By the book

"You use a lot of continuous tenses in your books. Is there any particular reason for that?". It's an interview on the BBC Radio 4 arts programme, Front Row, some twenty years ago. The author was from the USA, he was pleased. "Being interviewed in England is just so great - you want to talk about my use of grammar!".

When we first arrived in Spain I wanted to try reading in Spanish but bookshops used to scare me. They usually had counters and the books were on shelves behind the counter. If you wanted to buy a particular book it was fine. You just asked. In Spanish. Of course they never had the book but you were hooked now, you had to order it, wait two or three weeks and then be shocked by the price. Spanish books are expensive. If you wanted to browse then tough luck. Slowly that changed. Faced by online sellers lots of traditional bookshops went to the wall, despite price protection, and the survivors became more self service. In the newer shops you could judge a book by its cover, turn pages, read a few lines, check the price and whatnot before deciding to buy or not.

I also discovered libraries. Cheap and browser friendly but not quite the same as owning a book. I also realised that books written in Spanish and bought from Amazon UK were, even after delivery charges, cheaper than the same book bought in Spain.

Then Maggie bought me a Kindle and my reading habits changed. It was still cheaper to buy Spanish language books from the UK than from Spain but now they came instantly and with samples. No nice covers though, no paper and glue smell on fanning the pages and print size became a personal choice. After a while Amazon forced me to become Spanish, website wise, but I was, and I am happy with Kindle. One of the big advantages of electronic reading for foreign languages is that the dictionary is inbuilt so, if looking up a word is essential, it interrupts the reading flow a lot less.

Reading in another language has made me more aware of the differences in books. Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne are a harder read than Sally Rooney or Kate Atkinson simply because of when they were written. Some authors though are easier to read than others because of their style and vocabulary choice. I'm a bit out of touch with modern English language writers but, as an example, I remember Philip Roth as being a harder read than Joseph Heller. If I decide to buy a book by Kate Bernheimer or Terese Svoboda in English I may or may not like it but it's very unlikely that I won't understand it.

That's not always the case when I'm buying a book in Spanish. Sometimes Spanish language books are full of words that I don't know, they can have a complicated, difficult to follow, structure and they can have cultural references that I don't understand. Julio Cortázar for instance was Argentinian and famous for his book Rayuela; easy enough to read but so pointless that I've tried it and abandoned it twice. Or Bartleby & Co by Enrique Vila-Matas, a supposed classic, which my own personal review records as being awful: dry, boring and incomprehensible. Sometimes the books are beyond my language grasp. I've tried to read Diario de un Cazador by Miguel Delibes a couple of times. It actually seems like it might be good but there is so much slang, so much colloquial speech, that I've had to admit it's beyond me.

When I buy a book that I find I don't like or I can't understand I often go back to the tried and tested for the next book. Someone like Isabel Allende for instance, or maybe a police story by Lorenzo Silva. Mind you that doesn't always work. I'd just read a book by Marcos Giralt Torrente that I really didn't like so I thought I'd read a Pérez-Reverte. This bloke pumps out books like there's no tomorrow and they're fine, easy to read, often with a nice narrative. I'd seen one called Cabo de Trafalgar, about the Battle of Trafalgar and I thought it would be a hoot to have a book where Nelson and Collingwood were the baddies. Bad mistake, nautical terms on every line: topsails, boatswains, forecastles, rigging and monkeys left right and centre but also with French and English speech spelled to be pronounced in Spanish - guar is bisnes for war is business - I still enjoyed it but it wasn't easy. So, lets hope that Jesús Carrasco has a good one with Intemperie which is the book I've just bought.

Access denied

I picked up four pieces of post from our PO box in the Post Office today. This is quite unusual. Often there is nothing. Two of the envelopes were from departments of the Spanish Government. One was my European Health Card from the Social Security people. I applied for this, online, last week. I did it as I brushed my teeth getting ready for bed. It took moments, it was easy. The card's only valid for six months but, next time, as a pensioner, it'll be for longer. No problem anyway. I brush my teeth every night.

The other was from the Catastro, the Land Registry. It was an answer to my appeal of February 2017 when they said we owned half of next door and charged us much more IBI, the local housing tax, than we should have paid. A lightning 25 months to respond then. In that time I've sent several emails, been to their Alicante office (where I metaphorically banged on the table) and reported them to the Ombudsman. That's probably why they answered so quickly.

Instead of sending me the notification by post the letter inside the envelope told me how to get to that notification online. To get to the notification I had to "sign" a receipt but, being the 21st century, they wanted a virtual signature. No problem; I have a digital certificate, an electronic signature, on the computer. Up to now that has always been sufficient when dealing with Government Departments. But not today. It took me over three hours to eventually get to the notification. Their systems only worked with Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome after several modifications and not at all with Mozilla Firefox. There were links to pages and pages of supporting documentation about how to access the notification along with helpful hints on how to get around potential hiccoughs. I tried downloading the older versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer mentioned in that supporting documentation but Windows 10 didn't like them. There were three potential programs to "sign" the receipt. Neither Chrome nor Edge wanted to talk to Java and the Government software, AutoFirma, something like SelfSign stalled in downloading at 99% time after time and the dodgy downloads wouldn't delete. I had to disable pop up blockers (the on/off on Edge wasn't where all the answers in Google said they should be) and I had to dismantle all sorts of other safeguards like firewalls and non acceptance of cookies. I got there in the end, because what I lack in skill I make up for in doggedness, but it was a hell of a job.

To be honest it was so outrageous that I didn't get particularly cross. I was doing that cursing and laughing out loud thing. I remembered the strikes of workers within the justice system asking for computer systems that worked and the piles of paper that you can see behind the judges in the current Catalan trials. Obviously the roll out of technological solutions varies from one department to another. I wonder if Catastro still has ink wells on its desks?

