Turning wine into water

I well remember our first ever fiesta in Culebrón. After the Saturday evening meal, under the pines, outside the social centre, the activity shifted to the paved square where there was a stage for the "orquesta," the showband so typical of Spanish small-town fiestas. As soon as we arrived at the square, I headed for the bar to beat the rush. There never was a rush; people went to the bar, but getting some booze down their necks didn't have the same urgency as it seems to have for us Britons. It's the same when a drink is finished; I, or we, go for another, but Spaniards don't worry too much about getting the next one in. They'll get around to it in a while.

I presume we Britons still say that Spaniards don't get drunk, or at least that it's very unusual to see them falling-down drunk. Point Britons at free or cheap booze and we will—at least I will—and I've always thought of myself as the person on the Clapham Omnibus, take advantage.

I used to comment to my Spanish learners of English, that the Spanish, on the whole, seemed to be more sober than we Britons and they would guffaw. They believed that the Spanish, as a nation, got drunk too. True, they had us down as a nation of beer swillers; multiple pints before falling-down drunk style, but they didn't see themselves as lightweights in the alcohol consumption stakes. To be honest I have no idea what it's like out there currently. Young people are the ones who tend to party, and as young Spaniards don't think of going out until late, by which time I'll be well tucked up in my bed, I'm not going to be there to see. Nonetheless, I've heard or read many recent articles that talk about the binge drinking habit of younger Spanish people.

On the roads the DGT, the Traffic Directorate, reckons that booze is present in more than 30% of road deaths and something like 25% are of those breath-tested after an accident are over the limit. Presumably that's one of the reasons that the government is considering dropping the limit from 0.5g/litre in blood levels to 0.2g/litre. That sort of limit means that if you drank a bottle of beer—a tercio (330 ml)—and you were an older man weighing between 75 and 90 kg, you'd probably fail the test unless you gave yourself an hour or more to digest the drink.

I've also noticed a lot of publicity around low-alcohol variants of booze and I've seen or heard several articles about how younger people are rejecting the alcohol culture around them—the culture that drinks beer or wine with a meal and starts a winter's day with a shot of brandy in or alongside your first coffee of the day.

If you live in Spain, you'll be aware of how common low-alcohol beers are. Non-alcoholic variants have about 13% of the Spanish beer market, whereas in the UK it's still well below 1%. There are actually two types of "non-alcohol" beers: 0,0 (zero-zero) and sin alcohol (without alcohol). The sin alcohol actually has a very small percentage of alcohol in it. If you get stopped by the Guardia for a breath test, you may well show as having alcohol on your breath even though you've been on sin alcohol all night. The zero zeros have no alcohol at all. Very few bars bother about the difference, but I've noticed that more and more often I get 0,0 when I ask for sin alcohol. One of the things I've always appreciated about low-alcohol beer is that it looks like beer. Once it's in the glass, those pains in the neck, who always want you to drink more, stop barking and shut up because they think you're on beer. It seems to me that this general principle is one reason for choosing newer non or low-alcohol drinks. Nowadays you can do something similar with a whole range of drinks, be that a 0º gin with tonic or a range of mocktails that are always there on menu lists alongside alcoholic ones. People who are temporary teetotallers (pregnant women, people under doctor's orders, drivers) have it much easier when they don't have to argue that "one won't harm you."

Low-alcohol beers have been around for years, but there seems to be a bit of a boom at present in other low and non-alcohol drinks which are typically alcohol-rich. Cruzcampo has been pushing a beer recently—Cruzcampo Tremenda—as "the perfect choice to enjoy a fresh and tasty beer without having to worry about the consequences." It has 2.4% alcohol, which is half the strength of their standard product. The other day Maggie bought some fizzy wine and it had a big 5% on the label; it was low-alcohol sparkling wine. In Villena, we asked for a tinto de verano in a bar, to demonstrate it to a couple of pals from the UK, and the version brought to our table was a low-alcohol one. True, it was a Colombian server and she seemed to have considerable trouble with my Spanish, but it helped persuade me that low-alcohol drinks are popping up everywhere.

So my general thesis is that for most of we older Britons the continuous, all day alcoholic happy hour, continues to be a part of our lives in Spain but the trend around us seems to be going for lower-alcohol versions. Maybe it's the start of a crusade against booze and very soon beer bottles will be carrying warnings just like packets of ciggies.

Something for the Palace Gates

My sister said that my nephew reads my blogs. He's just about to set off to Colorado because his new wife has a job there. So here's one to send him and her on their way.

Just for those who haven't been keeping up, I have throat cancer. The Spanish healthcare system is looking after me. However, because the Region of Valencia is being run by a very right-wing local government, one of the insidious little side effects seems to be that lots of patients are being passed for care in the private sector. I suppose they natter as they play golf together. Of course, I may be completely wrong. It may be because the private hospitals have more capacity or because they're doing lots of two-for-one offers.

The private hospital is for the radiotherapy. The thing where they strap me to a table and direct particle beams at the cancer in my throat and neck. The idea is that the rays damage the bad cancer cells but that my other cells are strong enough to fight back. Or at least that's how I visualise it. I could well be wrong.

The public hospital, the one in Elda, is where I talk to an oncologist who has decided on the treatment, and it's also where I have to go for three sessions of chemotherapy. Chemo involves using a drip to put some sort of poison into my veins. Again, I understand that the idea is that they kill bad and good cells alike, but the good cells can recover and the bad ones can't. I haven't Googled any of it. I'm just trying to do as I'm told.

The people in the radio place are perfectly nice, but the chemo people on the Day Hospital do their best to be incredibly "up". They say nice things to everyone. Very co-operative, odd sense of humour and very nice hair were my piropos for today.

I'm just an outpatient, I don't have to stay in hospital long. The chemo takes longer; it was about three hours today and four hours last time. The radiotherapy takes no time at all. For purely logistical reasons, I drove myself to Alicante this morning. I got there before 9 am and I was away to get to Elda before 10 am, and my underground parking ticket only cost 55 cents.

