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.

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.