Doctoring up

I don't go to doctors much. I don't particularly care for them. Nice enough people I'm sure but I often find that I feel unwell when I talk to them. My habitual worry is that they will tell me that I'm worse than even I imagined. I've been feeling a bit rough recently. Rough enough to go to the doctor. Of course getting to see a doctor at the moment isn't the usual process. The normal routine involves a few key taps on a phone application and then sitting around in a health centre for a long time after your supposed appointment. Not at the moment though, the app only offers phone consultations, so I booked one up. 

I think phone appointments with medical people are a good idea. Nobody has to travel, probably the doctors can deal with more people than usual in the same time and, to be honest, I see no reason why the conversational exchange that leads to a diagnosis shouldn't work just as well over the phone as in person. If a show and tell is needed then at worst talking to a doctor on the phone is an efficient triage system. The problem, for me is that doctors in Spain often speak Spanish. Phone calls, unlike face to face, offer no explanatory gestures, no pointing, no visual examples and no word negotiation. All you're left with is the spoken word. 

The doctor didn't ring at the agreed time. In fact she was 80 minutes late and I'd half given up on her. Fortunately I wasn't naked in the shower or half way up a ladder when she rang but I was raking leaves. Now forty years of sucking down cigar smoke have taken a toll on my lungs and, sometimes, I find myself panting and gasping for breath after the least exertion. Leaf raking must count as exertion because the first twenty seconds of the call didn't go well. Being unable to breathe is detrimental to dialogue. Respiration resumed the call went well. As a process it went well that is. Outcome wise I'm not so sure. Having dismissed the possibility that I may be at all ill she suggested over the counter medicine. All a bit of an anti climax really.

Do you know the one about the Australian who thought that Loughborough was pronounced Loogaboogara?

The English letter O sounds exactly like you just read it. Oh? Oh! The Spanish letter O sounds completely different - a bit more like the O in otter. It's a simple Spanish sound that we Britons often forget. I live in Pinoso. Now read Pinoso again but this time change the O sound to the one from otter. The coronavirus and Covid both have the letter O in them. I tend to use Covid. Think otter again as you say Covid

This word, Covid, is one I learned in Spain. It sounds like the Roman writer Ovid but that only helps if you say Cicero instead of Cicero, or it could be the other way around. Covid is a word I hear on the radio and the TV all the time. So, I'm Skyping to some people in the UK. I say something like "Covid is wreaking havoc with some businesses". The Skypee couple look blank. It was only later that I realised that my pronunciation had, fleetingly, caused confusion.

I was aghast. Someone, somewhere on a forum, on Facebook, in Twitter, (but obviously not on TikTok where I never venture) asked what a TIE was. There has been so much babble about these things in places I look that I thought everyone knew about them. I don't think they thought it was the longish piece of cloth, worn for decorative purposes around the neck, resting under the shirt collar and knotted at the throat. They may well, though, have thought it was pronounced that way, as in "Tie a yellow ribbon around the old oak tree". TIE, for Brits, is one of those with initials, like "The UN", rather than as a word "NATO". Spanish letter sounds are not the same as English letter sounds and in TIE Spaniards roll the letters together. TIE by the way is the foreigner's identity card. It's quite possible that the person asking the question has heard these cards talked about but not recognised the subject because of variations in pronunciation. Say Pinoso with that British O and Spaniards might not recognise the word.

Sometimes it isn't the pronunciation it's the equivalence of ideas embodied in a word. IVA and VAT have different letters but the same meaning, ITV and MOT (the car test) are similar enough to be interchangeable. Sometime the words and ideas are not though. The Spanish Tax system doesn't really have a tax allowance in the same way as the UK does. In practice there are similarities, and it's around 5,500€, but the concept of tax free money isn't the same. There has been a lot of Internet chatter recently about whether another lockdown was likely locally. The word itself embodies an idea which is not really applicable here; the use of a word drawn from one context and applied to another can cause real confusion.  

These language differences aren't the ones that you associate with learning the language. It's why I decided not to ask for the British bacon sandwich the other day in the fast food sandwich shop. I know how to say British bacon perfectly but I'm not confident about how a Spaniard would say it. The easiest thing was to go for the roast chicken with Brie, pollo asado con brie, because I know how to pronounce that.

The Widow's mite

One of the local, but British, animal charities was collecting food and clothing for the refugees parked on Lesbos. So we popped along with our donation. The same day we went to a Mercadona supermarket in Monóvar where they were also collecting food for the same people. I handed over a few cans of meat and fruit.

There's another animal charity in Pinoso. They operate a café to raise money for their work. For a variety of reasons they are in financial difficulties which are principally Covid related. Maggie gave them some cash and we handed over a few things for their second-hand shop.

My support for that particular animal charity is somewhat coloured by a training event I went to in the 1990s about funding for charities. A photography project volunteered to be the guinea pigs. The trainer asked what their "mission" was; they were clear and succinct. "To promote good quality photography to the people of Cambridge". We were asked, by the trainer, to suggest ways to achieve that goal. We came up with things like pasting photographs on the side of buses, having people with sandwich boards bearing photos in the streets, publishing photos in the local paper, preparing exhibitions for schools and shops etc. The trainer asked the charity how they were promoting photography. They said they ran a gallery. The trainer suggested that maybe a lot of their effort was going towards paying the rent, heat, light and maintenance of a gallery to hang their photos for only a few hundred, already motivated, visitors rather than on doing what they'd set out to do. I am reminded of that every time I think about the efforts to run a café and good as new shop, which has all sorts of benefits for lots of people, but which only supports the animals by a rather serpentine route.

A few days ago I was watching the TV news. I saw the Open Arms boat operating off the Libyan coast and that reminded me it was a while since I'd given them anything. The bit of video that was shown over and over was of a refugee boat sinking, of a woman hauled into one of the rubber rescue boats hollering that she had lost her baby. The toddler was recovered from the Med but died soon after. 