Normally an ambulance comes and gets me. For most of we patients, it's much more minibus than ambulance, with four seats in the back with space for a wheelchair and someone on a stretcher. There are the two seats in the front too. Sometimes it's a Magical Mystery tour with a pickup in Monóvar, Elda, Novelda, Monforte etc., and sometimes it's been a more or less straight run. Last week I had two trips that were more like taxi rides. One or no stops. Other times the journey can take two or three hours each way with lots of stops. I very seldom travel with the same people. I have to get up before six to be ready for the ambulance.

People who see me say I look well. That's because, so far, my hair hasn't fallen out and the skin hasn't stretched, leaving me with cadaverous sunken cheeks and a sallow complexion. My mouth is a total disaster area. It's lined with all sorts of foul-tasting mucus, and I often think I might throw up. I've given up eating by mouth simply because everything tastes disgusting. I drink water and tea (which tastes worse than the stuff they give you in bars) and then I drip feed some stuff like baby gruel or Complan into the tube that comes out of my stomach. My ears are very loud too, and I get tired even thinking about doing the weeding, but I'm still driving, still doing light jobs like cleaning the toilets, changing beds and doing laundry. Maggie, though, as well as the stress of my being ill, is taking an unfair share of the household work, particularly as I've stopped shopping and cooking as well as the garden.

So, I think that's it. The wedding plans are moving slowly as Maggie waits for documentation that will start the mad dash to get the rest. I'm still planning to book up one of the Imserso Pensioner's holidays tomorrow, and I have another blog nearly ready to go. It's taking a while because it's a bit weak. This one took the time to type it. Very fast.

The photo is from a local paper in 2020 but it is Elda

A quiet week

I was backing up the computer last week and there wasn't a single new photo to add to the photo album. This is distinctly odd. It means that I didn't go anywhere or do anything away from the daily routine. It's true my life is a bit off kilter at the moment and I wasn't much in the mood for galavanting but nothing? It also set me thinking about some of the things that we have done over the years

Tourism accounts for nearly 13% of the Spanish Gross Domestic Product—cars, the main Spanish export, account for about 10%, and agriculture just a tad under 9%. Tourism is becoming a problem in Spain, not really because of the tourists, but because of the people who make the most profit from them. In places like Barcelona, Mallorca, and Málaga, there is so much money to be made out of tourists that investment funds and the like have got in on the act. They buy up a block of flats to let out to tourists—if people have to be evicted in the process, so be it—because they make stacks more cash out of short-term lets to tourists than from the more traditional landlord-tenant relationship. So, whereas it used to be pretty simple for a couple setting up a new home to live in the same neighbourhood as their family and friends, they now find themselves unable to pay the inflated prices, and there is a general price hike all around as money chases the available rentals. Tourists have different spending profiles to residents. Trendy bars, vermuterías, bike hire shops, guided tours of the city, etc., aren't the first shops that locals need, just as the tourists are less likely to use butchers, pharmacies, and supermarkets. Traditional retail moves out along with the traditional residents as quickly as craft and local produce shops move in.

Obviously, the phenomenon of mass tourism overwhelming places is much more complex than a few nasty investors. Pop into a village on the Adriatic where three cruise ships of three thousand each pour 10,000 tourists onto the streets every second morning and see how it changes the face of the village. Up in the Pyrenees, we queued behind tens of motorhomes trying to negotiate streets that were too narrow and then sat among tourists in expensive-looking but spotlessly clean mountain gear, eating "traditional" ice cream. We were there too, though. We're a part of this.

Nonetheless, tourism is still something that lots and lots of town halls try to encourage. On one side, there are the places designed for tourists, like Benidorm, or places that attract tourists because they are loaded with things to see and do, like Seville and Madrid. But here, I'm thinking about the surrounding areas and how the decent tourist offices exploit what they have. It has to be said that most of Alicante province, or Murcia, isn't awash with lovely little villages or small towns enclosed by mediaeval walls. But tourist offices exist to promote what there is, what can be wrung out of the local environment. If what you have is the remains of the rail and steam-powered boom of the mid-19th century, or if it's Bronze Age remains and cave paintings, or a wine industry, or saffron packaging, or an architectural style, or a grape harvest, or a monumental cemetery, or a church, then that's what you have to work with. Some tourist offices are much better at coming up with something new than others but nearly all have their moments of genius.

We've got a lot of castles around here. If they weren't guarding the frontier between Christians and Muslims, they were guarding the frontiers between the old Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. Often, where a town has something so obvious, they can either open the doors and hope someone turns up, or they can get on with a bit of promotion and arrange the dramatised visits, the reconstructions, and the jousts. I remember that in Sax, it was Juan Pacheco, Marquis of Villena, who tells you about his support, or not, for Juana la Beltraneja, whereas in Petrer, for a nighttime visit, the ghost of a murdered Moor told the story of the struggle for power in the city between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Petrer also managed to weave the castle into its sessions about the end of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s.

Some towns don't have very much at all. The better tourist offices don't let that stop them, though. In Yecla, we've done a tour where each landmark—or where there had once been a landmark—had someone tell us the story of that place, accompanied by a musical performance. So, mediaeval music for the old church, and a bit further on, at the old gate to the town, we'd get North African music as a reminder of the Moorish conquest. We've done modernist architecture and the development of churches in Yecla, as well as tours by night. In Monóvar, we've gone on walks built around going out for a picnic as the locals did for years and getting a bit of history at the same time. With mention of Monóvar that leads to a couple of sessions based around the writer, Azorín, born in Monóvar, and schooled in Yecla. And while we're in Yecla, we went for a walk around their network of urban/rural paths and then went on an oil tasting session. They are only examples. The ingenuity is relentless. In Elda, we walked from spot to spot where someone dressed as a 16th-century peasant, a 19th-century shoe salesman, and a 20th-century nurse told us about the development of the shoe trade and the business community in Elda. In Novelda, the number of variations they can find on the theme of modernist architecture or their links to the seafaring scientist Jorge Juan seems endless. And while we're on Modernism, the week in Alcoy with half the town, and visitors, dressed up in Edwardian costumes and eating Edwardian snacks is really good fun.

There are also a lot of things that are based on activities. We've done any number of stargazing type tours—the culmination is counting the meteors or seeing Saturn's rings through the local astronomical society's telescopes - but it's also about perching you next to the Christ statue in Abanilla to explain the once Christian-Muslim divide, how the streets have twists and turns to give defensive positions and the construction of cave houses as much as to show off the 11-inch reflector. We've hunted for scorpions with ultraviolet light in the hills behind Elda, clambered up apparently vertical mountainsides to get to some Bronze Age cave site, and even planted trees.

