You got the SP, now the results

Just in case you're interested the socialists, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), had a good election. They gained 38 seats and now have 123 seats in the lower house of parliament (they also won the upper house). On the other hand the conservative Partido Popular (PP) had a disastrous day. They lost 71 seats down from 137 to 66. Anyone want to give me odds on the survival of their recently elected leader?

On the left Unidas Podemos (UP) dropped 29 seats to 42  and on the right Ciudadanos (Cs) gained 25 to 57. To the shame of Spain and Spaniards the ultra right party VOX went from nothing to 24 parliamentary seats.

Another eight parties won representation in the lower house. Most of them have a regional flavour - Catalans, Basques, Valencians, Navarrese etc. The biggest of these, with 15 seats in the Congress, is Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, ERC, which is headed up by a politician who is currently in prison for his part in the dodgy Catalan referendum.

There are 350 seats in the Congress so 176 seats are needed for a majority (minority governments can be elected but only if, in the investiture vote, they get a majority either through abstentions or through one off support). The right: PP, Cs and VOX, even lumped together, can't get anywhere close.

For the head of the PSOE, Pedro Sanchez, to get the 176 seats he needs to be President the only (reasonably possible) single party that could help him do that is Ciudadanos because they vacillate around the centre ground sufficiently to be philosophically compatible. Even though the pundits say the chances are icicle in hell there could well be lots of external pressure to push for that unlikely pairing.

The natural bedfellow for Pedro and the PSOE is Unidas Podemos but, between them, they are short of the magic number. Add in the other independent groups with similar philosophical leanings and the alliance is still one short. So Pedro needs to talk to some of the independents to get there and that is dodgy political ground. The alternative, and a real possibility, is that he will try to go it alone as a minority government in which case he will have to horse trade over every single initiative.

We shall see.

Just to round things off the elections yesterday were national.  The local elections come next month. The political "constituencies" for the General Election are the provinces but votes are collected on a municipal basis. So, just for information, Pinoso voted like this: PP and PSOE had a dead heat with 1,013 votes each, Cs got 839, VOX 503, UP 501 and Compromis (a Valencian group) got 56. The animal rights party got 39 votes. That's a good result for the PSOE in a town which is traditionally PP for the General Elections.

We also had elections for the regional government here in the Comunitat Valenciana. There are 99 seats in the local parliament so it's 50 seats for the majority. The PSOE (and its local version the PSPV) got 27 seats, PP 20, Cs 18, Compromis 18, VOX 10 and UP 8. For the last Valencian administration the PSOE, Compromis and Podem (local version of UP) formed the government. They could do the same again after yesterday's results.

2019 General Elections in Pinoso

I don't get a vote in the General Elections here in Spain. Nonetheless I popped out to the three polling stations in Pinoso to have a bit of a nosey. I took the photos as soon as I arrived and I only stayed a few minutes just to see what numbers were like. The polling stations looked busy to me though it was mid morning, a good time, especially as the church had just chucked out.

This lot of elections are the thirteenth since democracy was restored in the late 1970s and the fifth set that we've been here for. We've lived under only three of the, so far seven democratic presidents.

Anything is possible, results wise, and coalition wise but it's likely, according to the polls, that the socialist Pedro Sanchez will be returned to power as the head of a coalition with left wing Unidas Podemos and possibly some of the Nationalist groups. There is even speculation that the socialists could form a coalition with the right of centre Ciudadanos party. Who knows? It's much more likely though that Ciudadanos will throw their lot in with the conservative Partido Popular, headed up by recently appointed, Pablo Casado. His chances of becoming president are increased if the racist, homophobic, peddlers of populist myths, Vox, (Hello Farage and Brexit fans) burst onto the political scene as the polls suggest and then support the PP.

We also have regional elections today for the Valencian Community. I don't get a vote in that either.

Getting down

Spain is full of fiestas. Fiesta is an idea that we foreigners living here begin to get a glimmer of but which most of us never quite understand fully. It's not just a street party or a carnival. A proper fiesta is based on traditions, sometimes traditions based on beliefs. Fiestas are a collective expression of a community; it's not about somebody organising something and other people watching. Fiestas are commonplace, often nearly ignored by locals yet usually loaded with symbolism in the clothes, dances, music, songs or other manifestations such as language and bonfires. Recognising, and altering, those symbols is something often passed from generation to generation. Fiestas are periodic and repetitive - with the same basic things happening year after year.