The good news is that they seem to have put everything right in their records. They've even regularised a bit of land that we didn't know wasn't registered. Now all I have to do is to hope that they give us some money back!

Ambulance chasers

We were following an ambulance. It wasn't in a hurry and neither were we. On the back door was the symbol of the Generalitat, the Regional Government, and the name of a private firm. Along the side, in big letters, SAMU, obligingly decoded for us even in Valenciano (Servei d'Ajuda Mèdica Urgent), the English would be something like Emergency Medical Care Service. I think, though I'm not absolutely sure, that just as people in care homes wear name tags in their cardigans, writing SAMU on an ambulance says who they are and where they belong. Use SAMU or SAMUR (which is the service for the emergency ambulances in Madrid) and you mean ambulance: the sort of ambulance that comes for heart attacks and road traffic accidents and not the sort of ambulance that comes to take you for your appointment with the urologist.

Health Services in Spain are devolved to the seventeen Regional Governments. Ours, in Valencia, is called the Generalitat Valenciana. Hence the logo on the ambulance. But I wondered about that name of the private firm. Obviously there are private ambulances to move people to and from private clinics and to deal with patients who are paying through their insurance companies or health plans. Mutual societies, which work with the Social Security Department to cover work place health, might also use private ambulances. But that wouldn't be the case for an ambulance with the Generalitat logo. Google of course knew. It seems that, in the modern world, the Health Authorities usually outsource their ambulance services. So there's a tendering and contracting process for outsourced fleets of ambulances. Staff can also be outsourced though it seems that the doctors and nurses aboard the ambulances are, usually, Health Authority Staff whilst the drivers and paramedics come with the ambulance.

I know there are Red Cross, Civil Protection and yellow DYA ambulances. I'd also read a story recently, in the local press, about our Town Hall buying a new ambulance. So how did this all fit together?

I think the Red Cross ambulances are, much like the Red Cross or St John in the UK. I saw a Red Cross ambulance crew in action only a few weeks ago in Aspe. They were covering a fiesta and somebody was taken badly ill. I presume that event organisers have to cover emergency first aid and one of the potential options is the Red Cross. The DYA is another example of a charitable organisation that raises money in any number of ways, including selling its services. The DYA was originally set up to cover the shortage of ambulances to deal with road traffic accidents in Spain but, I think, it now generally operates through arrangements with Regional Health Authorities. Obviously when push comes to shove, in a train crash or terrorist attack, all the ambulances from everywhere become available. So then, what about our Town Hall ambulance? Checking back in the local press the ambulance was described as a TNA. Google said TNA is Ambulancia de Transporte no Asistido. The penny dropped.

There are two basic types of ambulances. Emergency Response Ambulances and Transfer Ambulances. Emergency Response Ambulances come in two types and with three crewing levels. Transfer ambulances come in two variations with two crewing levels. There are plenty of other sorts too, like rapid response vehicles, but I'll just stick to the principal types.

Generally, when someone calls 112 (there are other numbers too but 112 is foolproof), the ambulance that turns up will be an SVB - Basic Life Support ambulance. It will be crewed by two TES, técnicos en emergencias sanitarias, or emergency health specialists which are probably equivalent to UK paramedics. They will have spent a couple of years at college getting their qualification and they will probably have done lots of short ancillary courses. The SVB vehicles are kitted out with defibrillators, all those immobilising braces, oxygen, drips and a long etcétera.

The next step up is an SVA - Advanced Life Support ambulance. These SVA vehicles carry more medication on board than the SVBs and more sophisticated kit. The real difference though is not in the vehicles, it's that SVAs come with more qualified staff. The SVA Sanitarizada (the lowest level of SVA) comes with an Emergency Health Specialists (TES) and an Emergency Nurse. The course to become a nurse in Spain is a four year university degree course. Most SVA nurses also do a further two years masters in nursing.

The most sophisticated vehicles and crew is also an SVA but, this time, it's called Medicalizada. These ambulances are sometimes referred to as Mobile Intensive Care Units. The on board equipment doesn't usually vary much from the Sanitizada but this time the TES and the Nurse have a Doctor with them. A Spanish SVA Doctor will have done six years at university, a couple of years on a Masters in Emergency Medicine and another four years or so on a specialism like cardiology or intensive care medicine.

Away from the full blown, nobody dies on my watch, vehicles there are the two types of transport or transfer ambulance. The first of these is what my dad and his mum would have recognised as ambulances. The patient will probably be on a wheeled stretcher. Their lives are probably not in danger but they are not well. It's possible, though not likely, that the transfer could become an emergency so the vehicles are equipped with horns and lights. The patient will be accompanied by one TES paramedic and a driver. The driver may just have first aid type knowledge from a couple of months course or they might be a TES as well.

The last and simplest type, the TNA, the sort of ambulance that our Town Hall just leased, may have a first aider or a TES type driver but there is no expectation that the run will become an emergency. Often these vehicles are minibuses.

In re-reading various articles about transfer ambulances it looks as though there are often arrangements between local Town Halls to share access to the SVB ambulances. I was talking to one of my students about this and she said that before Pinoso sorted out its own local arrangements people could die whilst they waited for an ambulance to arrive from Elda, which is where our hospital is, some 28 kilometres away.

There is all sorts of legislation about how a vehicle qualifies to be an ambulance, from simple things like having the word ambulance painted back to front so that any driver looking in their rear view mirror will be able to read that they have an ambulance on their tail through to what it needs to carry, how it can operate and how long it can take to get such and such a distance.

