Truths and falsehoods

I listen to a fair few podcasts. Most are arty or documentary like and just one of them, Spanishpodcast,  is aimed directly at people learning Spanish. This week the episode was called True or False, ¿Verdadero o Falso? and dealt with some of those commonly repeated "facts". You know the sort of thing - we only use 10% of our brains (false), hippos have pink sweat (true), hair and nails continue to grow after death (false), koalas have two penises/vaginas (true) and others of the same ilk.

There were a couple of Spanish related stories in the podcast that I thought I could safely pinch for this blog. The stories have the added advantage of satisfying any cravings I might have to write a blog entry whilst gently steering me away from politics. I'd been tempted though because, yesterday, Parliamentarians were being sworn in as "MPs" at which time they have to promise or swear to uphold the Spanish Constitution. Lots of the Deputies used their brief moment in the spotlight to make some form of statement - from local to global, for the Catalan republic, for the Basque Country, for Spain in general and for depopulated Spain in particular, for the planet, for social services, for murdered women, for democracy, for love not hate and for the Trece Rosas, the thirteen young women killed by a Francoist firing squad soon after the Civil War. Today there are politicians saying this tinkering with the swearing in ceremony is an abomination, a misuse of a public forum blah, blah, blah and that it should be stopped by law. As I keep saying I fear that Spanish society has a very tenuous grasp on the idea of liberty of expression.

Anyway back to Spanishpodcast. Apparently one of the stories, as you down the tequila and Jägermeister shots, is that, in Iceland, it is legal to kill Basques. The Basques are people born in the Basque Country in the North of Spain. Amazingly it's sort of true. Alex, the man from Spanishpodcast said that it's a long story but the essence is that in 1615 a Basque fishing boat went down in a storm off the coast of Iceland. The fishermen, who were probably whalers but Alex kept quiet about that because he knows we foreigners are touchy about whaling, managed to swim ashore. The Icelanders, all those Helgasons and Sturlusons, thought that these Basques were invaders, the vanguard of a bigger army, so they slaughtered them all. That done they had a bit of a parliamentary session and enacted a law making it legal to kill Basques. The law stayed on the statute books until 2015 when the Icelandic Government finally abolished it. And from that date I suppose the tourist routes between San Sebastian or Bilbao and Reykjavik became just a touch safer.

The other story was about a war, the longest war that Spain has ever undertaken, which passed off without dead and wounded or even weapons. It's a bit like the idea that Berwick on Tweed is still at war with Russia (you can Google it just as well as me but I've played drinking games too!) because a small town in the South of Spain, Huéscar, declared war on Denmark in 1809 and that war went on for 172 years until 1981. Not a shot was fired, nobody was killed or injured and really nothing happened at all but, officially, there was a war. In fact the story goes that sometime in the 1970s a Danish journalist was briefly detained in Huéscar but as it was the town archivist who discovered this declaration of war in 1981 and couldn't find the peace declaration to pair with it, a story in the 1970s sounds a bit fishy to me. Anyhow, when it was discovered both sides, the Andaluces and the Danes, took it in good part and had a bit of a party to celebrate the peace. In good Andaluz style that is now an annual fiesta and the Danish ambassador to Spain is usually one of the attendees presumably with a peace offering - pastries maybe?

Another talking politics post

It's strange how the same thing has more or less value depending on your own thoughts and when you have them.

I was listening to some high up politician from Navarre (an area of Spain) on the wireless. She was going on about how her right of centre party had done well because it had picked up more votes in the last election. I won't extrapolate on her model by pointing out that her party came second. Instead I'll pick up on her complaint about a Catalan party that probably holds the key to the formation of the next Spanish Government. The party in question are Catalan separatists, they want some form of autonomy, nationhood even, for their region.

So the Navarre woman says her party's votes give them legitimacy. She argues that Cataluña is an integral part of Spain. By her own reasoning the people who live in Cataluña are Spanish and, in Cataluña this separatist party got sufficient votes, enough to make them potential kingmakers. But, for the woman from Navarre, the party that won most votes, and is looking to form a government, shouldn't talk to this separatist party because their votes are less valid than some other votes. She didn't try to suggest that the winning party's votes were bad votes, worth less than votes for her party, but she did argue that the separatist votes were worse; tainted votes, less valuable votes, wrong votes. I listen to this and wonder why the journalist interviewing her doesn't point out this massive contradiction, this illogical behaviour.