I'm almost certain that the boat has been banned from actively looking for refugees; the best they can do is wait on one of the known routes and rescue people in trouble. It should be a thing of pride to Spaniards that Open Arms is a Spanish NGO. Economically and legally Open Arms is hanging on by the skin of its teeth. Other boats were operating in the Med, including the one funded by Banksy, but I think the ever so caring Italian Government has put so many legal obstacles in their way that the Open Arms is the only boat still currently at sea. I'd be very pleased if someone were to tell me that's duff information and there are tens of boats out there doing the decent thing whilst our governments look the other way.

The supermarkets have all joined in an initiative for the next week or so to raise money for the food banks. Covid means that collecting food is a bit dodgy so, at the checkout, you're asked if you want to be "solid" and donate. I've not seen anyone say no yet.

My charitable monthly direct debit is for the omnipresent Red Cross. This time of year they always phone trying to sell me lottery tickets but this year the approach was different. They said that Covid was pushing them to the limits. They wanted me to take 100€ worth of tickets and sell them amongst my friends. I said no but I bought more tickets than usual.

Another Christmas time appeal is Un juguete, una ilusión - A toy, a hope. They sell a biro each year with the funds raised going to providing toys for kids who don't have any. They only mentioned Covid in passing.

These groups want my money for the good things they do. There are thousands more and the virus isn't helping. 

The other day I got an email from my bank. They pointed me to a message they'd sent me via their bank app which I never read. I nearly didn't read the email as I presumed it was, yet another, advert. They told me that they were changing my current bank account and updating my terms and conditions. Although the first message was dated 6 November the changes were from the beginning of November. This is a translation: "At Santander, in recent months we have been closer than ever to our clients, helping them overcome their difficulties. Now our commitment is to reward your loyalty. We are going to transform the way we relate to you. This new, simpler and more personalised model is called Santander One". 

I have been paying 36€ per year. With the new, simpler, personalised model the cost for the same service will be 120€ per year. 

An article in PC Bolsa, dated 27 October 2020, says that Santander's profits are 48% lower than last year. No wonder they want extra money from me! Projections for Santander's profit for this virus lashed year are now just 1,109,000,000€. Poor things, how will they struggle by?

And, unlike those refugees and cats and dogs and people queuing for food and children without toys the banks know that the state, which gets a lot of its money from people like me, will look after them - they have experience. The Spanish Audit court said, in December 2015, that the cost of restructuring Spain's bankrupt savings banks after the 2008 crisis had totalled €60.7 billion, of which nearly €41.8 billion was put up by the state. I can never remember which convention Spain uses for billion - so that may be  41,800,000,000,000€ or only 41,800,000,000€.

Horlicks and a Wagon Wheel, please.

One of my early blog entries was about Spam. I was probably suffering withdrawal symptoms and I'd just discovered the delights of mortadella. I must like fatty meat products of doubtful provenance because the other day I was attracted to the design on a tin which showed some sort of processed meat. It was called magro and I don't remember having tried it before. Magro is unmistakably similar to Plumrose plopped ham with chalk - if you're old enough you'll remember the TV advert and if you're not your mind will still be nimble enough to work it out. As I sampled the magro I wondered if there was a blog to be written about the Spanish things that had replaced what had been UK staples. Cola-Cao for Cadbury's Drinking Chocolate, Hero bitter orange jam for Robertson's or Frank Cooper's marmalade and so on.

No, that wasn't blog material. Far too mundane. Most of it would simply be about trade names. There are some things, the sort of things we occasionally get a hankering for, from Quality Street and Ovaltine to Piccalilli and English mustard, which can be tricky to get hold of but capitalism is a wonderful thing and, if there's a demand, there'll be a supplier. Where we Britons gather together, on the coast for instance, there is usually someone ready to scratch that itch be that Walker's crisps or Bovril. To some extent it happens in Pinoso where HP Sauce and Heinz Sandwich Spread rub shoulders with the Ybarra mayonnaise on the supermarket shelves. The only indispensable item, British style tea, is fortunately available from Mercadona supermarkets which are everywhere even in the places where Brits only pass through on their way to somewhere else. Anyway nowadays there's always an online supplier. 

I wondered if I could focus the blog on the things we'd had to forego. The staple things. The only thing that came to mind was milk. When we first got here fresh milk was hardly available and we had no option but to make do with UHT milk in cartons. If I ever could taste the difference I can't any more. When I occasionally do get to the UK I fondly expect the tea to taste better for fresh milk but it doesn't. In fact fresh milk is readily available here nowadays but we don't ever buy it. That aside I couldn't think of a single thing. I asked Maggie and she told me that there were far fewer varieties of sugar - no Spanish caster sugar and no soft brown sugar for instance. Then she remembered that, in the past, there were no chillies to be had either. That's no longer a problem for us. One of the local supermarkets carries them probably just for we islanders. Spaniards don't, generally, care for spicy food so chillies are a bit unusual. My guess would be that it works the other way around too. Rabbit is a very common meat here, available in the smallest supermarkets, and I'm sure that it's available in the UK from specialist butchers and probably from M&S or Waitrose but it's hardly a staple in most households.

The only time that the food supply here is at all problematic is when you decide to try something that is a bit different. The sort of meal you build from a recipe which calls for the sort of ingredients that are not kitchen cupboard staples. So, whilst quails eggs and panceta might be a bit exotic in the UK they aren't in Spain. On the other hand sesame oil, tahini or garam masala would be tricky ingredients to find in Spain.

This means that some commonplace British food is difficult to prepare. Thai curry would be an example. My guess is that nowadays it's probably student food in the UK but I'd be surprised if anything but a small percentage of culinary adventurous Spaniards have ever tasted one. In that case you're going to need the Internet or maybe a touch of space in the suitcase of those visiting UK friends to supply that fish sauce, shrimp paste, the makrut lime leaves or even the thai curry powder.

So no. Apparently there's no blog there.