There are, within towns and cities, fiestas and fiestas. Some are only fiestas in name because they were designed by tourist boards or trade associations. They don't fit the spirit of the definition above. They can be big, they can be enormous, but they do not, necessarily, represent the spirit of a community. You'd have to ask a local to be sure but I think that, for instance, San Juan in Alicante is one of those seminal fiestas. If you go and watch the parade it's impressive but the real San Juan is not in watching - it's in participating. In getting into a barraca and eating, drinking and dancing with your friends, in sitting around a bonfire with people you met at school etc. It's one of the reasons I like the Easter celebrations in Spain - the Church may think they're religious events but I think that they are much more an expression of a community. Here in Pinoso I think Santa Catalina is like that, in Valencia the Fallas and in Ciudad Rodrigo the encierro at Carnaval. There are thousands of others. I should say that in these days of mass tourism some of the fiestas may lose some of the spirit of that description. I know a couple of Valencianos who think that Fallas is just one huge commercial inconvenience nowadays aimed at tourists. The Wine Horses in Caravaca struck me as one enormous booze up and people have said the same about the Bando de la Huerta in Murcia.

In fact it was to the Bando de la Huerta that we went yesterday. A bando is usually the sort of thing that the town crier reads out, a proclamation. Town Halls here still pin bandos to their noticeboards. As an example in December last year the town of Yecla issued a bando banning the collection of wild plants, like holly and ivy, connected with Christmas. In this particular case, so Wikipedia tells me, the bando is a programme, often with a critical political message, for the fiesta written in verse. Huerta is the key word here though. The dictionary definition I knew, before living in Murcia, was market garden but it's a lot wider than that - it means the fertile, irrigated land of Murcia (and Valencia). It's the countryside, the agricultural land.  From that quick look at Wikipedia it seems that the Bando was originally a festival organised by rich people to mock the peasants in the countryside with their funny habits and clothes but, nowadays, it's a celebration of the traditions and customs of the countryside and the wealth and harvests that it produces.

We've been around this area for ages and it's the first time that we've been free to go. We didn't stay long and we didn't participate. We just watched some of the parade and we were even a bit late in arriving to see all of that. Apparently Pinoso had a group in the parade and we missed them for instance. One of the reasons we were a bit late was that we couldn't find anywhere to park. The city centre was closed off, cars were parked, and double parked, everywhere. Obviously everyone wanted to get in on the act. Outside all of the bars there were piles and piles of men and women drinking and talking and wearing waistcoats and "traditional" dress. Very odd to see young men with modern haircuts, piercings and tattoos consulting their mobile phones, beer in hand, wearing zaragüelles, a type of big, baggy, white boxer shorts and often alpargatas, the shoes we Brits call espadrilles. In a way that's where the fiesta was. In just the same way that it was in the Floridablanca gardens where a barraca, a sort of temporary HQ set up by a peña, one of the neighbourhood or interest groups that participate in the fiestas, was in full swing and oblivious to the passing parade as they served traditional and typical Murcian food and where there would be folk music, displays of bygone days and the like. We could see the fiesta around us, everywhere but we didn't really get involved.

Just to say that the Wikipedia article about the Bando is about 10 pages of A4 long so there is lots more to know about this event if you're interested. Bear in mind too that the Bando is just one of several events happening in Murcia this week as a part of the Spring Festival.

Life in the slow lane

There aren't many self serve checkouts in Spain. They have them at Ikea, the scan your goods, push in your credit card type and they have some at Corte Inglés though I've never seen them in use. At Carrefour they used to have self serve but they changed to a single queue system - Checkout Number fourrr please.

Generally then supermarket queues are stand in line, stuff to the rubber belt, the person at the till scans your items, you put them into a bag and then you pay, maybe scanning your loyalty card in the process. You can still buy plastic bags at the checkout but most people don't.

Consum, probably the largest supermarket in Pinoso, works exactly like that. I'd gone for my usual 30-40€ worth of every second day shopping. There were four of the six tills on the go, the deputy manager was on one till, the women from the deli and fish counter were up too. All the tills in use were busy. The days of the ten items or fewer queue are long gone.

I stood in a queue. I was behind lots of baskets with a few items. Over on the next till there was one load already on the belt and a couple unloading a big trolley load onto the belt. I hesitated. The paying so often seems to take people by surprise. Scenario; I know I'm in a supermarket queue, I know I'm going to have to pay for this but when they ask I'm going to be surprised. Now where is my purse? Oh, no, I'll use plastic instead of cash. Loyalty card? Oh yes, now where is it. Oh deary me, I can't seem to find it, oh, I can use my ID number and so on. Even then they are not contrite, they don't load their bag as quickly as they can. Oh, no. They put the card away carefully, have a quick gander at the till receipt and then slowly begin the last of the packing so that you can't get to your things which are now piling up alongside theirs.

I decide to risk my luck with the trolley instead of the several baskets. A lad steps in behind me. He just has Coco Pops. I let him by. The woman with the trolley does all the stuff above, all the looking for her purse and failing to pack speedily. She also adds in tinkering on her mobile phone to open the application that holds a record of the discounts she can claim and her "monthly saver cheque." It takes her a while to find and open the app. She wants the stuff delivered and there's a bit of a conversation about a suitable time. There is also trouble at the next till. Something isn't scanning properly and the woman on my till seems keen to get involved. She abandons us a couple of times to help out in the next aisle. One of the other management staff joins in. We stand patiently in line.