I hear, time and time again, politicians pointing out that certain things can't be talked about because they are unconstitutional. If the law says that Spain is indivisible there can be no conversation about it being divisible. That would be illegal. But, worldwide, lots of things that used to be legal are now illegal and lots of things that were legal are now illegal - pit bulls without muzzles being one example and Elton John and David Furnish being another. Changing laws, changing constitutions, happens all the time.

In 1933 a Republican (left wing) government in Spain introduced a law of "Vagos y Maleantes" the Law of Layabouts and Thieves. Basically this law said that if you were a ne'r do well you could expect trouble - trouble if you were gypsy or gay or workshy or uppity about working conditions or lived in a dodgy council estate and sold scrap. Over the years this law became associated with the Dictatorship, with Franco, but it was there before him and, with a changed name and all sorts of modifications it was still there in 1995 - twenty years after Franco drew his last and descended into the fiery pit. That law was dropped in 1995 because, somehow, people became to believe it was wrong and bad and made no sense. For 62 years though it was law. It was right. Now it's wrong. Just like the Constitution is right and the Basques and Catalans are wrong.

Good votes, bad votes, legal things, illegal things, fixed positions, immovable barriers. I've heard that humankind is on a collision course with disaster. I wonder how that happened?

Sour grapes?

I never particularly cared for Bohemian Rhapsody, or Queen come to that. For years and years though the British people, in polls no more dubious than the Catalan referendum, voted Bohemian Rhapsody the best song of all time or some such accolade. In Spain that same sort of listing goes to a song called Mediterráneo by Joan Manuel Serrat. Last Saturday some bloke I was having lunch with asked me if I'd ever heard the song. I controlled my snort and answered his patronising question almost civilly.

He was an anaesthetist, I think the woman with him was a surgeon. There were five other people, including us, on the table and one of those people, a bloke we'd known for fewer than three hours, bought lunch for everyone on the table in an outstandingly generous gesture.

We'd met the bill payer and his two pals in a car park in Novelda as we waited to do a tour of the vineyards that produce eating grapes, uvas de mesa, in this little bit of Alicante province.

The wind was blowing, it looked like rain. Of the 23 people signed up for the tour only five of us actually turned up. Our future benefactor and his two pals went in one car and we went in the vineyard owner's BMW along with the tour organiser.

Spaniards seem to prefer their green grapes with seeds. One particularly famous seeded variety is aledo; the grape traditionally eaten alongside the midnight chimes that ring in the New Year. All the eating grapes we saw were protected from birds, beasties and the elements by wrapping them in what look like paper bags as they grow on the vine. This time of year, the run up to Christmas and the New Year, is a big time for picking - possibly because of the popping them into your mouth as the chimes ring out thing - but that could be a bit of chicken and egg type reasoning. One of the various stories to explain the twelve grapes tradition of the Spanish New Year has the grape growers of the past, faced with a huge glut of grapes at Christmastime, coming up with the cunning plan of promoting their fruit for the New Year. Do Britons choose to eat sprouts as a Christmas accompaniment or is it simply that there was very little option in the dead of a British winter?

So we got the tour. I understood it perfectly. We saw the forms of "trellises", we heard why hand picking was the only way, we learned  about the seedless varieties, with pink skins and red leaves grown under nets for the British market and lots lots more. But that was a week ago. All the fine detail has now drained from my overtaxed and withered mind.

The bit that I do remember, and the thing that surprised me most, was the next bit. The vineyard owner drove us to a shed just off the La Romana-Novelda road, by the turn down to Aspe. It's hardly a centre of population. Inside the shed there were well over 100 people  working at a cracking pace to prepare the fruit for market. They cut off leaves, discarded damaged grapes, packed the fruit in variously named boxes for different supermarket chains and then carted the boxes to waiting lorry trailers or piled them into the cold store. It was a very slick operation carried out to a stridently upbeat and very Spanish musical soundtrack.

And to finish off we went to a bodega that grew the other sort of grapes, the ones that people ferment into alcohol. That's where we met the man who paid for our lunch and the medic who thought that after fifteen years in Spain it was surprising that I'd heard a Spanish song.

The menoo

It's nice to think that people remember me from time to time. This week two old friends sent me the same article they'd both seen in the Guardian about the slow death of the Spanish "menú del día". The piece said that ordinary working Spaniards no longer had time to eat a big meal at lunchtimes, that diners were looking for different sorts of food and that restaurants were no longer able to work on such low profit returns. Actually I wrote about some of this in ปลาออกจากน้ำ  (Thai for fish out of water) when we were in Madrid. So, I partly agree and I'm sure that the Guardian correspondent is right in suggesting that there is a trend away from the traditional three course meal. Nonetheless, away from the big cities, the menú is very definitely alive and well.