Keep on truckin'

I don't remember the film title but I do remember the little gasp of horror from the audience as Michael Douglas padded across the room in half light heading for the bathroom. The reason for the concern was that he had a sunken, old man, bottom and, though I haven't dared to look recently, I suppose mine is too.

So far as I know I have no chronic illnesses though I know from people around me that your luck can change in seconds. I do often feel old though. Old as I feel the pain in my knees. Old as I realise that I'm gasping for breath after climbing a few stairs. Old as my arms ache after a bit of sawing. My feet hurt all the time, and the tinnitus is really loud. And so on and so forth. I'm getting old. No, let's be right about it, I am old. I know that people around me refer to 45 year olds as middle aged but all I can suppose is that they failed their "O" level sums.

Covid, and the responses to it, have kept us all quite hemmed in for a while now. Of course it has done much more. It has killed people, destroyed businesses, overpowered health services, left people penniless, challenged basic democratic rights and much more but, in our case, it has mainly hemmed us in. Lots of normal activity has stopped. Spain, a country where the smallest centre of population has a fiesta to celebrate its patron saint has cancelled them all. Covid is going to do to Christmas what the Grinch failed to do. 

On the cultural side the few concerts and sports events that have found a way to continue have been severely limited or have no spectators. In like manner the big museums may still be putting on new exhibitions but the the visitor numbers are scandalously low. Book fairs have been cancelled left right and centre. It's true that he cinemas are open but there are almost no big budget Hollywood films to see and even the domestic releases have been scant. Who wants to waste all that effort in releasing their film for paltry attendances? Of the five cinemas we most usually go to one has closed, probably for good, and one is running on a five day week. Current travel restrictions mean we can't use three of them; they are out of bounds. I went to a 4.15pm film screening last Wednesday and I was the only person, in the whole of the 11 screen cinema, apart from staff. Last night we went to a theatre in Elche and there were six of us in the dress circle. Down in the stalls half of the seats were taped over but occupancy of the remaining half couldn't have been more than a third. It was all a bit lifeless and depressing. You're living it too. You can add hundreds of similar examples and we're not even particularly confined at the moment.

Despite the fact that I keep doing it, wandering around yet another cathedral or a town centre hasn't really interested me for a while. But for the captions on my photos I often can't tell one from the other. Much better, in my opinion, to go to somewhere when something's happening. So I remember the community opera performance in Peterborough Cathedral much better than I remember Peterborough Cathedral. It's fine popping out to a local town, going to the coast or eating out but for me it's better when there is a twist to that. When the town has a food fair or there's a tapas trail, when something out of the ordinary is happening in the streets, when you've gone because you want to see the latest blockbuster exhibition or maybe something less obvious. Sports events, film festivals and the rest are, to me, great reasons for going somewhere.

It's not that my heart and nerve and sinew won't hold on for a while longer yet but it is all a bit wearying.

Burning certificates and Bonfire Night

Today, the 5th, Bonfire Night, has been rainy. Until today, the month had been deep blue skies and temperatures in the high twenties. You don't fool the trees though - it may still be warmer here than most summer days in England but it's Autumn; time for leaves to fall. Raking or sweeping them up has become one of my daily jobs. I collect them in one of the capazos, big, bendy 55 litre buckets. Once they were made of woven esparto grass now they are rubber or plastic. So simple and so useful.

There is a lot of fallow land around our house so something as innocuous as fallen leaves are easy to dispose of. Not so with the prunings from our various fruit trees or the mound of fronds left behind after our palm got a long overdue haircut. If I owned a trailer I could haul the prunings to the local tip. Sorry, I shouldn't call it a tip any more. It's an ecopark where they collect, sort and recycle waste. I presume that, at the ecopark, they shred the garden waste for compost or something equally environmentally sound. I have no trailer though, so, environmental vandalism it has to be.

It's not acceptable to just pile things into a heap and set fire to them. You have to get a certificate to burn. The certificate tells you what you can and what you can't do - not near roads, not near uninterrupted vegetation, only at such times, with water to hand and so on. You also have to check the local alerts before lighting the blue touch paper. Sensible regulations.

In the past to get a certificate I went to the local town hall, talked to someone behind a desk who took my details and, a couple of days later, when the appropriate councillor had signed the permit, I went back to get the paperwork. More recently they started to send the certificates by email. 

The Pinoso Town Hall website is a disgrace. Unlike most "government" websites, which have been getting better, the Pinoso website got worse when it was updated a few years ago. Some of that was because of new data protection regulations but most of it is because it's badly designed. I also suspect that there is an intentionality to not supply information. On the transparency page, for instance, there is a heading for the 2018 accounts. Presumably it's a bit early to add the 2020 budgets or the 2019 accounts. Click on the 2018 heading though and you'll find that the sections are empty. 

Nowadays the website really only serves for reading the local news and even then only so long as you don't mind party propaganda. That's not quite fair. There's a page called incidencias which you can use to report problems and make suggestions and that bit of the website works fine.

A part of the Pinoso website is a virtual office which supposedly allows you to carry out some administrative steps online. Somebody told me that you could apply for the burning certificates there. I looked and I looked but I found nothing.

In the end it proved a lot faster to drive in to town and go to the town hall. There, before the alcohol gel had dried on my hands, someone had given me a small piece of paper with an email address and details of the information I needed to supply to get a burning certificate. I emailed the details the same afternoon and, a couple of days later I got the certificate. Nice and easy. In fact, I wondered why somebody hadn't thought to put that information on that scrap of paper onto the website but, hey ho. 

I don't really have an opinion

This is a post about Covid. First though one of our cats has been missing for nearly three days. Bea, Beatriz, was the cat that I most expected to die of old age; a bit of a homebody, an easy going girl that gets/got on with all of the other cats. We have no idea where she is - gone walkabout for some reason, carried off by an eagle, poisoned by a wicked witch or squashed by a car. Nothing is too theoretically outrageous because we know nothing. Cats can disappear for days and then re-appear, that's what we're hoping for. Generally though ours don't come back.