It's good being a pensioner. Time to burn and with a sanguine view of life.

Red Letter Days

The wettest April since Noah took to boating according to some news reports. We had Easter tide guests. We were confined to barracks. The Easter parades were cancelled. Sight seeing was off. We presumed the shopping centres would be closed for the bank holidays.

We Brits here in Pinoso seem to call bank holidays, Red Letter Days. I presume that's because the holiday dates are printed in red on paper calendars. I'm going to call them bank holidays because that's what I've always called public holidays. National Holidays are the same all over Spain. Most people will not work on those days but that doesn't, necessarily, mean that they will work fewer days in the working year. The Spanish logic is that bank holidays are not actually holidays, they are days when you don't work. So only the extra non working days need to be included in the holiday calendar. If, for instance, a National Holiday falls on a Sunday, like Christmas Day 2016, it will not be shown as a bank holiday because it is already a non working day. On the other hand Saturday is a working day so if Christmas Day were on a Saturday, it would be shown on the calendar as a day off and you wouldn't have to work. If you have a job that doesn't require you to work Saturdays there would be no extra day to compensate. There are up to ten days of National Holiday each year but usually only eight or nine of them are used because the others fall on Sundays - it varies from year to year. Additionally there are two days chosen by each Region. As we live on the border between two Regions, Valencia and Murcia, that sometimes catches us out. Last, but not least, the local Town Hall sets a couple of days off. Traditionalists, with a paper calendar stuck on the fridge might find that the one produced in Pinoso, in Valencia, shows as many as four holidays different to one produced in Abanilla, Murcia only a few miles away.

Yesterday, coming out of the the flicks, I was surprised to find the shopping centre, where the cinema is, open. Open on Easter Sunday? This morning, Maggie had arranged to show some people a couple of houses. She's heard Britons talking about how it's illegal to work on holidays and she was worried that the local police would drag her away in chains as today is a regional Valencian holiday.

I've written about this before but here it is again. I'm going to talk about Valencia. So, in general, in the Valencian Community commercial hours from Monday to Saturday should be fewer than 90. Businesses have to display their opening hours. Businesses can open up to eleven Sundays and bank holidays according to the annual timetable published by the Generalitat, the Regional Government of the Valencia Community. On those eleven dates the timetable is completely flexible and the hours are not included in the usual 90 hours per week.

For 2019 the designated Sundays and bank holidays are/were 13 January (for the sales), Palm Sunday (for lots of tourists), Good Friday (for lots of tourists), Easter Sunday (for lots of tourists), 23 June (two holidays fall close together), 7 July (sales), 12 October (which is a Saturday when two holidays fall close together) and, in the run up to Christmas and Three Kings, the 6 (Black Friday I think), 15, 22 and 29 December.

Some businesses can open when and as they like provided they fall into at least one of the following classes. That the business occupies less than 300 square metres and is classed as a small to medium enterprise. That it's a bread shop or a paper shop or a petrol station type business - the list includes things you'd expect like cakes bread, flowers, plants, magazines, newspapers, fuel, flowers, plants and prepared meals. Convenience stores can open when they like (there's a definition). Shops in places where people are travelling by land, sea or air have free rein to open when they like as can shops that sell mainly cultural products. Businesses set up to provide services to tourists are also in the list. The big exception, the one that keeps whole swathes of shops open, at least during some parts of the year, is one that allows any shop to open provided it is in an area deemed to have a lot of tourists. The Generalitat says what the areas are.

So there's the reason the shopping centre was open on Easter Sunday. Last Friday, Good Friday, we could have taken our guests to the Aljub Shopping Centre down in Valencian Elche. On the other hand if we'd foolishly extrapolated our Valencian knowledge to the Murcian Nueva Condomina shopping centre we'd have found the doors bolted on both Friday and Sunday despite Murcia having 16 Sundays and bank holidays on its list of exclusions.

Got that then?

To facilitate proof of conformity

I've got a bit of a tax problem. It started just before the Easter break. The Spanish tax people seem to think that I lied in my 2014 tax return. I didn't. Well, so far as I know I didn't. The whole process is going to be one huge pain in the backside. Part of the ritual of bureaucratic torture that the Spanish state inflicts on its citizens with a monotonous regularity. In the years that we've been here we've bumped into it time after time. We immigrant Brits complain about Spanish bureaucracy and so do Spaniards. Britons complain about British bureaucracy too and I suppose that Ghanaians complain about Ghanaian bureaucracy. I think the difference with the Spanish system is that it is unassailable, unflinching, unmoving and unrepentant whereas the British one is just long winded. The British version is, was, much more open to question in the case of dissent.

The Spanish process starts in one of two ways. Either there is hardly any information. A bill or a fine or a notice that requires Holmeslike deduction to work out what it's about. Much more common though, and this is the case with the tax letter, is that the notification is written in pompous and overblown language using words that nobody uses, a language designed to highlight the difference between the erudite state apparatus and the lowly and colloquial citizen.