Just one last thing. Spanish ambulances have traditionally had amber flashing lights, they've only just started to use blues and twos. Ambulances could have blue lights from August 2018 and all of them will have to carry blue lights by August 2020.

Peace and Love

Back in 1993, in a football game between La Coruña and Sevilla, there was an incident between Diego Maradona and Alberto Albístegui. The physiotherapist for Sevilla went out to help Maradona but by the time he got there Maradona was back on his feet and no worse for wear. The La Coruña player, Albístegui, was bleeding though, so the Seville physio gave him a hand. Back on the touchline the Sevilla coach, Carlos Salvador Bilardo, was incensed by the behaviour of his medic. He was shouting the equivalent of "For God sake Domingo (name of the physio), who gives a toss about the other side!, the ones in the coloured shirts are ours, Pisalo, pisalo!" Now pisalo means something like stamp on him, stamp on him. It was one of those football stories that became legend.

As a result, during the nineties, it was not unusual to hear chants from the Spanish terraces of “Pisalo, pisalo!” when the fans thought a certain type of play was called for.

1994/95 season Cup-winners Cup. Chelsea against Zaragoza. Chelsea aren't doing well. The terraces turn to fighting. The Spanish police wade in truncheons a go go and the uninvolved Zaragoza fans begin to chant "Pisalo, pisalo," in support of the police action.

The legend is that the Chelsea supporters heard the Spaniards chanting and thought they were saying "Peace and Love!, Peace and Love!". Suitably shame faced the Chelsea supporters settled down. It was in the British newspapers the next day so it must be true.

Thank you Alex for that little gem to add to my cultural knowledge of Spain from his language learning podcast of this week.

A piece of cake

Britons are often disappointed by Spanish cakes. You pass a cake shop and there are all sorts of incredibly appealing cakes and buns with reds and greens and cream and pastry and they look really tasty. But they aren't. The cream isn't real, it tastes of nothing much. The pastry is too flaky or there's too much of it and the coloured bits are just sugary.

Now it would be an untruth to say there aren't any nice cakes, pastries or buns in Spain. I really like lots of the traditional stuff. Bizcocho, for instance, is a sponge cake and there are lots of variations on bizcocho just as there are lots of variations on sweetened bread like toñas or the almondy flavours of things like Tarta de Santiago. Not far from us, in Petrer, we have the shop of one of the most famous cake makers in the whole of Spain; Paco Torreblanca. But, in general, fancy cakes in Spain are often disappointing.

Just bear with me whilst I add something else into the mix. Because I'm old I continue to watch broadcast telly. In the same way that the, Ted Rogers hosted, 3-2-1 show of the late 70s and 80s was based on a Spanish TV show, lots of current Spanish TV programmes are based on international templates: First Dates, Big Brother, The Voice, Come Dine With Me, Strictly Come Dancing, Got Talent, Kitchen Nightmares, Boom and lots more have Spanish versions. Last night the Spanish interpretation of the Great British Bake Off, cleverly titled Bake Off España, aired for the first time. Jesús Vázquez was the host and Dani Álvarez, Betina Montagne and Miquel Guarro were the judges.

I've never seen a full episode of the Great British Bake Off on either the BBC or Channel 4 but I have seen bits of it as Maggie is an avid viewer. Some of those cakes look truly incredible. I did watch the whole of the first of the Bake Off España programmes last night. I didn't think the standard was very high. In fact it looked to me as though lots of the bakers didn't have a firm grasp on the basics. The crema in the milhojas was a runny liquid, a couple of the participants had real problems making their ovens work and there were two kitchen fires. The judges even spat one of the cakes out!

"Well, what would you expect?," asked Maggie, "Spaniards aren't good with cakes."

Making one cross

It's election time in Spain. The local and European elections were on the cards, programmed in on the calendar for May from long ago, but then the Central Government, headed up by Pedro Sanchez, couldn't get its budget through parliament and so was left with little option but to call a General Election. On Monday of this week the President of our region in Valencia decided to bring forward the regional elections and to hold them on the same day as the General Election, April 28th.

As I listen to the news there seems to be a qualitative difference between the politics I'm used to and what's happening at the minute. It all seems very personal, very combative. It's more like squaring up for a shouting match or a brawl than a political debate. No actual fisticuffs to date though!

You may or may not remember that Spain had two General Elections very close together in late 2015 and mid 2016. In both cases the conservatives gained most seats but they couldn't manage a clear majority. Eventually, in October 2016, Mariano Rajoy, the then leader of the conservative Partido Popular or PP, pulled a minority government together. In June 2018 one of the highest courts in Spain handed out lots of sentences in a big corruption case. The court said the PP was implicated directly in that corruption. As a result Pedro Sanchez's socialists orchestrated a vote of no confidence. It was supported by a whole host of disparate political parties and that was the end of Rajoy. He jacked in his job and went back to being a property registrar. Sanchez became President.

For years and years the two big parties in Spain have been the Partido Popular, PP, the conservatives, and the Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE, the socialists. There has always been a good smattering of nationalist parties particularly from Cataluña and the Basque Country and the vestiges of the old communist party always picked up a few seats too. That two party structure started to fall apart when a left wing group called Podemos did well in the 2014 European elections and shortly afterwards a right/centre group called Ciudadanos, which had been present in Cataluña for a while, gained ground on the national stage. In the last two general elections it has been four big players plus the nationalists.