I know very little about Covid 19. I have no idea why it is that Spain has incredibly high case figures and Burundi, the Seychelles and Laos have next to none. I've heard lots of "explanations" as to why we're in such a pickle from regional pride and too much hugging to irresponsible young people and an inability to count. I've read how the Swedes handled it well and how the Swedes got it completely wrong. Ask on Facebook or Twitter and you can take your pick from the answers to suit your point of view.

There are obviously lots of ordinary people who know much more about disease control and social planning than I do. They keep telling me little factlets. They tell me the Chinese started it. They tell me it's only winnowing out the weak. They tell me that more people die from falling off step ladders than die from Covid. There is another bunch who tell me that wearing a face mask is tantamount to being beaten on the soles of our feet with sticks and think Human Rights Watch should mobilise. I realise that I'm teetering on the edge of senility, just ask Maggie, but I think I remember that in Catch 22 Doc Daneeka reminded Yossarian of the hundreds of medical conditions that could kill people. I appreciate that, I know that car accidents tear bodies apart and kill and maim thousands each year, I know that measles and bad drinking water kills and kills and kills.  But it's not a comparison is it? People get killed all the time but that doesn't mean that men killing their partners is any less wrong. It's not that the cost of a nuclear submarine would pay for clean water in Mali; it's that killing machines are not a good thing to buy.

We have new figures for Pinoso from 26/10/2020. They say that there have been 211 positive tests in Pinoso since time began and that 54 of those positives were in the last couple of weeks. Two people have died - again since it all began. That means the cases in 100,000 figure is 678. The last time I did the primary school sums necessary to work out the infections per 100,000 number and posted it on Facebook in response to someone else's post somebody laid into me for scaremongering. They said that Covid wasn't anything. Flu - the sort of flu that you take Lem Sip for not the sort of flu that lays continents to waste. Donald Trump got over Covid in 25 minutes after all. So, this time, no comment.

We have a curfew from late evening through to early morning all over Spain, meeting numbers are restricted, the manufacturers of Christmas specialities may as well file for bankruptcy now as the politicians fight over a six month long State of Alarm or a parliamentary scrutiny every two months. It's the sort of stuff that's going on all over Europe. For some it's democracy under attack with ridiculous and pointless controls faced by an intractable enemy and for others it's politicians scrabbling to do their best to keep people alive and save their economies.

Maggie just told me as I came back into the living room that Murcia, the Region just ten minutes up the road from us, is going to restrict movement between municipalities. Live in Jumilla and you have to stay in Jumilla. Lots of people from the three Murcian municipalities that border Pinoso come into Pinoso for their shopping, banking and social life. I wonder if they are going to be turned back at the border? 

Flexible friends

Around 1975 I went to my branch of the Midland Bank and asked them for an Access card. Credit cards were pretty uncommon then. My bank turned me down as one of the great unwashed, a person without a job. There was another bank that offered Access at the time, probably the NatWest, and being persistent I went there to ask about getting a card. They suggested I applied for a Barclaycard instead. So I filled in the form, using a Biro, posted it off to somewhere and, several weeks later, got a nice shiny Barclaycard back.

22nd October  2020 and Barclaycard have just closed down that account. I can't use it after today. Not because I'm in debt but because they are cleaning up their European business before the UK finally abandons the Union. I forget what they told me about why they were closing me down. It was something to do with it becoming more expensive of trickier to do business with Europe when they ceased to be a member of the club.

I've had a Spanish credit card since  about 2006. I remember the people hawking their cards outside the Carrefour supermarket being amazed when I approached them to ask to sign up! At first it was a Spanish Barclaycard but Barclays sold the business on to Banco Popular, later Santander, who then sold a lot of the business to some U.S. risk capital group. It's called a WiZink card nowadays.

In the same way that I have a Spanish credit card I have a Spanish driving licence, pay Spanish taxes, I'm on the equivalent of the Council Tax list and we have a TV aerial which collects the Spanish TV signal. I know though that lots of Britons continue to behave as though they live a couple of thousand kilometres North of here. They have bank cards based on money in British bank accounts, they have British mobile phone numbers, imaginative solutions to watching broadcast British TV, as well as Amazon.co.uk accounts and the NHS still thinks they live in Acacia Avenue when they pop in to see the doctor on their trips "home". There has been an enormous kerfuffle as Britons, who have lived here for years and years, scrabble to get around to changing their driving licences, organising their "right to reside" paperwork and even register as living in the house they live in before the Brexit deadline. The fact that there's an advert on the Spanish Spotify channel advertising someone to sort out paperwork for British immigrants suggests that it's big business.

Apart from the slight twinge of losing something I've had for over 40 years I will miss the card not a bit but I do hope that today's change won't cause anyone here too much of a problem.

Peanut butter isn't really a Spanish thing

This morning I was talking to a Sergio. As we got ready to go he said he was off for his breakfast. Get yourself some toast with avocado I quipped. This is because I've recently become aware that avocado on toast is a trendy Spanish breakfast. Sergio quipped back - with peanut butter and mango eh?

One advantage or disadvantage of using Skype to speak to someone is that you see them. I obviously looked confused. Sergio stayed online to say that Social Media Influencers, had been responsible for a huge run on those products in the recent past. He specifically mentioned a 100% peanut peanut butter sold by the Mercadona supermarket chain.

I had a look for Sergio's Internet Influencers by searching for peanut butter and I found them. I found several as you might expect but one bloke, Carlos Ríos, who shows 1.4 million followers on his Realfooding Instagram, popped up time and time again. He was quoted in lots of magazine and newspaper articles. Not that I really read any of the articles or looked at his Instagram properly but it looks as though he rates the healthiness of various foods, recommends easy to prepare healthy snacks and does food related stories with a healthy angle. A reasonable enough way to earn a living in the Internet age. You'll get the idea from one newspaper headline about him;  The nutritionist influencer who taught 400,000 young people to eat like their grandmas. Obviously my Spanish tutor Sergio is aware of these sort of people and the things they post about. They had completely passed me by until today but that's probably because I'm now very old and I say things like "I don't see the point in Instagram and TikTok".