Over the years, and without giving it much thought, I can cite examples. I appealed the charge for mains drainage because we don't have mains drains. Appeal denied was the response. No explanation. They did say though that it was a firm ruling that could not be contested.

When I asked our Town Council about changes to the junction by our house they simply didn't reply. I can give you a list of other processes that have been thwarted with the same tactic.

A long, long wait is another common ploy. It took just over two years for the reply to our appeal against being overcharged for our local land tax. To get a building inspector to visit to rubber stamp the paperwork after some major building work took just over eighteen months. There is a four year "statute of limitations" on tax matters, which is why I've got the tax letter now, only two months left or they'd have to forget it. Honestly, 2014? Does it really take five years to get around to checking my piddling tax return? And I have ten working days to reply - or else. I suppose I can expect the same process next year for 2015.

Even if my tax declaration is as honest as I think it is I predict that there will be some administrative wrong that has to be righted. The whole rigmarole will be distressing and will cost me time and money. I will probably need official translations of my P60 and however it turns out I will have no redress. They will never say "Whoops, sorry about that".

It does all become quite wearing.

¡Costaleros! - ¡al cielo con el!

Easter in Spain is spectacular. Every town has its own Easter. The floats, religious carvings, rolled along, or, much more impressively, borne on the shoulders of men, and nowadays women, along time honoured routes. Some people are in it for the religion, some for the culture, the tradition, or maybe it's just an opportunity to collect bags and bags of sweets. Some of the processions are joyous, some are military, some verge on the bizarre whilst others are organised chaos. I've not seen many, maybe twenty different towns, a few famous ones on the telly and whilst each is similar none is the same. But I'm not out on the streets now. I'm not listening to a plaintiff saeta sung from a balcony or watching mantilla wearing women or bare footed Nazarenos. There will be, almost certainly be no silent and unlit streets and no black hoods as Thursday becomes Friday when death is the order of the day. All because it's raining.

There are associations that fund raise and work all year for Semana Santa, for Holy week. We were in Jumilla this morning and we saw two very ordinary garages where people were preparing religious statues for their outings. In the Museo Jesús Nazareno about a dozen people were working on the floats, arranging flowers, fitting candles, hoovering and generally smartening up whilst lots of well wishers and lookers on came and went.

It was drizzling when we went for lunch but when we came out the streets were awash. We checked Facebook and there was the message to say that the processions had been cancelled. All that work wasted. The opportunity to process gone. I suppose as well as the potential damage to the statues, their clothing and the float in general there is also a potential danger of runaway floats or of statues carried on shoulders crashing to the ground as the carriers lose their footing. It seems a terrible shame though and I really feel sorry for all the people involved.

We hoped that it might not be raining in Pinoso but a Twitter message said no for the 8pm outing. There is still the vaguest possibility that the Cristo de la Buena Muerte will be lofted skyward as he leaves the Parish Church in the darkened streets of Pinoso at midnight tonight followed by hundreds of people carrying candles but I'm not that hopeful.

The title is something like: Bearers - to heaven with him! It's a cry to the people carrying the "Christ of the Good Death."

I'm pleased to say I was wrong. I went out for midnight and the procession was on. Leaden skies but no rain. As it turns out it was a temporary truce. The rain came back with a vengeance and all of the Good Friday processions in the area were cancelled. On Saturday morning it is still pouring down

Another drive to work

First of all it was the journey to Cartagena, then to Fortuna and to Cieza. Places I have worked or lived. Easy blogs to write and also ones that were well read. Next Monday is the last day of my current work contract. I don't think there will be another. My Spanish retirement date is 30th April, my UK old age pension kicks in from May 7th. If I have my way I will never work again.

There are only two sessions left. I will only drive to work twice more. This is nearly my last opportunity to repeat the details of home to work journey so here is the story of that 6.3 kilometre route.

Dirt track to start. Not too chewed up at the moment. One good thunder storm and the ride can be very bumpety bump through the ruts. A right turn onto the tar to make a legal, rather than the more obvious, illegal turn across the cross hatching in the centre of the road. It's a bad junction. There have been a couple of crashes in the last year. People take no notice of the 60 km/h signs on the main road so taking the right, going into Culebrón village proper and swinging around near to Eduardo's Restaurant to make another legal turn in the direction of Pinoso makes good sense, even if it does add a bit of time and distance to the journey.

The fields to the immediate left are green with cereal shoots, to the right, and very quickly to the left too, the much more traditional landscape of vineyards. Do you know, I'm trying to visualise it now, and I'm not sure whether there are olive trees as well. I can say with some certainty that there are but that's only because they are everywhere around here but it's mostly vines. If the vine stocks are laid out in slanted rows to form rhombus shapes on the ground then it's almost certainly monastrell grapes planted for use in the D.O. wines, wine with a quality mark. Nowadays there are quite a lot of vines laid out on trellis wires to grow higher which can be harvested by machine rather than by hand as in the D.O stuff.