Our very own town is a good example of this. Nice place that it is, Pinoso is hardly a tourist destination. The clock tower isn't exactly awe-inspiring, the Wine and Marble museum is nice enough but not exactly extensive, The Maxi Banegas route doesn't set the pulse racing and the recent travelling exhibitions in the Cultural Centre have all looked a bit dog-eared by the time they've got to us. Mind you, we've done some good stuff here. The tour of the cemetery around All Saints' Day, the tour of the local cucos, the dry stone-built rural shelters complete with dramatised episodes, the tour of the town's Civil War sites which was all done without seeing a single palpable trace, the tours of the town archives—all of them conjuring something from not very much. We've done walks with the town biologist, and we've seen rescued animals set free in the wild after they've recovered. Recently, Pinoso has started to explore food-based activities more because someone spent a lot of money on a show kitchen. Turning that into how to mix a good vermouth cocktail, how to cut ham, and any number of activities based on the local cuisine has been the upside to that.

The point is that with a bit of looking, there are any number of things to do alongside popping down to the coast, eating out, getting a drink with friends, watching the local fiesta or attending a local concert. 

So how're you doing?

I left the last blog when I had done two or three sessions of radiotherapy down in Alicante at the private Perpetuo Socorro hospital. The chemotherapy in Elda still hadn't started because I am, apparently, veinless, and they couldn't find a way to get their chemicals into my blood.

On Thursday of last week, they sorted that out by installing more permanent access to my bloodstream via a probe that leads to bigger, better veins in my chest. The same day, they spent four hours, first pumping saline into me, to make sure I was hydrated, and then pumping in some chemicals which, in my layman's understanding, are designed to be powerful enough to kill off nasty cancerous cells but not quite violent enough to kill me.

It's all a bit of a faff. Lots of the days have been exceptions for one reason or another, but the process is something like this.

I am scheduled for 33 sessions of radiotherapy. There is one session on each working day. I did number five today, so by my reckoning, that will take me through till mid-October. The radiotherapy directs X-rays, gamma rays, high-energy electrons, or heavy particles (and I have no idea which) at the specific area where the throat cancer is. I wait in a pleasant enough waiting area with free coffee and Kiss FM radio until they call me in. I take off my shirt, and they strap me onto a table with a mask over my face to help with targeting and to keep me from squirming around. It's not horrid but it's not something I'd choose to do for fun—not being a Tory MP. It doesn't hurt; there is no particular sensation of heat or anything, and it leaves no marks or redness. It takes fewer than twenty minutes from shirt off to shirt back on. I am told that from about the tenth session it will close up my throat, making it difficult for me to eat or drink, which is why, a couple of weeks ago now, they put a plastic tube directly into my stomach.

The chemo is done in a single session during the day. There's no overnight stay in Elda hospital. The place is a suite of recliner-type couches, a couple of big armchair-type chairs, and a couple of beds. Medics in purple pyjamas are here, there, and everywhere. They try to keep it all very jolly, all first names and a lot of laughing. Usually, people are given a bit of a choice as to which they prefer between bed, chair, or recliner, but the basic idea is that you get comfy, and then they hook you up to drips that first hydrate you and then do the poisoning of the cancer cells—different people get different concoctions. I think I have two more sessions to go, at least in the first phase. Next time around, I have to get a blood test a couple of days before they do the chemo session, and I think that also involves a consult with the oncologist.

So, neither of the actual treatments is particularly unpleasant, and both places are friendly and as un-grim as they can be. The problems come with what they do to you. And what the treatments do to people depends on what you're being assailed with and how you react. Currently, my effects are a very, very loud ringing in my ears, which makes me almost deaf in noisy situations. Most things taste very different and I've been unable to eat lots of stuff simply because it tastes horrid. My head aches most of the time, my mouth is lined with fuzzy felt, and there's a general feeling a bit like mild pins and needles throughout my entire body. My guts spend most of the time rumbling and gurgling, and I go from rushing to the toilet to wishing I could. I'm supposed to keep hydrated, which, apparently, means drinking water. Especially at night, that has a very unsettling effect on my bathroom habits and means that I'm not sleeping very well at all. The list of possible things to come—from skin eruptions to vomiting to total deafness—goes on for nearly 20 pages of A4. Going bald only gets a single phrase.

There are also a number of inconveniences. The port sticking out of my arm hurts a little all the time and has to be kept dry in the shower which makes for fun. I mentioned the feeding tube too. That still gives my guts an occasional twist so that I wince, but it's also a constant, unpleasant, presence. The feeding tube has to be redressed every day and washed through with clean water. At the moment I do that after I've showered. When my throat closes up, I will have to use that tube to eat. The method involves a squishy plastic bag loaded with some liquid-type mush which drips through the tube directly into my stomach. The feeding will take 45 minutes, and the tube will need to be cleaned and redressed after every feed. They also want me to push water through the tube twice a day. I reckon the feeding and dressing will take over three hours per day.

Combine that tube feeding with the ambulance. At the moment, an ambulance comes and collects me at 8 am every morning—a routine that has to be changed to get the blood sample done before a chemo session, and a routine that will have to be amended when the chemo is on the same day. Ringing the ambulance people is not one of my favourite tasks because it always gets complicated—an informal Spanish test. It takes me a while to get going in the morning as it is. When the time comes that I need to feed myself through the tube, I reckon I'm going to have to get up at 5 am every day to catch the ambulance, and it'll bring me home a bit before 2 pm. That's a lot of faff for a twenty-minute session.

So, so far, nothing terrible has really happened. I felt very sorry for myself over the weekend after the first chemo, but I seem to have bucked up today. I suppose too that even if everything goes to plan, if the treatments work, it's not going to be all over in a few months. There'll be tests and check-ups and procedures to remove ports and tubes and so on for months, and probably years, to come.

I'm not going to have many other experiences to blog about for quite a while, but people do keep asking.