Carlos, on his Realfooding Instagram, recommended this brand of Mercadona peanut butter. As soon as I saw the photos I realised I'd bought some last year. Apparently I'd bought it within days of its launch, I'd tasted it and then thrown it away. It tasted nothing like peanut butter and was completely horrid. Not worthy horrid like that unsalted, unsweetened Whole Earth brand peanut butter I sometimes bought in the UK. No, this peanut butter wasn't simply a bit boring and a bit too chewy for my sugar and fat saturated taste buds. The Mercadona stuff had a horrible runny consistency, it dripped off the toast but, more importantly, it tasted absolutely foul. 

Another lost opportunity to be hip and cool or whatever the TikTok generation says to mean the same!

This is where we live

I was doing the Spanish conversation thing with Ana, via Skype. We were talking about Culebrón. I could see she had the wrong idea. I wondered if I'd ever written about the place we live in a general sense. I didn't bother to check in case I had. No point in wasting an idea no matter how moderate.

We're in the province of Alicante one of the three that make up the Valencian Community. Benidorm is in Alicante to help you locate yourself. Alicante City, our provincial capital, is about 50 minutes away.  Our municipality, Pinoso, is well inland, the last town in Alicante before crossing over the border into the Region of Murcia. Pinoso is nothing like Benidorm. 

If you turn left on the main road that runs close to our house you can reach Pinoso town centre in about five minutes, ten minutes and you'll be in the Region of Murcia. Turn right instead and, within fifteen minutes you'll be in Monóvar town centre. Ten more minutes in the distance from Monóvar you can see Elda/Petrer. Elda and Petrer are two different towns but, in places, one side of the street is in Petrer and the other in Elda. In Petrer or Elda there is a hospital, a hypermarket, cinemas, train station, fast food joints, castles and the Madrid Alicante motorway.

Pinoso is our local town. It's where we go to get cash from the bank machine, see a doctor, stock up on food, get a beer or go to a restaurant. There is a good sports centre, there are gyms and a library and a cultural centre and a theatre and a cemetery and a market hall and so on. It's a remarkably long so on given that, size wise, Pinoso is really no more than a village. It's to do with money. Although there's a lot of worry at the moment about the tumbling income from the marble quarry Pinoso has, within it's boundary, a huge marble quarry which has produced shedloads of cash for ages. I seem to remember that when building was booming the quarry was producing more than 6 million euros a year for the town coffers via a local extraction fee. Income was about 4½ million in 2018. A couple of months ago when I went to hear the sob story about how the town is on its uppers the predictions for income this year were only around 2 million. Goodness knows how Covid will affect that.  Very soon, unless they start to cut services, local taxes will have to increase drastically.

Outside the town centre Pinoso has a municipal area that takes in a fair bit of countryside. The countryside is peppered with vineyards, olive and almond trees; arable land. Pinoso's geographical limits stretch to the border of three municipalities in Murcia and, in our direction, to the municipality of Monóvar. Within Pinoso's boundaries there are lots of small villages. Those villages are called pedanias. By name they are: El Rodriguillo, Cases del Pi, La Caballusa, Casas de Ibáñez, Paredón, Lel, Ubeda, Culebrón, Encebras and Tres Fuentes. There are also a number of other clusters of houses, which are called parajes on the Pinoso Town Hall website. Those very small settlements, sometime little other than a wide spot in the road, are El Faldar, El Sequé, Venta del Terrós and Monte Cabezo. There must be some legal difference between peadanias and parejes because I'd guess that El Faldar probably has more houses than Cases del Pi.

Most of the pedanias have a mix of dirt and tarmac roads in the village centre. Individual houses are scattered around the outskirts of the pedanias. Quite a lot of these villages have restaurants cum bars, they all have a chapel and a social centre though neither is usually open. I don't think any of them have shops though Paredón has a British run restaurant, caravan park type complex which offers other services and that may include some British food products. We once went looking for a bakery in Casas Ibáñez which we didn't find but which people assure me exists. I'm sure that, in the past, the pedanias had bakeries and grocers but now everyone has an Audi Q7 instead.

We live in Culebrón which you probably surmised from the blog title. I wouldn't like to hazard a guess at how many people live in Culebrón. The official number is around 100 and I can quickly count at least twenty, maybe 25 households that stay here all year round so that's probably about right. In summer there will be a lot more because people think that the countryside is cooler than the town.  The main road down to Elda/Petrer used to snake through the houses in the village but a little before we moved to Spain a new road was built which divided the village into two distinct and unequal halves. The bit we're in has fewer of the limited services that Culebrón offers - like tarmac, street lighting, drains, basketball court, recycling bins, the social centre- than the other half. On our side of the road there's a farm, a bunch of houses, lots of crops and some dirt tracks. 

Most of the houses on our side of the road are in terraces, maybe only three houses but terraces none the less. So we have neighbours but we also have, what, by British standards would be, a big garden. The house is house like. It has a double pitched roof, mains electric and mains water though we are not connected to the drains. There is no mains gas but our Wi-Fi is an acceptable 20Mb.

The house itself is probably a couple of hundred years old though as there was no proper land registry in the area till 1987 nobody really knows. At one time it was two tiny terraced houses but they'd been knocked into one by the time we bought it. When we had to change the roof a few years ago the house got a bit of an exterior facelift so it doesn't look particularly old. The walls are thick which keeps the house cool in the summer and freezing in the winter. Nowadays though with pellet burners and gas heaters and hot/cold air-con we can keep the living areas warm when we're in them. It's still a bit nippy, read bloody freezing, first thing in the morning. 

It's absolutely true that Alicante has a brilliant climate, it's no lie that we get 300 sunny days a year but when the sun goes down, when you're inside or when you're in the shade it can be very cold. Sit inside an unheated building when it's sunny, clear and 18ºC outside and, after a while your fingers, hands, nose and ears will go numb. The buildings have almost no insulation, we have tiled floors and there are no curtains at the windows. Add in that we're at 600 metres (nearly 2,000 feet) which means we get lower temperatures than someone on the coast. As I read just the other day where I live it's summer by day and winter by night.