On the right the old tip now converted into one of those recycling areas with areas for everything from fluorescent tubes and used olive oil to garden waste and builders rubble. Just by the turn to the "Ecoparque" there are a bundle of solar panels. The last PP Government put the kibosh on solar electrical generation by withdrawing subsidies and raising taxes on the production. I'm not quite sure whether the short lived Socialist Government had time to reverse most of those decisions. They said they were going to but lots of their legislative plans ran out of time. Oh, there's a very old sign too to mark the new Industrial Park that never was. Spanish building bubble and all that.

To the left there are a couple of tracks. On one of them there is a very faded board which tells of an experiment to attempt to reduce bird deaths from collisions with power cables. I went to have a look once. I expected markers on the wires and suchlike but, as a non expert, all the wires just looked normal to me.

There are horse stables to the right, and actually some way over to the left on the other side of the valley, just by what I understand is a control station of some kind for the natural gas line that runs along the valley floor, there is another livery stable and riding school. One is too far away to see horses and the other very seldom has any beasts outside. 

Time to slow down now. There's a left turn to Encebras and, in the days when there was plenty of money, there often used to be a Guardia Civil speed check there. I understand that spending cuts mean fewer Guardia. It's a bit like that housing estate planned for the left side of the valley just a couple of hundred metres up which never got beyond drawings, and maybe models, before the building bubble burst. Just on that turn, there is a building. When I worked for Rustic Original back in 2005/2006 they owned that building. Nowadays it seems to have been transformed into an organised parking space with facilities for motorhomes. It's also been the site for a car boot sale and a couple of bar/restaurants in our time here. As we are gazing leftward we can see the back of our marble quarry, one of the largest open quarries in Europe. Whilst we're looking in that direction and talking about Pinoso's industries there is Monte Cabeço, our salt dome, our "emblematic" hill. The salty brine pumped out of there goes down to Torrevieja to be mixed with the sea salt in the lagoons before it ends up either on our tables or, as road grit.

Past the Iberdrola power station. Big diesel generators I think; always a blaze of light at night. Over the crest of the hill. The one time go-kart course and buffet type bar to our left as abandoned as the bar on the right. Down the hill towards the roundabout. On the right the power station built to burn almond shells that the town council closed down. The resultant court case eventually cost the town three million euros in compensation.

The roundabout boasts a big sort of statue type thing with the coat of arms of Pinoso on it. It took me years of driving past that roundabout to realise that the three trees growing on the traffic island are like the ones on the coat of arms.

We're beginning to get built up now. The nut processing factory to the right is a marker for the industrial estate with all those metal box buildings and lots of badly parked cars and manoeuvring lorries. Onwards, dodge to the left by the first obvious bar in town and then another kink to the right just past the Red Cross buildings. We're running along an avenue of tall pine trees now with a concrete channel in the centre designed as a storm drain. I have pictures of cars afloat in it when we get those storms that dig trenches into our track. Businesses and houses to the right and left. One of the restaurants regularly wins prizes for the best rice, paella to you and me, in Spain.

Another small roundabout at the end of the storm drain, the Badén, and left up Constitución one of the principal streets in Pinoso lined with bars and shops and businesses and with plenty of pretty lime trees too. That's Constitución at the top of this post, taken, I think, in the 1970s, when it was still compacted earth. I was told, years ago, by a Spaniard, that there wasn't a lot of tarmac in Pinoso to the 1980s but that seems a bit unlikely to me. To be honest I'm a bit dubious about the 70s tag for the photo. Not a single car?

To park for work I have to take the service road that runs parallel to Constitución the turn is just before our relatively new Cultural Centre that houses our town library amongst other things. Now I'm looking for a parking space and then the last few metres to work on foot.

In the Garden of Earthly Delights

El Jardin de la Seda. The Silk Garden, is an unremarkable public green space in Murcia. It has quite a lot of standard model ducks and some of those red faced Muscovy jobs. Joggers and walkers, some in track suits and others disguised in ordinary street clothes, do their stuff. Dog walkers with dogs large and small, some of them keen on battle. There's even the tall chimney left over from the silk factory that gives its name to the garden.

It had been raining. In fact half an hour before we got there it had been pelting down and we had been forced to seek shelter from the storm in a handy bar in the Plaza Circular. I'd even maintained a WhatsApp conversation with Victor, our potential guide, as to whether the walk would go ahead. It's been raining on and off for a couple of weeks now. Last week I posted a photo of a dismal beer festival spoiled by the rain. An old friend in Cambridge saw the photo and commented; "I have made friends with a Spanish woman who now lives in the UK and she says that sometimes in Spain, people don't take their children to school if its raining!" That's why I thought to check with Victor.