And so it begins

So, we left the story with me in hospital, being fed on gruel and camomile tea, having had a stomach tube fitted. The hospital kicked me loose on Monday with only two scheduled appointments for the week at that time: one with a nutritionist and the other with a cancer doctor, an oncologist—both in Elda. Because not everyone has the advantage of living in Culebrón, I should say that our local health centre in Pinoso (5 km away) is linked to Elda Hospital (25 km away), but sometimes, for specialist services, patients are sent all over the place. The hospital I'm going to in Alicante for the radiotherapy, Perpetuo Socorro, is a private hospital about 55 km from home.

The nutritionist was a bit of a hoot. She gave us a box with 30 tubes to connect my stomach feeding tube to a pouch full of a Complan type food. That box was bulky but light. She also gave me a scrip for the feeding pouches, and the bloke in the chemist offered me a sack trolley to take those to the car. He also showed me how much they would have cost but for the health system—€768.

The next stop, with the oncologist in Elda, was make or break. She was subbing for my doctor, who's off on holiday. As she shuffled papers, when she wasn't quite sure what sort of cancer it was, etc., I rather cut across her and asked the one important question: has it spread? Is there metastásis/metastases? If the answer were yes, there would be no radiotherapy the following week; if the answer were yes, the €768 worth of sloppy food and the feeding tube were all a waste of time. If the answer were yes, then death was around the corner, and all the clinicians could do was to hold it back a bit. The answer was no. Relief a go go.

So now all that remained was to get started on the radiotherapy in Alicante and the chemotherapy in Elda. There were lots of criss-crossed phone calls, quite a lot of them taken as I drove across windswept Teruel Province in the car. The private hospital's appointments don't show up on the state system calendar that is used by the local health centre, the hospital in Elda, or the ambulance service, who I will be using to transport me up and down the road to Alicante. Appointments were made and unmade, but in the end, we had times for the radiotherapy, and when that was done, I was told to simply turn up in the chemotherapy unit at Alicante hospital, and they would get me started on intravenous chemicals when I arrived.

The radiotherapy was easy enough, at least the first time. They strapped me to the bed wearing a big fishnet design facemask, played soothing plinkety-plonk piano music backed up with tweeting birdsong while a big Space 1999 thing blasted me with Flash Gordon-type death rays. I didn't feel a thing. They have promised the pain for later.

I turned up at chemotherapy in Elda. We were instantly on first-name terms. They set about cabling me up and couldn't find a vein to get one of the needles in to direct the chemicals into my bloodstream. They tried with different people, people who do this every single day of their working week, and they tried five times without success. Eventually, two very pleasant blokes turned up with one of those ultrasound scanners—jelly on belly, ah, it's a boy—things. They're called ecografías here, so don't be surprised if I say eco. With that, they were able to see the veins in my arms and the needles as they were introduced. The veins collapsed the first twice, but it was third time lucky—or so they thought.

They hooked me up to some saline; again, I may say suero, but I didn't know. I thought it was the cancer-combating chemicals. My arm started to hurt; I was a bit surprised—drips are usually painless. After maybe twenty minutes, it was hurting a lot, and when I stroked my arm, I realised it was swollen. I'd sort of associated pain and nasty potions. In fact the vein had collapsed, and the saline was dribbling into my arm turning it into some sort of human sausage. A nurse squeezed some of it out, but six hours later sitting at the computer, there is still a steady drip of saline from my arm.

I'm going to have to reorganise the ambulances so that on Thursday I drive myself to Alicante for the radio and then on to Elda to get something called a Picc Port fitted, which is a sort of more permanent entry to plumb me into the drips. And that's where we rest.

____________________________________________

Just a couple of related things. Thank you to the tens and tens of people who have offered good wishes and practical help. I apologise for not always responding. The other thing is about the delay in seeing me. I have to say that I see nothing unreasonable about the delay outside the fact that the health service doesn't have enough capacity, probably because paying taxes is not a popular thing. I haven't come across lazy or indolent staff; I don't think anyone has screwed up or let me down anywhere. The initial referral took a long time, but I told the GP about a sore throat. She couldn't really refer everyone who went to her with a sore throat to a specialist every single time. The people who got to see the specialist in front of me presumably got there because their GPs saw something more urgent or because they'd waited their turn and got to the head of the queue as they should, as I did. I would be very unhappy if I were the queue jumper denying treatment to someone else.

Anyway, I'm well and truly on the treatment conveyor belt now, so fingers crossed and on to whatever the next thing is. Expect more blogs.

Paradores and dictators

For Maggie, my partner's, birthday this year we went for a weekend in the Parador in Sigüenza. A Parador is, basically, a posh hotel. Paradores de Turismo de España, is a state-owned commercial company, its sole shareholder being a government department. Paradores were originally conceived, in the first couple of decades of the last century, as a way of promoting tourism in areas that lacked adequate accommodation. The idea was to open up an area, particularly to well off tourists, with a particular eye on the developing motorist market. The first Parador was built in the Gredos Mountains from scratch, on a site chosen by the then King, Alfonso XIII. 

Soon after this first landmark opening some bright spark came up with the idea of converting unused large historic buildings to work as the hotels which would also help maintain the national heritage as well as being attractive to tourists. At the same time, another government committee began the construction of the new Albergues de Carretera. These roadside hostels had petrol pumps and workshops to effect running repairs on the cars and were located at key points on the road network. Seventeen were planned, twelve were built and most of them later ended up being turned into Paradores. One of them was the one at Puerto Lumbreras in Murcia. It closed about 10 years ago when Paradores built a new hotel in Lorca.

There are just short of 100 Paradores in Spain and lots of them are based on refurbished castles, like the one in Sigüenza, and monasteries. Others are architecturally impressive newer buildings and some are nothing particularly special, architecturally, except that they are sited in spectacular locations. The last time we'd stayed in a Parador, before this last weekend, was a couple of years ago when we stayed in Cuenca - in that case it's a converted monastery. 