On top of this splintering on the national stage there are the Catalans. Back in 2017 they organised a second referendum on independence. None of the safeguards were in place for a fair vote and the referendum had been banned by the courts beforehand  but, somehow they have managed to produce a situation where anyone outside of Spain sees them as the innocent victims of a brutish and almost totalitarian government. The politicians involved in that declaration of independence were locked up soon after the referendum and not given bail. Some of the Catalan politicians foresaw that possibility and fled the country. Holding those politicians in prison, on remand, for so long hasn't done Spain's democratic image much good. The jailed politicians are actually in court now.

It's difficult to be objective about Cataluña. My view is that the independence politicians are a bunch of petulant children who are quite unable to have any conversation that doesn't start from the premise that their birthright has been stolen from them and that Cataluña should be an independent nation now. So far as I can see they haven't actually done any politics for ages - economy, education, health and the like - because they spend all their time talking about being oppressed and bullied. Obviously there are other schools of thought.

The nationalist Catalans did support the socialist censure motion against Rajoy but, when it came to budget time, they refused to help the socialists a second time unless Sanchez talked to them about Independence. Sanchez said we can't have talks with a pre-set condition of talking about Independence and the Catalans said talk to us about Independence or you won't get your budgets. The Catalans knew that their reaction would mean the fall of the socialist government so I can only presume that they think they are going to get on better with the PP and Ciudadanos. Now there's a bit of clear thinking for you. Even by trying to talk to the Catalans the right of centre parties continually called the socialists out saying that they were negotiating with rebels and betraying the Spanish people. In fact Ciudadanos and the PP keep blathering on about imposing central government rule in Cataluña. Under much more pressing circumstances, when the Catalans actually declared unilateral independence, Rajoy used an article of the Spanish Constitution to impose direct rule but it only lasted as long as it took to organise local elections and get the next regional government in place.

Without the Catalans and other nationalist politicians in the Basque Country the socialists couldn't raise the support to get their budgets approved. Without a budget the government couldn't do the things it wanted to do. It was an impasse and the only real way out was to call a General Election which is exactly what happened.

The last time I saw opinion polls the Socialists were out in front. In their short time in office they've got stuck in to doing lots of things that have been on the cards for ages. The fact of doing something has cheered up their long time supporters and brought on board some of the ditherers. They're having a tough time at the moment because, with the election called, they have decided to use their dying days of office to enact some legislation by decree and the other parties are calling this an electoral strategy.

Second up were Ciudadanos. They have a good looking youngish bloke in charge. They're pretty right wing and they are all for taking over Cataluña but they too seem to put their money where their mouth is. They managed to leverage some things they wanted to see done out of the last government and their Catalan leader comes across as level headed and articulate woman. So they cheered up their natural sort of supporters and took lots off the PP.

The replacement for Rajoy as leader of the PP  is also a smart youngish bloke. However he seems to be ill informed and stupid. He's talking about rolling abortion laws back to a 1985 law (nobody quite knows why he's talking about abortion as nobody else is) and he seems to be quite happy to lie, not the usual sort of political manipulation of the facts, but the Donald Trump sort of direct untruth. When the PP had slumped to third in the polls he said that it was because the socialist government now had charge of the statistical office and so they'd made up the figures.

Finally there's Podemos, the left wingers who subsumed the old communist party into their ranks and then let it wither away. They've been involved in lots of infighting and they've failed to support pragmatic and popular changes which they have tried to explain ideologically. Complicated and subtle political messages don't make easy news and the right has been able to exploit the lack of agreement on the left.

So socialists popular and out in front, Ciudadanos popular and in a strong second, the PP trailing badly and hampered by poor leadership with Podemos entrenched in navel gazing and on the verge of extinction. The likelihood is that nobody will get a majority. The most obvious outcome is a rightist coalition but nothing is ever straightforward when it comes to Spaniards doing deals so no crystal ball gazing at the moment.

There's also another factor. Down in Andalucia at the end of 2018 the socialists, who had held the region since democracy was re-established, didn't win an outright majority for the first time. The PP and Ciudadanos did a deal to take over and govern the region but even then they didn't quite have enough votes to do it. The wild card was a bunch of right wingers called Vox. They want to suspend the Catalan Government, in fact they want to re-centralise all government (Spain is basically organised federally), to centralise education, to beef up support for "family values" (they don't much care for feminists), close frontiers and mosques and they want to increase the influence of Spain in Europe. Basically then usual sort of idiotic populist nonsense that we've heard from the USA, Brazil, Italy, Bulgaria, Poland and an increasingly long etcetera.

Vox doesn't have any parliamentary seats but it does have a Twitter and an Instagram account. And they are on a roll. They are doing what Trump does. They do not argue in the time honoured tradition of proposals and counter proposals. They publish something bad, nasty, homophobic, sexist, jingoistic or whatever in a short, easily digestible form and right thinking people rise up against them and denounce them on the social media. The debate actually helps abhorrent politicians to spread their poisonous messages. We see their misinformation and twisted analyses on Facebook or in WhatsApp groups because all of us have "friends" on Facebook who we would steer clear of in real life or at least we'd steer clear of the subjects that turn up on social media. Those people believe the slurs, repeat the false information and they simply attack anyone who is not with them. If we respond the nonsense gets more exposure and if we don't respond we are doing less than we should. It's a bit tricky.

And, down in Andalucia, the two, run of the mill, right wing parties, the Partido Popular and Ciudadanos, were perfectly happy to get into bed with the far right politicians of Vox. If I were to use that crystal ball my guess is that, after the vote on April 28th, that's what we will be looking at on a national scale.

Lord Carnal and Lady Lent

Today is Shrove Tuesday, the last day before Lent. Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday. Time for a bit of a knees up before the sackcloth and ashes of Lent. No booze for forty days, no chocolate. Pancake day.