Simple idea. This bloke has a company and a doctorate in something botany related. He organises guided tours here and there to look at plants and trees and whatever else botanists are interested in. He's organised a series of walks around various of the green spaces in Murcia and we booked in for the one yesterday evening. It was very good; from ancient palm trees which lived alongside dinosaurs to how to spot sweet and bitter acorns from the shape of the small oak tree, called an encina, typical of large areas of Spain. Oh, and the next time we see a bougainvillea together you'll be amazed by my little known fact about their flowers. The price of the walk was novel too. The Reverse Ticket Office; pay what you think the walk is worth. A real shame that there were only three of us.

Nothing and nothing else

I haven't done anything very interesting for a while but that won't stop me.

I went to stand outside the Town Hall yesterday evening. Every first Friday of the month at 8pm - a reminder that violence against women needs to stop. I've done it a few times. Nobody notices but I should be there. Afterwards the group often puts on a film. I haven't been to that for ages but I did go last night. The film was called Frances Ha and it wasn't bad at all. The interesting thing was that it was introduced by a couple of young women who I think were still at school. They were speaking in Valenciano which means that I caught about as much as I would if I were in a Belshill pub late at night talking to an 80 year old local who was a boxing contender in his youth. The young women talked about similarities in style to Jim Jarmusch and Woody Allen, about the handheld camera movements and the framing of the scenes. I was impressed. I don't think the majority of the students I've encountered across the years would know who Jim Jarmusch is or be interested in finding out.

I spent a bit over six hours in Elda hospital the other day. The friend of a friend had a terrible stomach ache. The local health centre sent her by ambulance to the nearest big hospital and I met her and her partner there to do the Spanish. It's the fifth time I've been to Urgencias, A&E, in the time I've been here either as patient or companion. Everything followed the "normal" pattern, the one I've seen every time, stabilisation, admission, a first consultation with a doctor who decides a course of action in this case a bunch of tests. Then a bit of a wait. This time that became a longer wait. Then they needed the emergency bay and my couple had to wait with her wheeled bed parked in a corridor. The staff were grumbling and complaining about the situation but all that NHS, abandoned in the corridors, stuff came to mind. Not that there weren't a bundle of staff around all the time but it was a corridor.

I listen to a podcast called ¿Qué? done by a couple of people who work on the English edition of el País, a Spanish newspaper in the same class as The Guardian and the New York Times. The podcast is in English and they welcome feedback. I've tweeted them, I've emailed them. I've been mentioned in the podcast a couple of times. In fact I listen to a number of podcasts and several broadcast radio programmes. I sometimes comment on those too. Last week, when a Saturday morning programme was talking about punctuality I made some comment about the late running of Spanish TV. As they read the comment out the presenter said Chris has written again. It's the same with a few podcasts and radio shows, multiple responses, "Hi Chris, nice to know you're still listening". Twitter and Facebook and email and what not almost persuade you, one, that you, one, knows these people as real people rather than disembodied voices.

A touch of nuttiness

For Britons nuts is an easy concept. There is, almost certainly, a scientific description but I think of nuts as having hard shells and an edible bit inside - peanuts, almonds, cashews, hazelnuts, pistachios, brazils, pecans and others I can't remember right now. Spaniards don't share that concept. They use the term frutos secos, dried fruits, and that includes nuts but it also covers what we think of as dried fruit - prunes, dried apricots, raisins, sultanas, currants and the like. It's not all that different really. Just one subdivision more. It is, nonetheless, surprisingly difficult to explain to Spaniards learning English.

I like nuts. This is quite a good thing because I don't much care for water, nor for the sawdust flavoured whole grain cereals. Fruit is OK but you get sticky eating it and it's such a faff - all that peeling and de-seeding and slicing. Vegetables and pulses are generally fine but when I say veg. I mean the standard stuff, nothing too slimy. I'm not too keen on sleeping either, after six hours in bed I'm bored. So, I'd have to say, the World Health Organisation and I don't see eye to eye about my lifestyle. Except for nuts. Nuts I like.

The first time I bought loose, in shell, nuts in Pinoso was this Monday. Until then I had blithely passed them by unaware of their existence. I didn't buy many and I only bought hazelnuts just to check. Sometimes, at Christmas time, I buy kilos of chestnuts to find that half of them are rotten. The hazelnuts were fine so, today, I bought more and a few walnuts as well. Before then the last time I remember buying whole walnuts was a couple of Christmases ago. They came in a string bag along with a little tool to pry the two halves of the shell apart. If it hadn't been a diagram on the label I wouldn't have realised why there was a bit of metal attached to my bag of walnuts. I was amazed how well it worked. I couldn't find that tool today so I just used my penknife to split the shell and reveal the brain shaped nut inside. I pondered. For the first 63 years of my life I shelled walnuts by squeezing them in pliers like nutcrackers. They were always a pain because the splintered shell would mix with the nutty bit. The Spanish way is definitely superior.

