Life in Culebrón

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 syst...

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. I...

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 co...

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 lemo...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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 - Christophe...

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 ...

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 pla...

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 pre...