We're not really well enough off to stay in Paradores very often, though they sometimes have really good low season offers, but every now and again, when we're feeling flush enough to splash out, we do eat in their restaurants. All the Paradores make a thing of promoting regional cuisine and all the restaurants are open to the public and not just to hotel guests. Indeed, in the past, they used to promote regional customs of all sorts and it wasn't at all unusual to be served a beer by someone dressed as an 18th Century kitchen maid or an early 20th century farmhand. Since the chain nearly went bust a few years ago they seem to have abandoned the fancy dress and gone for polo shirt type uniforms throughout their network. The bars are also open to the public so, if you're not looking for a room or a meal, you can still get yourself an overpriced coffee and take the opportunity to have a bit of a look around what are often imposing buildings. I have to be honest and say that sometimes we've been disappointed by the price and or quality of the rooms, food and even the bars but we keep going back because they are quite special places.

There is a, tenuous, link between the Parador chain and a Spanish dictator. It may not be the dictator you're thinking of. From 1939 to 1975 Francisco Franco ruled Spain. Franco managed to manoeuvre himself into the lead position among a group of generals who staged an uprising against the democratically elected government in 1936. The rebels expected to seize power quickly but instead the coup turned into a three year long bloody civil war. Between 1923 and 1930 there had been an earlier dictatorship in Spain. Just like in 1936 it was a group of army generals, this time led by Miguel Primo de Rivera, who thought that the politicians were making a pig's ear of running the country and so mounted a military coup. That coup was tacitly approved of by the King at the time, Alfonso XIII

From about 1927 Miguel became keen on spending on infrastructure projects and founding state monopolies such as Campsa, the forerunner to Repsol, the petrol and energy people, and Telefonica, later Movistar the telecoms company. One of the projects that he supported was the construction of the Parador hotels as a method of fomenting tourism and promoting a positive image, among the rich, about Spain. That's why the first Parador, the one in the Gredos, was opened at that time and on a spot chosen by the King. To push tenuous relationships even further there is a link between Miguel Primo de Rivera's lad, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and the ideology of Franco's rule. Jose Antonio was the politician who founded the Falange Española which was a sort of Spanish version of the Italian and German fascist parties. He was killed in a jail in Alicante not long after the start of the Spanish Civil War but his party became the official state party of the Francoist regime and still exists.

Getting a shower

It turned out to be a bit of a porky. They told me I'd be in hospital for about 24 hours to fit a peg  - a stomach feeding tube. It's nothing more than a plastic tube that leads directly into my stomach. It will be needed when my throat has closed up so much with the radiotherapy that I can no longer eat through my mouth. In fact I'm here till Monday.

I thought this was the last of the pre-treatment things to be done before the real fun starts. I've been running around the province getting bloods done here, a talk to a dietician there and CAT scan at another place. The talk with the radiotherapy hospital in Alicante actually turned into quite a session. Information given, they made a sort of death mask (and I'm not being maudling, it's just what it reminded me of) by shaping a heated plastic mesh around the contours of my face. The idea is that I will be held in place by the mask as they blast me with rays and the grid, just like in a game of battleships, will allow them to direct their fire at the target. They also did a scan, with the mask in place, to locate my tumours against the grid.

Anyway I'm now wearing, rather fetching, Generalitat Valenciana pyjamas and sitting in my room along with my temporary bunkmate Stefan, who has hepatitis, in Elda Hospital. This is the third day I've been here and since the peg was put in I've been catching on to the everyday routines a little better.

That's why, daringly, I asked them if I could take a shower. The answer was of course but I hadn't anticipated the obstacles.

The first was that the peg has to be washed in the shower and that would mean I would have to apply new dressings, afterwards. I had no gauze, no tape. I asked. I got.

But I'd forgotten that the gauze needs to have a slit cut into it so I had to flag down a passing nurse anew. And, just as the nurse was about to go I remembered that I was tethered to a saline drip which meant I needed to be unhobbled. He disconnected me.

Finally ready to get soapy and damp and breakfast arrived. The instructions from on high have put me on a liquid diet. That is so the liquids can be injected into my stomach via the feeding tube but, at the moment, chowing down at a hog roast or eating fancy buns at the Savoy would cost me nothing but financial or digestive harm. The nurses and kitchen people said they'd see what they could do. I have to be honest  and say that after 43 hours of fasting being given a luke warm mint tea and a pineapple juice yesterday was just slightly disappointing.

It was camomile tea for breakfast.

Then back to the showering and apart from the minor flooding, the strangeness of washing around a plastic tube hanging from my stomach and trying to keep the dressing around the cannula dry it was fine.

XOXO

In the majority of Spanish bars, with most cold drinks, you will be given some sort of accompaniment. A few olives, a handful of nuts or a nut mix, a few crisps, maybe some panchitos (generic for cheesy puff, Monster Munch sort of crisp type things that aren't crisps) or even sugary sweets. You won't, generally, get anything with a coffee or tea, except maybe a biscuit. Obviously only the insane drink hot drinks with anything but bakery products. Some bars are more generous than others and some only serve the extras at given times. Something that used to be common, as an accompaniment, but aren't so much nowadays, are altramuces, lupin seeds. 

To digress, as I so often do, as I mentioned frutos secos (the nuts or nut mixes) I remember that they caused me problems when I was teaching English. To me it looked like a direct translation - dried fruits. So I'd go into a long spiel with the students about how the things that had a shell that had to be broken to get to the edible kernel inside - almonds, hazelnuts, peanuts, walnuts and so on - were called nuts in English while things like sultanas, prunes, raisins and the like were dried fruits. I could never understand why Spaniards were so slow to grasp the concept; in fact it was me. The Spaniards recognised the two different words - fruto and fruta - and I didn't. The first is the idea of produce or product and the second is fruit. So they were wondering why I was babbling on about why frutos secos - for nuts and the dry mixes - were different from frutas secas - dried fruit when exactly the same distinction is made in Spanish.

Back at altramuces, lupin seeds; they're shaped like large smarties or the flying saucer shaped M&Ms (and, if you're old enough, the all chocolate Treets of yesteryear). They get called chochos. Now chocho is a word used to describe a part of the body that (at least in the old two sex days) was specific to women. I've heard chichi too. Indeed someone asked Maggie if XOXO at the end of a greeting in a birthday card spelled chocho - I suppose the suggestion was that it was some sort of sex code. I quite like them, the plant seed snack that is. Spaniards generally separate the outer skin from the inner kernel. I can't be bothered and usually eat the whole lot. They're salty and a bit slimy. You can buy them in supermarkets in jars usually, stored in brine. They can be cooked but usually they're eaten cold alongside a drink as an aperitivo. Unlike edamame beans they are not, at all, trendy.