On protecting my anonymity

I went to see the doctor this morning. Like all the doctors I've ever encountered, doctors in Spain make you wait. This is obviously because a doctor's time is much more valuable than mine or, indeed, yours. In truth, nowadays, nearly everyone's time is more valuable than mine in a financial sense but, as usual, I seem to be straying up a branch line.

I've been to the doctor a few times over the years in Pinoso but not to the point that it's second nature to me. I was quite decided to be decisive today. The last time I was there there was a little printed list stuck up with sellotape outside the doctors door. The appointments were arranged in 15 minute blocks. Inside the fifteen minute block there would be three names; three people had the same appointment time. I couldn't remember whether the system was first come first served or whether the list order gave the order. My decisiveness amounted to no more than asking rather than muddling through.

I was stymied on two counts. First of all there were three Britons, a couple and a single, outside my assigned door and they were people that I knew. Conversation was to be struck. The pair were in with "my" doctor before me so, until they moved, there was no hurry. They weren't sure where they were in the running order so I asked the people waiting on the plastic chairs. It was an easy conversation. I had the same time as a young woman but the system is first come first served. "It has to be that way now," said someone. "There used to be a list but the data protection act has stopped that". "Ah", said someone else. "That's why the nurse now calls people by numbers rather than names I suppose". "No matter", I said, "Spaniards like to talk". I was relieved that they sniggered rather than stringing me up by my thumbs.

I suppose that the data protection thing is to do with consent to use personal data now being clear and certain. Just because I want to see a doctor doesn't mean that I gave anyone permission to release the fact that I am there. Maybe I want to remain anonymous. Actually as I booked my appointment using an application on my phone I suppose that the list would have contravened that rule about data on a person not being used for another purpose. Maybe I should read the data protection stuff more carefully. When we visited Jumilla Castle a few weeks ago I was asked to send an email with certain details. Nothing too Edward Snowden but name, address, email and my ID number. The woman on the phone said it was for data protection. Odd though, now my data is protected they know all sorts about me whereas before they would just have known that Chris and Maggie were on their list for castle visiting.

Order, order

There seems to be a bit of a conspiracy to keep me on my toes as I reach the end of my working life. Most of it is positive enough. Pension paper mostly. Having found forgotten private pensions I've had to make phone call after phone call and fill in myriad forms. Because I live here and not where the pensions are I've had to talk with the tax people in the UK and fill in more forms to get myself exempted from UK tax. That Spanish tax process, for the calendar year 2018, starts in a few days time and has to be done before the end of June. I hope that having got the UK exemption means it will be easier, if more expensive, to sort out.

Then there's the state pension. I did a blog about that. I hoped, I was told, it would be paid through the Spanish Social Security people in Euros but, disappointingly, it now looks as though it's going to be paid in the UK in Pounds.

And what about Brexit. Now, to be honest what happens in the UK isn't very important to me. I certainly don't give a toss about the puerile posturings of a bunch of public school boys (and girls) in Parliament but their pompous hubris is making it reasonably difficult to work out what's going to happen to us.
In general the statements from the Spanish, and British, governments have been dead positive. All about our current situation being protected and so forth provided the other country plays along. But there's a lot of difference between a ministerial statement and what happens in some hot office awash with foreigners trying to get various bits of paper in a language we have problems with. Obviously, as soon as we Britons are out of the Union, we have to do things exactly as Malawians or Russians or Canadians. All of us are from "third countries" as far as Spain is concerned. There are at least 300,000 Brits in Spain, maybe more. The problem is that we've never quite understood why Johnny Foreigner wants us to jump through their stupid hoops. Why the hell should I change my UK driving licence for a Spanish one?, what's the point of registering with the local council?, why would I want to pay Spanish taxes instead of British ones?, come off the doctor's list in Barnstaple? - not on your nelly. So, there has been a bit of a scramble amongst we immigrants to get our paperwork sorted before we lose all those automatic rights that being a European Citizen gave us.

Of course if you want to be certain of staying in Spain it's easy enough to become Spanish. You do a test to prove you can speak Spanish and another to prove that you know something about the country you live in. So being able to answer simple questions, the sort of thing a Briton would know about the UK- for instance "Which Officer of State has precedence after the Royal Family?" The sort of thing every Briton knows, or here, the sort of thing that every Spaniard knows. Yeah, right. Most of us can't handle B1 Spanish and as for the Spanish constitution you can forget that. And maybe we want to stay British because, technically, we have to renounce our British Nationality if we become Spanish. Anyway, there's quite a long waiting list from lots of people who've run away from terror regimes or are looking for a newer, better life.