So there you go Ana. A bit of English for you to read!

Spanish for Siegfried, Triston and James

I read a book last week. In it a young woman has moved to the country, to a small village in the middle of nowhere Spain. She's thinking community and tranquillity. She rents a house and the first thing that she asks her landlord is if he knows someone who might have a dog for her. I was reminded of one of Maggie's stories. Maggie worked with a woman in Madrid who had a Spanish partner. The couple decided to move to the countryside and one of the requisites, one of the first things to do, according to Maggie's friend, was to get a "brute of a dog".

In the book the landlord palms the young woman off with one of his own dodgy dogs. Like all good country Spaniards the landlord thinks that it's cruel and unusual to sterilize a pet. The newcomer is from the city though and she takes the dog, for sterilization, to the nearest vet. The description of the vet's office is of a dusty and run down place where the vet is reading his phone and where there are no clients. It was much like that when we lived in Ciudad Rodrigo - except that it was before smartphones became our every time diversion. Eduardo the cat went with us. When it got to the time for his annual jabs I took him to the local veterinarian. The office was a scruffy and the vet was his own receptionist. I went more than once and I never had to wait.

It's not like that in Pinoso. We have a vet who trades under the name of Huellas; Pawprints. There's quite a team at Huellas including a receptionist, a bloke who seems to do a bit of everything, a couple of small animal vets - vets who deal with small animals not diminutive vets - and I think there's also a large animal vet (variation on the same explanation) but I haven't seen him for years so he may or may not still be there. There must be a dog groomer too because they offer doggie trims. Whatever, and whoever, the point is that it's a biggish team and it's a busy office. 

Turn up unannounced and you usually have to hang around for a while even when both vets are on duty. Plenty of Spaniards use the vet but, considering we Britons are outnumbered about 15 to 1 by Spaniards in Pinoso, we have a very strong presence in that office. It's amazing how often there is a Briton waiting with their (usually) dog or (sometimes) cat before I arrive. The vet's is fairly modern and the treatment rooms look properly medical with cupboards full of vials and tablets and sterile wrapped stuff. The vets are pleasant and well regarded.

Pinoso is very affected by we British. Brexit may be changing that a bit and there may be more Belgians and Dutch joining the Moroccans, Ecuadoreans and everyone else but there are still a lot of Britons and we are very noticeable. We're loud, we're old Empire confident and we don't blend in.

Whether we Brits are the reason that Cristina's is so busy or whether she was simply a vet with a well thought through business plan is something you'd have to ask her.

I'm not sure what colour jacket you need

As well as the post box, the bodega, and Jason and Patricia's B&B, Culebrón has a restaurant. The restaurant is called Casa Eduardo because it's run by Eduardo with his wife, Maria Luisa, and nowadays, their son Sergio. To be honest the business used to be pretty moribund but it appears to have bounced back from the number of motors I see parked outside. The usual explanation is that the son added a bit of sparkle. I've always liked Eduardo's but Maggie is less of a fan. That said there's absolutely nothing to stop me from popping over for elevenses or even getting an odd beer when Maggie's out working but I don't, at least not frequently enough.

Eduardo was talking to me quite a while ago now about Sunday mornings. He told me the restaurant had to be open at some ungodly hour for the hunters to get their breakfasts. Hunting is big in Spain. In season you can hear the shotguns going off from dawn to dusk and the abandonment of the hunting dogs when the season is over is a Spanish scandal.

This morning, on a local Facebook community page, someone was asking about hunting. I thought they wanted to do some but when I re-read the post they were asking if the hunters would be a problem if they bought a rural house. Pet dogs slaughtered in error, hunters walking across their land - that sort of thing. Anyway it piqued my interest because I guessed that going hunting in Spain might be a paper heavy undertaking. 

First of all you have to be over 14, over 16 in Galicia, and, if you're under 18 you'll normally need permission from your parents, guardians or carers. Then you have to pass the hunting exam which is set by each Autonomous Community. Once it's passed it's passed though. It's not a recurring test.

Next, each season you have to get a hunting licence for the region or regions where you intend to hunt. The licence is for a named person so it's non-transferable. There is a multi community licence available. If you intend to go armed you need a firearms certificate. There are different certificates and presumably different procedures for getting licenced for the guns suitable for small game hunting (rabbits, hares, partridge and the like) or for larger animals (deer, boar etc.) Crossbows also need a licence though apparently longbows don't. It looks as though the licencing for those is a state licence administered by the Guardia Civil. It's the firearms certificate that requires a health test which has to be done every so often dependant on your age. If you commit an offence or you break the rules your hunting licence or your firearms licence can be taken away. There are different procedures, and different licences, for hunting with birds of prey! Hunters need civil liability Insurance and without insurance all the other licences lose their validity. 

With the exam passed, the licences bought, your guns (or raptors) licenced and everything insured you then need somewhere to hunt. All over Spain you see the little square signs divided by a diagonal line into two triangles, one black and one white. They delimit the coto - I suppose the English word would be hunting reserve though that sounds like an oxymoron to me. Anyway, to hunt you need to get authorisation from the owner of the coto. I'm pretty sure that I've heard that farmers often sell the hunting rights on their land to clubs and associations.

