages. It's cheap, it's flexible, you don't have to go out in the cold and rain, you don't have to sign up for anything and you can abandon tutors with complete impunity.

I've never really expected a lesson from the italki people I've talked to. Most of their teachers do offer proper structured courses but I've only ever wanted a bit of conversation. The woman I'm talking to, each week at present, and I don't have the same world view. That does guarantee that we have a pretty realistic conversation that jumps from topic to topic. I'm never happy with the quality of the conversation and I never feel there's an improvement in my level but, at least, it maintains a routine. 

Actually I also speak to someone else online. This time it's an exchange - half an hour of English for half an hour of Spanish. I found this chap through either the conversation exchange or the my language exchange website. I think we click pretty well and I enjoy the sessions. As well as general chit chat he often has particular questions about words and phrases. We never have the least difficulty filling the time. Again I'm often disappointed with my Spanish but it's ameliorated somewhat by the whole thing being more bilingual than the italki session.

3: Routines around water

This is the third in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to write in a Spanish angle.

We, well the house, has a cesspit. Nothing sophisticated, just a brick-lined hole in the ground. If we were to try and sell the house we'd have to do something about that. Legislation has changed in the years we've lived here. Now we'd either have to put in a decent septic tank or, more likely, dig a big trench to connect our house to the village drain that stops 200 metres from our front door. All the run-off from the washbasins, sink, showers and toilets goes into that cesspit, the black hole, and microorganisms do the rest. 

Lots of the toilets in Spanish bars, museums and the like have signs asking you to throw soiled toilet paper into a wastebasket. But, good Lord, we're British - we couldn't do that. What about the stench, what about the flies? No, we whizz the paper down the toilet and flush. On one occasion, that caused a problem. Basically, all the drains in, say, a bathroom or kitchen go to a central point beneath the floor of the room, the arqueta, and then join a single pipe which goes to the cesspit. In one of the en-suites, that arqueta trapped lots of unspeakable stuff. We found out because we'd had to break through the tiled floor to get to a leaking water inflow tube. With Marigolds, a bit of stretching and a lot of cursing I cleaned that out but, in order to stop the same thing happening again, I took to hurling a couple of bucketfuls of water down each of the toilets each week. 

We also have trouble with the hard water. The scale that builds up does a lot of damage. It blocks the flow reducing filters on the taps, the scale clogs up the inside of shower hoses and shower heads and it coats the heating elements of electrical water heaters with stone. One new kettle furred up so much within a month that it started to leak. I've now incorporated so many small tasks within the routine that what was once simply tipping a couple of bucketfuls now takes me around 40 minutes each week. 

Another water-related job is that I check our water meter every week to make sure that the use is more or less as expected. We've heard far too many stories of a leak on the consumer's side of the water meter that have run undetected for long periods, with resultant big bills. 

At the main stop valve, where the water comes into the house, we have a simple filter to catch at least some of the sediment. I check that every three months and change it as necessary. From that inlet point the water passes through a tube that ran, exposed, along the side of a North facing wall. The water used to freeze up several times over the winter, leaving us less fragrant for the day. When we realised why that was happening I wrapped the tube with insulation and I now check that insulation on a monthly basis, replacing jaded gaffer tape and adding bubble wrap as necessary. We didn't have a single day without water, because of frozen pipes, last winter though I suppose Global Warming may have loaned a helping hand there.

One last thing is that the our clean water supply, on the council owned side of the meter, comes in pipes that are varying depths below ground level. Every now and again a passing tractor or lorry damages the pipe and we lose our supply. There's 24 hour call out service provided by the town hall so it's not such a big deal but it can take a while to get sorted sometimes.

2: Routines around rubbish

This is the second in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to find a Spanish angle.

This is a very small job. Wherever you live there will be a local variation on how you dispose of rubbish. In most Spanish towns and cities people take their rubbish down to containers that are placed strategically around the streets. The hope is that people will separate out the stuff that can be recycled so as not to fill up the generalist bins. 

The yellow ones get containers like cans and cartons. the blue ones get paper and card and the green ones get glass. The generalist bins are also green. In some places there are brown bins that get organic waste and around here there are a couple of places that have community compost bins though they have not spread as was once promised.

The stuff that isn't organic, or container or paper or glass, goes into the ordinary bin. Theses bins are, usually, emptied late at night in the cities and towns. Pinoso has chosen a different approach. Rather than have big lorries go around in the wee small hours here there is a small truck that takes the bags that people leave outside their homes every evening. The reasoning behind not using the standard, big, neighbourhood containers is that people abuse them. They dump building rubble, worn out mattresses, old kitchen units etc either in, or more likely, alongside the bins. This causes the town halls all sorts of problems in collecting the rubbish and paying for its disposal.

In our particular case we have three of the large rubber buckets, capazos, just outside the front door where we collect the stuff for recycling. I take the containers, glass and paper type stuff to the nearest communal recycling bins when the journey ties in with another. We also have a compost bin, supplied by the town hall, in the garden. Our kitchen bin gets very little use with most stuff going for recycling or to compost.

Almost all the municipalities have systems for collecting the larger items that are "legitimate" household waste but which won't go in the community bins. Mattresses, the old dining room chairs, the calor gas heater etc. The difficulty is that people are impatient and they often want that settee out of their house now, this instant, and they find some way to dump it next to the bins. Hence the Pinoso approach. It's  difficult to put your old deckchairs in a bag hanging from your door handle. The people who can't be bothered to take their stuff to one of the ecoparques, modern style non landfill tips, drive it out to the communal sized bins that are dotted in the country areas around the town. We have one of those communal bins a few metres from our house. Luckily it's not visible from the road or it would soon be overflowing. Fly tipping in open countryside still happens but it's nowhere near as common as it once was.

If you have stuff that's difficult to dump, or potentially toxic, there are systems. Battery collection points are all over the place, there are lots of clothes recycling and used cooking oil bins and nearly everything else from the redundant hi-fi to garden cuttings can be taken to the ecoparques. For small items like printer cartridges, fluorescent tubes, small electrical items and what not there is also a mobile ecoparque that sets up shop most Wednesdays in the town centre.