I thought we were pretty sorted, pretty Brexit proof. I'm very timid and tend to do as I'm told. After all we do live here, our house is here, our cats are here, we don't live anywhere else or have money and property overseas.  We pay Spanish taxes, we vote in Spain, our doctor and dentist is here, my driving licence and my road tax is Spanish, I listen to Spanish radio and I buy my clothes in Spain. I've probably spent less than a month in the UK in the past fourteen years. But it now looks as though, having checked the details pretty thoroughly beforehand, there has been a bit of history rewriting and we may be one piece of paper short of the full hand. It's odd because it's a piece of paper that I have helped other people to obtain. It's probably not going to be much of a problem. But, it could be. And for some people something similar will be a problem. They will find that they can't fulfil some requirement or other and so can't get residence here and they'll wonder what to do with the house they bought that they shouldn't live in all year or the car that they shouldn't drive.

Never mind. Oh the Archbishop of Canterbury and then Lord Chancellor but all we Britons knew that.

A grave situation in the dead centre of the town

I did a summer stint on parks, gardens and cemeteries when I was a boy. I still tell stories of those few months. The first time was, I think, in Hollywell Green. A Victorian mausoleum appropriate for the status of one of the mill owning families of the time. Before anyone thought to brick in the heavy, lead lined mahogany coffins, putrefaction and excellent craftsmanship produced a splendid time bomb designed to spew bone fragments left right and centre. One of my gofer jobs was to check for bones and sweep them up before the family and undertakers turned up with the latest of the family line.

Spanish graveyards are different to British ones. Well different and the same. Spaniards have mausoleums too for those old powerful families. I suppose it was wine or saffron or something instead of wool. Who knows. The idea is the same though, rich folk lording it over the people who made them rich even when they are all dead.

So there are mausoleums and there are graves, the sort where the coffins are lowered into a pit dug into the ground. Think of the scene in one of those old cowboys where the makeshift wooden cross marks the spot and one cowboy, hat in hand says "Someone should say some words". So far, then, Britain and Spain are much of a muchness.

But Spaniards are flat dwellers. Not so much where we live, in the country, surrounded by trilling birds and old blokes in straw hats working the earth, but in anywhere with any population Spaniards tend to live in flats, in apartments if you prefer. In the older blocks, the one without lifts, the top floor flats are cheaper. Nobody wants to haul their degradable plastic bags full of groceries up six flights of stairs to the third floor and older people don't want to buy a flat and then spend the rest of their days as semi prisoners, staring out of the window.

It's the same when they're dead. Nowadays cremation is growing in popularity but until recently it was always burial. Burial with a difference for we Brits. The Spaniards build a sort of thick wall, or a double faced chalet. In the outside walls they leave space for something akin to lengthened pigeon holes; pigeon holes long enough to take a coffin. When the time comes the coffin is hoisted up, horizontally and slid into a hole in the wall. The pigeon hole is sealed with something rough and ready and later, probably, with a commemorative stone. The rental on the nichos, niches, that's what the pigeon holes are called, is very low. And, just as with the flats, the higher niches, the ones you need a ladder to get to to put on flowers and to clean the stone are cheaper. If you're really poor, if nobody is willing to pay for your disposal then the town hall will bury you but you go into a common grave. Bones cleaned out of older niches, to make way for new occupants, also go into the same space. If I've mis-remembered that the correct version is in this article that I wrote for the old TIM magazine

Nowadays, with cremations, lots of the urns also go into niches, smaller niches, sometime with the urn on view but more often the urn is treated like a coffin and walled in and given a commemorative stone.

I like Spanish cemeteries. The architecture of the mausoleums is often incredible. The rows and rows of niches are nearly always well cared for and the system itself is neat. They are usually very colourful too because the niches that don't have fresh flowers nearly always have colourful plastic ones instead. Alcoy does tours around their cemetery so I thought it must be worth a look and I went over there yesterday. The snaps are here. Usually Spanish cemeteries are oases of tranquillity but, at the start of November, on All Saint's Day, most families turn out to spruce up the family plot. The graveyards become just as noisy as anywhere else with hundreds of people out and taking advantage of the opportunity to greet friends and neighbours alike.

One last, very positive, thing about Spanish cemeteries is that they always have toilets. Nowadays, knowing where the nearest toilet is is often important to me.

Big Brother has a file on me

I got a message from SUMA, a local government tax collection agency, telling me that I could check what they were going to take out of my bank account in April. In their email there was a link that took me to something called Carpeta Ciudadana - the Citizen File.

The Carpeta Ciudadana is basically a site that collects together lots of the information held on me by various Government agencies. There was a list of all the ministries - from defence and education to work and immigration - and any procedures that I had open with them. There was another section for notifications, another for information held on me and so on.

I was a bit worried that the page showed that Hacienda, the tax people, had two processes open on me but then I realised that it was to do with the time I sorted out some unpaid tax on a small UK pension during a tax amnesty. It's not as though I have anything to hide but the fewer dealings I have with authority the better I like it.

It was amazing checking through the pages though. There were details of  my work record, details of my car, my road tax, details of the points on my driving licence, details on the house, local taxes paid, proof that I didn't have a criminal record, my work history, any dole payments etc. All sorts of stuff.

If that's what they are telling me they hold on me I wonder just how much more they know?