The article I used as the basis for this post from the Royal Spanish Hunting Federation reminds hunters that they should always use legal methods for hunting which I presume rules out AK47s and hand grenades. Only animals listed as fair game in each region can be hunted. Hopefully then our cats are safe so long as the hunter's eyesight test is reasonably recent. There was also a general reminder that there are safety rules that have to be respected - for instance someone on the Facebook page that I mentioned above said that hunting within 500 metres of a house is not allowed and I presume there are other comparable rules and regulations. (This is apparently duff information; see the footnote). Then the hunting seasons have to be respected. I just had a look to see when that was but it's far more complicated than I expected. For instance, this year you can hunt rabbits with dogs from 19 July to 25 December but only on Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays and on regional and national holidays. On the other hand if you want to blow song thrushes out of the sky from a fixed position you'll have to hold your murderous instincts in check a little longer as the season doesn't start till 12 October and goes on till 6 December. You can't do that on Thursdays either - just Saturday, Sunday and regional and national holidays. Its the same start and finish dates and the same days for the lone hunter banging away at anything they find or a line of guns flushing out everything in front of them though hare and partridge have to be left alone after 8 November. No wonder they need to pass an exam! I suspect there will be a large section on noting the difference between rabbits, hares and chihuahuas and an even larger section on calendar use.

Oh, and I forgot all about hunting with dogs but without guns. And fishing. Pah!

--------------------------------------------------

It's a couple of weeks after the original post. It's Sunday morning and there are hunters near our house. There is a comment on this piece which says that the commentator didn't know about the 500 metre rule. As I said I read that on the answers to the Facebook question that prompted me to write this post. Apparently it's wrong. It may have been 500 metres at some time but there is an entry about Hunting in the Official State Bulletin signed Francisco Franco in 1970 which sets the limits at 100 metres from villages and the like and 50 metres from individual houses. There is a more recent entry in that same Official Bulletin relating to Valencia which sets those limits at 200 metres from the edges of villages and 50 metres from isolated houses with prohibitions too on shooting close to roads and tracks. Sorry about that misinformation.

Expect cloud cover and drizzle

I've been to Skegness and Morecambe and Rochester several times but if Star Trek's Mr Scott were to transport me to one of them without warning I don't think I'd know where I were. It's exactly the same with Spanish towns and cities. Of the 50 Spanish provinces I've been to 49 of their capitals but the only ones I know well are the local ones. The one I'm missing is Palencia. In order to be a completist though I'm also short of one of the two autonomous cities on the African coast; I've been to Ceuta but not to Melilla.

Last week we went on a bit of a jaunt, 1,979 kilometres of mainly motorway plugging passing through 15 or so provinces. The plan was simple enough. Up to a village included in the 20 prettiest villages of Spain list for the first night, a village in Huesca more or less on the French border with views to the snowy Pyrenees. Next a couple of nights in Pamplona, the place where they do the bull running with the red and white clothes a la Hemingway, before a longer stay at Zarautz on the Basque coast just outside of San Sebastián. From there we'd head south, running for home with an overnight in Zaragoza. Being that way inclined we added in a couple of stops along the route and our seaside lodgings were the base from which to sally forth. Just as I've been to Skegness I've been to Pamplona, San Sebastian, Vitoria and Zaragoza before but the bits I remembered were few and far between. The smaller stops, such as, Ainsa, Alquézar, Anso and Zarautz were all new to me.

If you want to look at the snaps they're towards the end of the September album and at the beginning of the October album. Click the link words. 

As we packed the car in Culebrón, to head off, I thought it was a bit chillier than it had been so, at the last minute, I threw a pullover and a light jacket onto the back seat of the car and a pair of trainers to accompany my sandals in the boot. Anytime any of the Northern regions of Spain feature on the TV news so do the umbrellas and snow ploughs. I know this but somehow I failed to register it. Maybe, because we live in the same country I thought it unreasonable that the weather differences would be significant. The sandals remained unused but I certainly used the trainers, pullover and the jacket. It was chilly, cold at times, and it bucketed down more than once. I knew it, the weather that is, but I hadn't really acknowledged it.

With the holiday over, as we unpacked in Culebrón, I thought maybe the Northern weather had travelled with us. It was nippy. I've often argued that Spain seems to have these quite sudden changes, often calendar linked, in weather. October has arrived and the warm weather is kicking its last for the year. I wore long legged pyjamas to bed for the first time in months, the window we leave permanently open all summer is now closed and, as we watched telly the other night, I added a bit of low level aircon to raise the temperature a tad. Today I dragged the calor gas heaters from out of the garage and even hung a couple of woollies in the wardrobe. At the moment daytime temperatures are still high but the mornings and evenings are cooler. Before long the five or six months of chilly, or downright cold, Spanish Autumn, Winter and Spring will be back to remind me why it is I really, really enjoy those months when the sun beats down relentlessly.

5,844 days

Sixteen years ago today, on 7 October 2004, I parked up in Santa Pola having travelled the 1,349 miles from Huntingdon behind the wheel of a 1977 MGB GT. My travelling companion was a black and white cat called Mary. Our destination was the flat where Maggie had been living for over a month whilst she worked as a teacher in nearby Elche. The journey took two days and cost 200€ in fuel, 120€ in tolls, 55€ for accommodation and just 25€ in food.

Now, if anyone had asked, I'd have sworn that on the first full day in Spain I went and signed on the equivalent of the Council Tax Register, the padrón. In fact my diary tells me otherwise. The only interesting thing I did that first day was to go, with Maggie, to a Spanish class that she'd booked us in to. It seems I didn't get around to signing on the padrón till the week after. Even then it wasn't my first bit of officialdom - apparently I'd managed to get a social security number a few hours before. Strange how memories become distorted with time.

Having done a couple of courses of Spanish classes in the UK I spoke some Spanish when I got to Spain. My memory is that we struggled with the language but that, overall, we used to manage OK. Again my diary suggests that I may be misremembering. I obviously felt strongly enough about it at the time to record that I had problems buying dusters and kidney beans one day! I didn't know the Spanish for either and, though I found the dusters easily enough, there were two jars of potential candidates as kidney beans. My solution, at the time, was to go to the international section in the supermarket (we were in Santa Pola after all) where I went through the ingredients on the side of a can of chilli con carne to find the Spanish words I needed. I suspect that the entry is a sign of frustration at feeling lost and adrift with the language. It's a frustration I still often feel.