As a young person I knew about Carnival in Rio. Lots of people in feathers, well women really. In fact some of them without many feathers at all: drumming and dancing, a wild bacchanalia. I had no idea why. It was something they did in Rio. Just like mushy peas and mint sauce in Yarmouth. Years later I realised that Mardi Gras in New Orleans was something akin though, to be honest, I still associate Mardi Gras with the backdrop to the druggy scene in Easy Rider.

I was taken a bit by surprise by Carnival by the Carnaval of here. I suppose it was when we lived in Cartagena. All of a sudden there was Rio passing in front of Zara and Druni the perfume shop. Some of the feathers the women dragged behind them were so wide that they touched both sides of the narrow street. There were groups of singers too. The costumes were all a bit too much falling down trousers and squirty flowers, too slapstick, for me and the songs were incomprehensible but Spanish people roared with laughter. The funny satirical songs are called chirigotas. If they are important in Cartagena then they are absolutely enormous in Cádiz. The chirigotas are so ingrained in Spanish culture that they get a brief slot on the national news on the telly.

When we'd lived in Santa Pola I don't think I'd ever realised there was a carnival procession there, nor in Pinoso. In Ciudad Rodrigo, where we lived for a while, Carnaval was a big event but there the scantily clad women and be-sequinned and top hatted men were supplanted by bulls running through the street.

But now I know about Carnaval, at least I know it is celebrated in Spain. I know it's big in Cádiz and monstrous in Tenerife. Round here Torrevieja and Aguilas and even Cabezo de Torres celebrate Carnaval flamboyantly with big processions and often with drag queens in impossibly high heels. Somebody told me that in Jumilla the other day part of the parade showed a disinterred Franco carried high on the shoulders of bare chested soldiers. Irreverence for two Spanish legends in one! Here in Pinoso, last Saturday, we had a nice little parade without sequins and without drag queens or satirical songs but with lots of people we knew.

Palmed off

I think someone has it in for our palm tree. If you are a long time reader you may remember a post about an invasion of palm eating beetles, the picudo rojo. It isn't so much the adult beetles that cause the problem but their larvae which feast on the soft tissue and buds of the palms. The trees, I know they're not trees but that's what we call them, die as a result.

Working out how to protect the tree against the beetle and overcoming a slight difficulty with power cables made me think we were going to have to cut the tree down a few years ago but, one by one, we solved the problems. In time I settled into a gentle, and relatively inexpensive regime of spraying insecticide every six weeks. As I understand it the insecticide I am using works like fly spray and interferes with the way the muscles of the beetles work so they die of asphyxiation. The big problem is that it does the same to other beasts, including bees and that's bad. In a more general way, living in Europe, pouring chemicals onto the land is no longer considered to be a good thing to do.

When I first started there were a couple of, freely available, types of chemicals to douse the tree. Then the legislation changed. If I were to continue to use the chemicals I would either have to hire someone in who had the appropriate handling qualifications or get that qualification myself. I was going to do the exam until I discovered that there was an exception designed to cover cases like ours. I was allowed to buy the chemicals in very small quantities at about 25 times the previous price. That's what I did and that's what I've been doing for about the last year.

I sprayed the tree today and with my usual 30 ml of pesticide in 45 litres of water then I went to the agricultural supplier to buy the next dose ready for the next spraying. Hardly any left said the man. The legislation has changed again. The chemicals that I have been using can now only be used inside greenhouses.

Now I've never cared for the idea that I'm slaughtering bees. I have looked for other treatments. I have talked to a palm tree expert in Elche and to the bloke who trims out tree about other ways to protect our palm. I was looking for the equivalent of ladybirds to control greenfly. The biological control. There's a sort of worm that eats the larvae and a fungus treatment too. Neither of them seem to be particularly effective and the regime suggested by both my experts was that I should use the biological treatments when the beetles weren't very active, in the cooler months, but stick with the chemicals in times of risk. I was also put off by the price. I seem to remember fungus treatment cost 80€ per application and that it needed applying several times a year.

So, after the bad news, I went to the environmental department at the town hall to ask for advice. The woman there agreed with me that it was a bit of a problem that the chemicals had been withdrawn. She agreed that the optional treatments were expensive and ineffective and she told me that the town hall had chopped down lots of palm trees which it hadn't been able to protect. She said that down in Elche, where the palm groves have World Heritage status they are losing trees at a prodigious rate. I didn't come away uplifted.

Not a good prognosis. But I've just had a look on the internet. There seem to be all sorts of products at all sorts of prices. I hope it's market forces at work and not just snake oil. Maybe there's still hope for our palm tree and for the bees.

Mainly the Archaeology Museum in Jumilla

Spanish museums used to be awful. Piles of stuff in random order often without any labelling or information. Most, though not all, are much better now and some of them even have levers to pull or computer screens to tap. There is still a tendency for the information to be a bit long winded (something I get accused of), and only very infrequently do you get the news story type labelling with a brief résumé in the first paragraph and more detailed information below. The most common style is a four or five hundred word description on each section. With all good intentions I read the first couple of information boards, scan the next two or three, read the first couple of lines of the next dozen or so boards and then start to wander aimlessly without reading anything unless it catches my attention. Usually the notices are in Castilian Spanish and quite often in English too. Occasionally around here, it's just in Valenciano which always annoys me.

It was sunny yesterday and neither Maggie nor I had work in the afternoon. We went for a bit of an explore and, more by happenstance than design we ended up heading towards Jumilla. I knew that there was an exhibition called Capturas individuales at the Archaeology museum there, the Museo Arqueológico Jerónimo Molina, but, I wasn't sure whether it was photos or paintings. If we were passing we may as well pop in to have a look.