Buenos días, this is Elda Hospital

Last June, that’s June 2023, I went to the doctor and said that I had the sensation of a lump in my throat. She felt around a bit, said it was probably nothing, but asked for a consult with a specialist from Ear, Nose, and Throat. In Spanish, that’s otorrinolaringología, and I’ve already got into the habit of saying otorrino, so that’s what I’ll probably use from now on. The request for the consult was ordinary priority.

It took nearly a year for the otorrino to see me - May 28th this year, in fact. He shoved a camera up my nose and down my throat and recognized the potential for throat cancer straight away. He dropped some pretty broad hints to me as well. Doctors though, very seldom, give bad news until their experience is backed up with test results. He set the ball in motion. He ordered an MRI scan, a resonancia, and things started to move. 

For the resonancia, the thing where you lie down in a big tube that makes a lot of noise while you try to stay stock still, the state system bumped me down to the IMED private hospital to speed up the process. That happened on June 26th, and I went back to the otorrino on July 18th. He had the results from the resonancia then and he showed me the images - lots of little tadpoles and shapes moving around on a screen - but he didn’t have the technical report to go with the images. Even reportless he knew what he was looking at. He told me that the otorrino department had some pre booked slots in the operating theatre for biopsies and that he would get the biopsy done on July 31st. Before then, I had to go to the specialist centre in Elda for blood tests, an ECG to check my heart and a couple of x-rays. In fact he booked those simple tests in for the next day, the 19th. A few days later, on the 23rd, I was back with the monocolour pyjama people for pre-op stuff, to talk to the anaesthetist. She told me that my blood pressure was high - dangerously high. I started to worry that my brain might spring a leak before the cancer got me. The blood pressure problem opened up a whole new swathe of appointments at the local health centre which have been running alongside the cancer stuff. Now I take blood pressure tablets.

The biopsy was on July 31st at Elda hospital. Despite being a small operation it was done under general anaesthetic. I had to take off all my clothes, put on some sort of over-feet covering made from a blue plastic sackcloth and a sort of shower cap as well - also blue. I was expecting one of those gowns that are open at the back but instead they gave me some sort of plastic underpants to wear - maroon coloured I think. Then I waited, for what seemed quite a while, my modesty and saggy belly, covered by a white sheet. In the next bay a young person screamed bloody murder. Eventually I was wheeled to some operating theatre. They put a mask over my face and the next thing I knew, Maggie was by my bedside, and I was back where I’d started. They said I could go home. I chose to get dressed first.

The next day, I met the otorrino again. He explained that the meeting had nothing to do with the biopsy. It was simply that he was going on holiday the next day and he had just got the resonancia report which showed some sort of abnormal growth, not only at the base of my tongue but also in a lymph node. It was time to pass me across to oncology - the cancer people. The unsaid became said. He stressed that it was still possible the biopsy might show the growth to be benign, but his experience told him otherwise, and that if he didn’t set things in motion before he went on holiday, it would delay things by weeks.

I went to oncology on August 14th. The doctor seemed like a solid sort of bloke. He made it very clear that I have a malignant tumor at the base of my tongue, at the entrance to my throat, with some extension into the lymph node on one side. He outlined a treatment using radiotherapy and chemotherapy. He described the horrors that this would entail - the vomiting, the closing up of my throat, my hair falling out, etc. He told me that I would be unable to eat, and so they would put a catheter in my stomach so I could be fed directly. He told me how I would lose hearing and may well go deaf. He managed to explain, without brutality, that small things like mouth infections and particularly infection around the catheter could be life threatening. The best bit was yet to come though. He explained that the treatment, with radiotherapy and chemotherapy, was about a potential cure but there was a corollary to that. If the cancer had spread, then the radiotherapy would be pointless, and instead of looking for a cure, they would simply be trying to hold back the time that I would die.

And that’s about where we are. I’m going to talk to the radiotherapy people about their treatment, which is going to be every working day for the whole of September. I also have to speak to a dietician, presumably to talk about how to keep me from starving when I can’t eat by putting things in my mouth. I’m also waiting for the date for the TAC, CAT scan in English, the test that will show whether there is metastasis, whether the cancer has spread to my lungs or bones for instance. I’ve talked to the ambulance service about taking me down to Alicante every day, and I’ve told a few people how this is all panning out. Now I’m telling anyone who reads this blog.

At the moment, it’s all unreal, of course. I feel no worse today than before I first mentioned this to a doctor thirteen or fourteen months ago. They have not yet attached the leeches, poured poisonous chemicals into my veins, or zapped me with lethal death rays. All that’s to come. I can’t actually imagine the horror of it all. I can't imagine how this is affecting Maggie but I did write a short email to the town hall asking what the process is for getting married. The grim reaper will reap but maybe the taxman can be held at bay for a while. And still, there is the possibility that the TAC will show that the reasons I’ve been hobbling and grunting when I bend my arm too much is because I have cancer in my bones. Then the radiotherapy will be pointless, and I’ll be on a more certain and quicker road to the death that awaits us all - our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

Not that it's exactly a plus, but I am getting to see lots of medical installations and talking a lot of Spanish, both on the phone and in person. Although I suspect that my language learning may soon be terminally truncated by forces beyond my control.

What's a Red Letter day?

Instead of thinking about Red Letter Days or Bank Holidays in Spain, you have to consider working and non-working days. The non-working days, which are very similar to, but not the same as, British public or bank holidays, are set by three levels of government: town halls, regional governments, and the national government. This means that days off differ in every town and every region. Only the days designated by the central government are definitively the same throughout Spain. The only infallible way to know when there are holidays in your town is to consult the lists of "días no laborables" published by various sources, such as newspapers and chambers of commerce and easy to find with any search engine.

I've written similar pieces before. It's not an easy read but Alison asked me to do it again, so I'm going to try a different approach. I'm going to presume that you live in Spain, and I'll use six municipalities in three different regions as examples. It's a bit boring but if you can be bothered to compare the three sets of dates at the bottom of the page you'll see that there is a fair bit of variation and that's what catches people out or makes it seem as though Spain is always off work. I've used Pinoso and Sax in the Valencian Community, Jumilla and Abanilla in the Region of Murcia, and, in Castilla-La Mancha, Caudete and Fuente-Álamo. I chose these regions because they share borders.