As well as misremembering there are other early entries in the diary that show just how wrong some first impressions were. We went to Villena that first weekend. In my diary I mention that the town seems nice enough but that it has no "old part". If you've ever been to Villena you'll know just how wrong that is. It also shows too just how lost we were. Nowadays, when we go to a new town we always head for the bit where the town hall and parish church are because that's where the heart of the town will be. Seemingly we didn't know to do that in Villena all those years ago.

The house hunting began nearly straight away. If we could we went out looking at places together. There were a lot of cowboy house sellers at the time and we saw all sorts of junk. We soon became very aware of some of the very dodgy sales techniques of the numerous get rich quick merchants in a market where house prices were rising week by week. On lots of occasions people were simply wasting our time so it became routine for me to talk to agents and sellers and have a look at the places alone so that I could filter out the no hopers. Later Maggie and I would go back to anything that I'd added to the "reasonable" pile. 

Eventually I went to an Estate Agent in Monóvar who showed me, amongst others, the house in Culebrón where we now live. I saw other houses, with a different agent, in the same area, around Pinoso, on the same day. I didn't care for the Culebrón house much and I discounted it but, the next day, on the Saturday, I'd arranged for some second viewings so that Maggie could see my selection. As we passed, what is now, our track I made the short detour to show the house to Maggie. It just happened that the owner had been so appalled by the state of the garden, when he'd shown me around, that he'd come back to do a bit of tidying up. By sheer fluke he was in the garden when we showed up and so he was available to show us around. I still didn't like the house much though the driveway was nice. Maggie hated the other houses I'd lined up but she reckoned the Culebrón house had potential. The truth is that our house hunting was not going well, we didn't have enough money and we seemed to be running out of options. With the help of the estate agent we got a builder to have a look. On a miserable November evening in the light of very low wattage bulbs Maggie invented a plan for the design of our house on the spur of the moment. It was drawn freehand in an old school notebook. A few days later we got the builder's quote back and on the 19th November we made an offer on the house which the owners rejected. We ended up paying the full asking price.

Back in the diary my summing up at the end of the year contained the following - "... and now living in Spain with absolutely no income, no job prospects to talk of and living off Maggie. I've just agreed to spend all the money I have in the world on a damp, shed like house in the middle of bugger all where. I am quite unable to speak the language". 

We didn't complete the purchase till after the Christmas holidays and we didn't move in till April of 2005. I have a photo of Maggie, the photo at the top of this post, unlocking the gate as we took possession and, every time I see that snap, I remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach that we had just made the most terrible mistake.

The oddest thing though is that, the other day, I was driving somewhere close by - it could have been the Yecla road or the one down to La Romaneta - and I found myself grinning all over my face for no apparent reason. I was thinking how stunning the countryside looked and congratulating myself on having made the right decision when we upped sticks and moved here.

Oh, and in't seat o'nowt, as we say where I was born or aprovechando que el Pisuerga pasa por Valladolid as we say in the place where I live, there's another entry in my diary about the first weekend after getting here in 2004 which notes that our first meal out was at a local Chinese restaurant and cost a massive 4.96€.

Four syllables bad, two syllables better

I'm up to three sessions a week now with the online Spanish learning - a bloke in Alicante, another in Manresa in Cataluña and a woman somewhere that's really Barcelona but isn't actually Barcelona - like Croydon isn't London. The hour long sessions are just conversation so none of us have to do any prep. The conversations go hither and thither; we've talked about squatters, the pluses and minuses of vanguard cooking, the differences between elections and political representation in the UK and Spain and other similar topics. I often trip over words and pronunciation but, generally, the conversation flows well enough and I often surprise myself with the obscure vocabulary that I seem to be able to dredge from the deep corners of my rapidly decaying brain. The tutors are uniformly complimentary but I've noticed that I keep my end of the conversations simple. I'm hoping that it will become more complicated with the amount of time that I'm now spending on speaking Spanish but I fear I may be deluding myself.

When I was teaching English to Spaniards I was once asked to explain verb inversion. I didn't know what it was but it isn't actually all that tricky. Verb inversions happen most commonly in questions. Apparently something like -they are working- is considered to be "normal" while -are they working?- is considered to be inverted. That wasn't what the students were asking me about though. No, they were asking about an obscure but essential element in their curriculum at the Official Language School where they were all doing their exams. Take a word like seldom. If you put seldom at the beginning of a sentence the word order has to follow a pattern. It's not good English to say -Seldom you hear a politician apologise. We change the words around and say - Seldom do you hear a politician apologise. It's the same with other words like never and hardly. Never have I heard a politician apologise. That was the verb inversion the students wanted to know about.

I was a bit surprised by this. It was something I'd never noticed in English. I was so impressed that I set up a little experiment. I asked a few English speaking pals in a bar to use the word hardly in a sentence to see if we all, intuitively, changed the word order. My experimental design was poor. Everybody used hardly perfectly. The problem, for my experiment, was that nobody used hardly as the first word in the sentence. They didn't say -Hardly ever do I pay with cash- they said, instead -I hardly ever pay with cash. I went back to the students and told them to forget about verb inversions. I told them it was an example of archaic language that very few people use when speaking. Their response was an indictment of Spanish education in general. Not in our exams they replied. Ah yes, an education where trainee carpenters learn about, and are examined on, trees and the different qualities of wood they produce as well as the history of wood working tools but where they never quite get around to making a bread board or a shoe rack.

Back to my English pals in the bar. They did what I do when I'm speaking to the tutors online. I circumnavigate the difficult constructions with perfectly good, but simpler, phrases. Instead of saying -If I were to go to Madrid I would visit the Mercado de los Motores- I say -The next time I visit Madrid I'm going to go to the Mercado de los Motores. Or -I missed the bus yesterday because I got up late- to avoid the much more difficult -If I hadn't overslept yesterday I wouldn't have missed the bus.

For years my excuse for my halting conversation has been that I hardly ever speak Spanish. You don't need much language to do the supermarket shop or order a beer and I've always argued that my opportunities for longer conversations have been few and far between. These sessions will rob me of that excuse and only leave the reality of old age and fewer functioning neurones.