Archaeology museums tend to be organised from old to new. Pre-history with cave paintings, arrowheads and the like close to the entrance moving on to the stone carvings of jewellery bedecked Iberian women and so on through Greek vases, Phoenician boats, Roman central heating. Then on to the Goths, the North African Moorish Invasion, onward to the Middle Ages and upwards through time stopping wherever the collections or the curators see fit.

We've done the Jumilla museum a bundle of times. We've listened to live music as we leaned against the display case that hold the two and a half thousand old year column featuring an armed rider. We've been on the roof on Museum Night to listen to poetry where the Republican prisoners took their exercise when the building was used as a prison and we've been to a talk about old Jumilla surrounded by Roman mosaics. So, when the bloke behind the desk asked us if we'd ever been before we said yes and that we'd only come to have a look at the temporary exhibition. The museum was not awash with people. Indeed we were the only customers. Moises, the man on the door, wasn't too busy. Our saying that we'd been before didn't stop him. He caught up with as we lingered over a bit of Iberian pottery on the first floor and started to give us a guided tour. His English was good and he knew his exhibits well. Altogether a very interesting tour. We didn't really get to see the temporary exhibition - they were paintings by the way. But, thank you, anyway Moises.

Tortilla and coffee

Culebrón has a breakfast club. Well sort of. A couple of years ago, it could be even longer, some British chums made me aware of the Wednesday morning group at Eduardo's, our local restaurant, and I started to go along. It was quite a big group, made up of around the same numbers of Britons and Spaniards. I used to go most weeks but I stopped when I started Wednesday morning classes and I never got back into the habit. There used to be a lot of laughing as language failed and gestures and pointing took over so it was good fun as well as an opportunity to catch up on local gossip.  I haven't been for months but, this morning, with nothing better to do I went for a late breakfast and to see who was there. As well as the home team there was Belgian representation. Just me representing the UK and only seven of us.

One of the Spaniards who regularly attends the group spent a lot of her life in the UK and she is hoping to return there in the near future. She's still trying to decide between living near to family or near friends she made here. That set a discussion going about why she wanted to return to a wetter and colder UK and why other ex Breakfast Clubbers had left Spain. I suggested that one of the reasons was that living in Spain, without good Spanish, is quite hard work and that's why lots of older Britons decide they will "go home". In the UK they can, at least, make themselves understood faced with those problems that come with age. I was really surprised with how little sympathy there was for that idea. The group was quite vehement that all that was needed was a little application to learn Spanish and that most Britons are unwilling to make that effort and choose, instead, to live in a British ghetto sidestepping interaction with the locals as much as possible.

Head them off at the pass!

I bought some books on Sunday. This is not, in itself, such an unusual thing. I usually have a book on the go. The difference was that I bought ten in one fell swoop.

Nowadays I can read almost any Spanish book without too much trouble. I've chosen to read more Spanish than English for two main reasons. The first is to improve my Spanish and the second is to bone up on the home culture. It does mean that I have no idea who is hip and cool amongst contemporary British writers but as I don't know the name of the Home Secretary, or the modern way to say hip and cool, you can take it that I've given up on keeping up to date with Britain. One biggish problem is that I often forget the names of the authors I've read. For some reason names like Eva García Sáenz de Urturi just don't stick in the same way as, say, Jessie Greengrass.

Anyway I am reading a book called Women of the Post War Period (Mujeres de la posguerra) by a woman called Inmaculada de la Fuente. I am finding it hard going. It's giving information about the post Civil War period in Spain by reference to the works of some famous women Spanish writers like Carmen Laforet, Ana María Matute, Carmen Martín Gaite and Josefina Aldecoa. I've actually read something by three of those four authors but the continuous references to characters in their books, as a way of highlighting life in post war Spain, is becoming just a little wearing.

So, back to the book buying. In 1826 Pinoso finally became large enough to be self governing and separated from the neighbouring town of Monóvar. The event which celebrates that is called Villazgo. It's a big event in Pinoso which centres on local food, local traditions and local culture. This year's event took place last Sunday. Amongst the delights there were stalls from local associations and groups, from the local villages and from some businesses.

One of the stalls was selling old books including piles of notebook sized and notebook thick cowboy stories. The covers featured garish cartoon drawings. Inside the cheap, newsprint type paper was yellowed with age. Two euros for ten "books" seemed like a bit of a bargain. I had this vague recollection, from a radio programme that I'd heard that, back in the 1950s, 60s and 70s there was an industry in producing huge numbers of cheap, accessible books with weekly editions. I also remembered that the censors kept an eye on them to ensure that they passed on the "appropriate" messages for instance about a woman's role in obeying and keeping her man happy. I think they were also an incidental tool in a vague campaign to confront the country's shocking illiteracy rate. A definite addition to my cultural education.

This morning I chose one at random to read. El buitre de Denver (The Denver Vulture) by Silver Kane, printed in 1969 and with an original price of 9 pesetas. Apparently Kane was the pen name for Francisco González Ledesma who wrote over 1,000 novels in his lifetime. Over my breakfast cup of tea, before the household chores dragged me away, I'd read just 40 pages. Even then Kenton was already dead, shot in the back by his erstwhile partner and the gunslinger Mallory had gone a calling on Kenton's beautiful and curvaceous widow, Alice.

Definitely a bit less taxing than those postwar women.

Confused for 80 seconds

Whilst I was shaving this morning, I heard a piece on the radio about changes to the rail service in Murcia. The National news has ten minute sections of local news every now and then. In the bathroom the local news comes from Murcia and in the kitchen the local news covers the Valencian Community. It's to do with signal strengths and because we are on the frontier between two regions.