There are a maximum of fourteen non-working days wherever you live in Spain. The national government lists, in the official state bulletin, up to nine non-working days - days on which people don’t have to work. The local town hall names two, and the regional government can name other days off to make up the shortfall. Generally the regional days come from a list, prepared by national government, of "suggested but substitutable" days. The suggestion is that days may be substituted because there is some strong local tradition to celebrate those days. Sometimes the regional days off can be a bit obscure. For instance, this year in the Valencian Community, 24th June was a regional non-working day, but if you chose not to work it, when your employer was open, then you had to make up your lost hours by doing extra hours on other working days.

The non-working days from the town halls apply only to the municipality. Remember that the municipality includes the satellite villages that "belong" to a town. It would be challenging to list all the pedanías; Abanilla, for instance, has over 20. But if you're in a village, whoever you pay your IBI (the local property tax) to will set your local holidays. Culebrón "belongs" to Pinoso, so we follow the local days set by Pinoso town hall. There are two days set by the local town hall in each municipality, which means that Pinoso, Sax, Jumilla, Abanilla, Caudete, and Fuente-Álamo, like every other town in Spain, close on days that have local significance. This can really catch you out if the day you choose to travel to some big shopping centre happens to be a local holiday in that town or city!

The non-working days from the regional government apply to the entire autonomous community/region. Each region has one day which celebrates its existence. It's a bit like the Welsh celebrating St David, The Irish St Patrick, the Scots St Andrew and the English St George. That aside the regional governments usually choose their days from the list of potential but substitutable days published by the national government each year. In some cases, all, or most, of the regional governments will choose the same days off from this list, so that a situation where say seven of the fifteen regions (Seventeen if you include the autonomous cities) will take the same day off. Three Kings. Epiphany, January 6th is an optional day, for instance, but all the regions in Spain always take it. With picking and choosing from this substitutable list there are often different non working days for the different regions. However, you can be sure that if it's a regional day off in Pinoso then it will also be a day off in Sax, because they are both in the Valencian Community. Meanwhile in Jumilla and Abanilla, and Caudete and Fuente-Álamo it depends whether they'll be working or not.

The non-working days set by the national government apply to the entire country, which means that all six of our towns will share the same days off work. These are the true "red letter" days.

If I've done well up to now, I think I've avoided saying "holiday"; I think I've used something like "day off work" or "non-working day." This is an important distinction from the idea of, say, a British public holiday. Spain is constitutionally a secular state. Supposedly, there is no link between the state and the church. Odd, then, that nearly all the days off are tied in with the Catholic calendar. Leaving that aside for the moment, I have it on good authority that on the seventh day, God ended His work which He had done, and blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work. To this day, Sunday in Spain is a day of rest - a non-working day. That doesn't mean that there aren't many people who work on Sundays, but it is, under some legal definition, a non-working day.

It’s very unusual for all fourteen days to fall on working days - from Monday to Saturday. Nearly always, one or two will fall on a Sunday, and if they are date-dependent holidays that fall on a Sunday, they will not be listed in the official calendars as days off. They don’t need to be because they are already non working days. That's why Easter Sunday and Mother's Day (First Sunday in May) are never in the lists.

Another difference from the British system is to do with fixed dates. There is a public holiday in the UK to coincide with the International Workers' Day on 1st May, but it’s not usually on 1st May; it’s on the first Monday in May. It moves to give people the day off. In Spain, Workers' Day is on 1st May, and it is celebrated on 1st May. The Spanish non working days are not shifted around to fall on a Monday, as they are in the UK. In Spain, if 1st May is a Sunday, it will be a day off work, but there is no need to add it as an additional day off work to the calendar because it is already a day off. If, by some Time Lord sort of miracle, all 14 days off were to fall on Sundays, Spaniards would not get a single extra day off work outside their contracted holiday. 

So, this year, 2024, the National Days were/are 1 January, New Year's Day; 29 March, Good Friday; 1 May, Labour Day; 15 August, Assumption of the Virgin; 12 October, Spanish National Day; 1 November, All Saints Day; 6 December, Spanish Constitution Day; 25 December, Christmas Day. The only "usual" day off that’s missing from that list is Immaculate Conception on 8th December because it’s a Sunday. However, if you notice in the substitutable list, they’ve added Monday, 9th December to make up for that.

For this year, 2024, the substitutable days - these are the ones that can be altered to fit in with local traditions or expectations by the Regional Government  - were/are 6 January, Epiphany; 19 March, St Joseph (Father's day); 28 March, Maundy Thursday; 25 July, St James the Apostle; 9 December, Monday after the Immaculate Conception.

The days chosen by the town halls can vary. I’ve added them to the lists below for the towns I chose. In Pinoso, the Monday after Easter Sunday was a day off, simply for local tradition, as was 8th August, which is the day of our patron saint. The other towns have similarly random explanations for their chosen dates. In some cases I had no idea why the towns take the day off.

One last thing: You will often hear Spaniards talking about puentes (bridges). This is where, by taking a day or two of your annual leave, you can get a block of time off that stretches over several days - you use leave days to make the bridge to the weekend.

So here're the lists

Castilla-La Mancha: 1 January, New Year's Day; 6 January, Epiphany; 28 March, Maundy Thursday; 29 March, Good Friday; 25 April, Local fiesta (Fuente Álamo); 30 May, Corpus Christi; 31 May, Day of Castilla-La Mancha; 1 May, Labour Day; 8 April, San Vicente (Caudete); 15 August, Assumption of the Virgin; 9 September, chosen by popular ballot! (Caudete); 12 October, Spanish National Day; 9 October, Local fiesta (Fuente Álamo); 1 November, All Saints Day; 6 December, Spanish Constitution Day; 25 December, Christmas Day.

Comunitat Valenciana: 1 January, New Year's Day; 6 January, Epiphany; 18 March, Puente for San José (Sax); 19 March, St Joseph's Day (Father's Day); 29 March, Good Friday; 1 April, Easter Monday; 8 April, San Vicente (Pinoso); 1 May, Labour Day; 24 June, St John's Day; 8 August, Patron Saint Day (Pinoso); 15 August, Assumption of the Virgin;  9 October, Valencian Community Day; 12 October, Spanish National Day; 1 November, All Saints Day; 6 December, Spanish Constitution Day; 25 December, Christmas Day; 26 December, Día del Cabildo (Sax).