RENFE, the train operator and ADIF, the rail infrastructure operator, have been in the news a lot lately. Over in Extremadura there was lots of fuss about really old diesel trains breaking down all the time and leaving people stranded for hours. The people of Extremadura complained that they live in a forgotten part of the country. In fact there has been a lot of grumbling, from several parts of Spain, that all the railway money is being poured into the glamorous high speed trains whilst the much more travelled commuter lines are being largely ignored. The story was rekindled a few days ago when, in Cataluña, there was a head on collision between two trains, leaving several people injured and one person dead. The trains looked like very old stock..

Back in Murcia the city is awaiting the arrival of the high speed train line out of Madrid. Over the last year or so, possibly longer, there have been a number of pitched battles, really violent confrontations, between people who live in the communities, that are about to be cut in half by the high speed lines, and the police. I have read articles that have suggested that vested interests are at work in suppressing reporting the number and severity of those confrontations.

Foamy faced I didn't quite catch the railway news but it sounded interesting. Like Sheldon Cooper I approve of trains and I like to use them. So I thought I'd check the story. I expected a quick, precision strike. Not so. First of all my search turned up lots of unrelated stories about the introduction of hybrid trains onto the line that currently joins Murcia to Madrid. These trains can change axle width (Spanish conventional gauge is wider than the standard European gauge used for the high speed lines) at Cuenca for the last part of the run into Madrid. They are hybrid because they have diesel as well as electrical drive for the non electrified parts of the route.

Thwarted by printed stories I had to go back and find the podcast of the news bulletin I'd half heard this morning and listen. I understood the words but I still didn't quite understand the story. In fact it turned out it was three pieces of rail news, affecting Murcia, reported as one

The first was about temporary cuts in the service between Murcia and Madrid because of the Variante de Camarillas. I thought I knew the word variante and I thought it meant variant. So what was Camarillas? The dictionary said it was a clique, a pressure group or band of people. I wondered if it were maybe some local agreement to do with the opposition to the new tracks. That didn't seem right though. Maybe it was a place then? The only Camarillas that Google maps knew was in Teruel. There was a street in Murcia called Camarillas Reservoir Street and that was the clue. I found the reservoir on the map. I also discovered that variante can mean detour. The Variante de Camarillas is a new stretch of rail that cuts off a corner in the current route between Murcia and Madrid. It runs from Cieza to Agramón (a place I've never heard of) and means that the line to Calasparra will become just a local line. Crikey. What a lot of work for such a simple story.

The second story was that there were going to be closures on the line between Murcia and Alicante. Again part of the difficulty was that there was a place name involved, another place I'd never heard of; Reguerón. It's a district of Murcia city. That story was about was closing the current line whilst a couple of stretches of new track were joined up.

The third piece took no working out. Another place, but this time they described the name, Trepía, as a village near Lorca. It was about protests demanding the  building bridges instead of level crossings on the new line.

Just 80 seconds of news bulletin which I would have understood perfectly if I'd known two place names and how to say spur line in Spanish. Or which I would never have heard if I'd shaved faster and got into the kitchen for the local news spot!

Letters to the Editor

When we first got here I used to buy El País newspaper every day. It was a part of my introduction to Spain. El País is a left leaning Spanish daily that came into being shortly after Franco's death. If you were looking for a British political and literary equivalent it would be The Guardian. Although its paper sales have plummeted El País is still the second most read printed newspaper in Spain (after the sports only newspaper, Marca). The digital edition of El País is number one amongst all the online Spanish newspapers.

The newspaper has an English version which I've read for quite a while. About a month ago the English edition started to promote a new weekly podcast called ¿Qué? The podcast is presented by the Editor, a bloke called Simon Hunter. He gave us his Twitter name should anyone wish to comment. I'd enjoyed the podcast so I sent a message to say so. There was a photo alongside Simon's profile picture and I thought he'd done pretty well for himself considering that he looked so young. Later I read his biography somewhere and it says he went to University, in Hull, between 1996-1999. I did the same, went to Hull that is, but in my case between 1972-1975. I suppose that's why he looks young to me.

The podcast is very good. Informal but very informative. It mixes background and story for some of the big news events in Spain each week.

I was skimming through my news feed this evening and I came across an editorial, translated into English, of a story about the moderator/mediator/rapporteur proposed to help the negotiations between Spain and Cataluña. Negotiations between Spain and Cataluña is tantamount to suggesting talks between Cumbria and England but you'll have to take the meaning rather than question the phrasing.

Basically the article pointed out the democratic problems with the Mediator solution. I could tell that the premise was interesting but I had to read it three times, and it was in English, before I could make head nor tail of it. Half the problem was the translation. There had been hardly any attempt to interpret as distinct from translate. Being a bit whiskied up, knowing who the editor was and having his Twitter contact I sent a message. I suggested the piece was incomprehensible and it needed some judicious editing. He came straight back. Understandably, he was defensive. It was all a bit tense. I backed off, he backed off, the phrases softened. I'm half expecting an invitation to the Christmas party

It's pretty cool being able to talk to a newspaper like that. And good on the man for defending his people.

A stroll around Pinoso

I've always liked cinema so, when I began to take an interest in Spain, I made an effort to see Spanish films. For years and years it seemed that every Spanish film ever made was about the Spanish Civil War. They were almost all dull and drear. I also read Hugh Thomas's book about the war and I found it hard going. Paul Preston's more recent history of the same event persuaded me that he was one of the most boring writers that has ever put pen to paper. Years later, I thought I should give him a second chance, he seemed to be well regarded by everyone else, so I read his book about Franco. I have never been tempted to try him again.