Región de Murcia: 1 January, New Year's Day; 6 January, Epiphany; 19 March, St. Joseph's day (Father's Day); 28 March, Maundy Thursday; 29 March, Good Friday; 1 April 2024, Easter Monday (Jumilla); 1 May, Labour Day; 2 May, Local Holiday (Abanilla); 3 May, Local Holiday (Abanilla); 15 August, Assumption of the Virgin; 12 October, Spanish National Day; 1 November, All Saints Day; 6 December, Spanish Constitution Day; 9 December, following the Immaculate Conception; 25 December, Christmas Day; 26 December, Fiesta Local (Jumilla). NOTICE that the 9th June, the Regional Holiday, isn't in the list because it's on a Sunday

Sharing the joint with young people

A couple of weekends ago, we went to the Low Festival in Benidorm. Maggie, my partner, knows that I like festivals. She doesn't. She doesn't like the push and the shove and the constant standing and, generally, the music does nothing for her. She's decided on her favourite musicians now, and she pretty much sticks with them. She doesn't discount newer stuff; it's just that, generally, she finds it falls short of her established preferences.

I'm going to try to do a piece here on the accessibility of music, but I know I'm going to meander and wander around the houses. So, what I want to say is that music is very accessible in Spain. From local concerts by town bands to municipal festivals for pianists or guitarists, through any number of styles and formats of music supported by local town halls for no other reason than that they see it as their job to enrich the cultural life of their populations. In the bigger towns, small, commercial, performance spaces come and go and nearly all the theatres programme inexpensive musical events as an integral part of their offer. There are also an enormous number of, particularly, summer weekend festivals that have different bands each year but where the line-ups for each of the festivals can look remarkably similar.

I like festivals. As far as I'm concerned, they have several advantages. The first thing is that they are relatively cheap. If we'd gone up to Sonorama this year, the weekend pass would have been 85€, and there were over 150 performances (including the DJs) ranging from old-timers, through the established and nearly established bands to the up-and-comers, some of whom will never be heard of again. At a bit under €2 per performance that's a good deal. The second is that there are several bands on at once. As someone who finds listening to an album that lasts 40 minutes a bit of a chore, the concerts done by people like Bruce, Taylor, or the Stones that go on for hours and hours, seem to me, close to a violation of human rights. Spending twenty or thirty minutes watching one band is more than enough and festivals make it easy to do that because if you don't move on you'll miss the other band just around the corner. Finally, especially in the early evening, there will be bands that are hopeful, playing and singing their hearts out, determined to make an impression. If you went to see one of Bob Dylan's concerts last year, think exactly the opposite. He didn't give a toss about his audience or the quality of his performance. The odds are that, eventually, with some of those bands or artists, sometime in the future, you'll be able to say you saw blah de blah long before they were famous. You'll be able to relate how it was just you with friends and relatives of the band members - and look at them now!

There is a downside, of course. The headline bands are often on way past my bedtime. I'm really not up to being jostled by a bunch of drunken, hormone-driven, and drug-fuelled young people at four am. And as for the abusive beer and food prices and all those little tricks to wheedle money out of you, like charging for the non-returnable glasses, I will stay seal lipped. In fact, this time Maggie was only willing to go because the VIP tickets offered less crowded bars, easy access to the headline bands, and places to sit. In fact she suggested it!

To be honest, I've not been to that many festivals while I've lived here. We've done the Low in Benidorm three times, FIB in Benicassim a couple of times, I did the old SOS 4.8 in Murcia two or three times too, and just once at the B-Side in Lorca. We've considered other festivals much further from home but, as I said earlier, the line-ups tend to be very similar and hotel prices in the nearby towns are as abusive as the price for noodles or shawarma inside the festival site.

There are other festivals that don't follow the format of lots and lots of acts crammed into a weekend. Monkey Week down in Andalucia, for instance, or one we've been to four or five different years in Cartagena—the Mar de Músicas. There, the format is individual concerts, with higher prices and numbered seats, spread over a longer period and using two or three venues which sometimes leads to a forced decision about seeing this or that band. There are other festivals that put on a series of bands at the same venue over either days or weeks. Local examples are San Javier Jazz and Yecla Jazz (jazz festivals sometimes include wildly un-jazzlike bands) or like L'Escorxador in Elche which puts on bands over the weekends throughout the summer. And, of course, not all the festivals are "pop" - there are classical and folk as well as specialist performances like the flamenco down in La Unión for Cante de las Minas.

The local town fiestas used to be a rich seam of music. Somewhere as tiny as Pinoso has put on well-known names over the years, from Estopa and Izal through to David Bisbal and Sergio Dalma. In Yecla, I've seen bands like Viva Suecia and Alaska. Jumilla too used to have decent names, as did EMDIV in Elda (the photo at the top of Shinova is an old one from EMDIV though the band were on at the Low this year) or Aspe both for their fiestas and their music festival AspeSuena. We've seen lots of big-name bands, often for free, over the years but that seems to be becoming less and less usual, presumably due to budget cuts. And, of course, there is a constant trickle of decent or interesting acts that are put on by local municipalities for one reason or another. Our most recent concert was Soleá Morente, daughter to the legendary Enrique Morente and part of an important flamenco clan, at a venue with room for no more than a couple of hundred people. It was really good fun, especially at a whopping 8€ per ticket.

I'm not keen on going to see has-been bands that had their creative heyday thirty or forty years ago and are still limping along on their hits. I know most people don't agree and would turn out to see Sting, Madness, or Simply Red in preference to Cristina Len or Rodrigo Cuevas. They wouldn't do it for me; why go to see has-beens when you can go and see the potential bands of the future? There is an exception—I don't mind going to see people who I consider may die on stage—we saw Tom Jones do a fine job last year, just after that abysmal Dylan concert, and we went to see Raphael in Murcia a while ago and his new teeth and dyed hair gleamed just as they always have, even if he had a bit of trouble with some pesky high notes.