The Spanish Civil War ran from 1936 to 1939. That's a long time ago. As I mentioned in a post a few days ago there are two schools of thought amongst Spaniards about the war and more particularly about the dictatorship that resulted from it. That it should be forgotten or that it should be given a thorough airing so that it can be finally laid to rest. Unlike Britons, a little older than me, who talk incessantly about "The War", the Second World War that is, I don't think that I've ever heard a Spaniard start a conversation about the Civil War. The majority of young people know about the Civil War from their school syllabus in exactly the same way as young Britons do topics on The Blitz. Our Town Hall had obviously decided which side it was on with the second in a series of annual week long events around a Civil War theme.

The war started because a group of army officers didn't much care for the result of the 1936 General Election. They organised a coup and botched the job so that it turned into a bloody civil war. The area where we live was the last redoubt of the Republican Government and, indeed, the last tatters of the defeated Government flew out of Spain to exile from an airfield about 5 km down the road from Culebrón.

Last Sunday we went for a walk around Pinoso led by the town archivist and a chap from Alicante University. The idea was to show us sites that had been important in the Spanish Civil War. I enjoyed standing on a street corner having to imagine the scene but, to be honest, the visit could equally well have been a lecture because there was very little to see in situ. The Archivist told us that the idea came from one of the local councillors. That's the same team that brought us a journey through the town archives and a tour of the local cemetery both of which have been among my favourite events here in Pinoso.

Anyway. so we're strolling around in the bitingly cold wind. We get told about the checkpoints to control traffic in and out of the town, we hear about the Pioneers, the socialist equivalent of a movement like the Hitler Youth, we hear about a lynching (and the dispute from the participants about whether that was a true story or not), we hear about paseos and about sacking the local church and the burning of all the religious statues. Paseo by the way is usually best translated as a stroll. Here though it's the euphemistic term used to describe the last walk to the firing squad during the Civil War years. At one point Maggie checked with me, as we walked from the site of an air raid shelter towards the clock tower used as a look-out post, that Pinoso had been in the area controlled by the Republic. I think that she was having some difficulty in squaring summary firing squads with the idea of the "good guys".

Just one little snippet from the talk that struck home with me amongst all the detail of colony schools and union activity. There has been a bit of a fuss in Spain recently about removing reminders of the dictatorship enshrined in street names. Lots of the ostentatiously named streets, like Avenida del Generalissimo, changed soon after Franco's death in 1975 but, in towns and cities the length and breadth of Spain less obvious Francoist street names and symbols live on. In Pinoso there were 12 of these streets with names like Capitán Haya, a Nationalist air ace, Sánchez Mazas, a writer, responsible for the "Arriba España" slogan and others of a similar ilk. Fair enough, I thought, change the names and there you go. What was pointed out though, by the guide, was that this was part of a systematic method of obliterating older social and cultural aspects from Spanish streets and replacing them with a "Francoist" history.  It reminded me of George Orwell's 1984 hero Winston Smith writing a piece for The Times about an air ace. In reality the pilot never existed but, in a fake news sort of way, he would become important as soon as his story was in print.

How do you say Historical Memory in English?

Spain came up with a novel way to move from the dictatorship of the 40s,50s, 60s and 70s of the last century to the democracy of today. No Truth and Reconciliation Commission here. The people who make the decisions about how things are going to work just decided to forget all about it - the Pacto de olvido - the pact of forgetting. Then, in 2007, the Socialist Government came up with the Historical Memory Law - Ley de Memoria Histórica - which recognised that there were victims on both sides of the Spanish Civil War, gave rights to the victims and the descendants of victims of the war, and the subsequent Franco dictatorship, and formally condemned the Franco Regime. Now neither Pact of Forgetting nor the Historical Memory sound like good English to me but I hope that you get the idea. The first idea, the pact, is to sweep the mess under the carpet and the second, historical memory, is to get it all out in the open so you can have a fresh start.

The Spanish Partido Popular, the Conservative type party, was against the Historical Memory law. Their argument was that it wasn't good to stir it all up again. The PP was in power between 2011 and 2018 so, in a very Spanish way, the law stayed in place but nobody did very much about it. Mass graves were not opened up so no remains could be handed over to families for reburial, at least not in any systematic or wholesale manner, and simple things like renaming streets dedicated to Francoist heroes or the removal of Francoist symbols was equally half hearted. And Franco himself, or at least his mortal remains, continued at rest in the place of honour inside the gigantic monument that is the Valley of the Fallen - el Valle de los Caídos.

Last night, in Pinoso, I went to one of the events that are "remembering" the Spanish Civil War this week. The events have the snappy title of Jornadas de Memoria Histórica y Democratica de Pinoso - Days of Historical Memory and Democracy of Pinoso - which, once again, you will have to interpret in your own way as I can't think of a decent English language translation. The problem, for me, is that the words represent concepts I don't share so I don't have good language for them.

The event was the showing of a documentary about Miguel Hernández; a poet from Orihuela in Alicante. The documentary is called Las tres heridas de Miguel Hernández and it's on YouTube with subs if you want to have a look. I knew a little about the poet having been to his house a couple of times, listened to radio programmes about him and even read some of his poetry. He stuck with the legitimate government and never renounced his socialist beliefs even when he was captured and locked up after his side had lost the war. He was condemned to death but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he finally died of tuberculosis in a prison in Alicante aged 32.

I enjoyed the documentary. Nicely put together and easy to understand. The people who presented it talked about some of the opposition that there had been to producing the documentary and the passions that Hernández still arouses in his home town of Orihuela. The question and answer session afterwards was really interesting. There were a variety of opinions but there were two obvious strands. The same themes represented in the idea for and against the Historical Memory Law. Sleeping dogs as against washing your dirty laundry in public.