Just before we go on something about the pronunciation. Menu, pronounced the English way, is carta in Spanish. Here we're talking about menú, with the accent over the U. This word is pronounced something like menoo, the full phrase is menoo del dear, menú del día and it's a fixed price, set meal.

The menú is, generally, served in restaurants at lunchtime (2pm to 4pm) on working days from Monday to Friday. The price is fixed and it usually includes two savoury courses and then a pudding. It generally comes with a drink - water, wine, beer or pop - and bread. Spanish servers will be surprised if you order a tea or coffee to drink alongside your meal; hot drinks are for afterwards not during. Often, especially on the Mediterranean coast, you'll get a basic salad thrown in too. It's usually an either or between coffee and dessert though sometimes you get both as part of the package. Despite being so ubiquitous it's an unusual style of Spanish meal because each individual orders separately and eats separately. So often, when eating in Spain, the food is ordered to be shared.

There used to be legislation about menus but the Guardian article told me that was changed in 2010 so here are a few of the little tricks and ruses to look out for.

The most common trick, especially for tourists, is that they are drawn in by the fixed price menú advertised on a chalk board or similar outside the restaurant. Once seated the tourists are handed a carta, the a la carte menu. They're a bit unsure if they read the board correctly, it's difficult to ask and so they order from the menu and end up paying more. Usually it's a bit of a con. If you ask for the menú they'll tell you what it is though it may well not be written down anywhere except on that board outside. Sometimes the fact that they don't offer you a menú is not the restaurant being tricky. As I said most fixed meals are available at lunchtime on workdays. Britons often think of the principal meal as being the evening meal. If you turn out in the evening there is unlikely to be a fixed meal available but the advert for the lunchtime meal may still be there. The same at the weekends or on Bank Holidays.

Another of the standard tourist area dodges is to charge for things that are usually included - like the drinks, the bread or the salad. The server puts them on the table, you eat them and they turn up on the bill. If you read the the menú information it will be there; if the menú listing doesn't mention drinks (bebidas) or bread (pan) then expect to pay extra for them. Even when you know the extras are coming it can sometimes be a nasty surprise. We went in a place opposite the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. We knew the drinks would be extra, we knew that it didn't include the coffee or pudding but it was still a good price for such a tourist mecca and the place looked nice enough. They charged me 6€ for a bottle of beer.

Most menus are not haute cuisine. A pal used to describe the menú choice as chop and chips. Plain and filling would be a kinder description though, every now and again, a menú can be surprisingly good. Even today, around here, there are, very occasionally, dead cheap but perfectly good menus available at around 7€. The majority are in the 9€ to 12€ range. There is often a second group of slightly better looking menus in some eateries  - maybe 15€ to 18€. If the restaurant does offer a fixed menú on Saturday or Sunday expect the prices to be higher; the 12€ menú becoming 15€ and the 15€ menú becoming 20€. Obviously there are price differences with geography. If you're in Benalmadena or Benidorm then the food is likely to be cheaper than in Barcelona or Bilbao.

Still a good way to kill the couple of hours when the streets are deserted.

The culebrón for Culebrón

There's a WhatsApp group for Culebrón. Usually it's used to advertise events or to check that it's not just your Internet that's down. There was a bit of a message flurry today when the water was off for hours. Eduardo (or Maria Luisa) said it was because the water main was being relocated under the new roundabout. As the messages bounced back and forth, so did the witticisms. Would the roundabout be decorated with a Coliseum like arrangement of marble blocks similar to the last roundabout built in the area? - that's it being built in the photo. I suggested that, as Culebrón, means giant snake, maybe a huge serpent would be appropriate. Someone asked if anyone knew the legend. I didn't but Google did. Google knows everything.

So, the tradition says that big hairy snakes, culebrones, go about, generally by night. These wild hairy snakes would attack carters and walkers going so far as to eat some of them. The snakes were generally supposed to live in warrens. One of their principle tasks was to guard buried treasure. Carters and walkers were advised to stay away from places where warrens and treasure coincided.

In order to feed themselves the giant snakes, the culebrones, culebrón is the singular form, would attract and ensnare prey with their gaze. They could do this even at a distance. When a culebrón was hungry it was big enough to eat animals whole because it had such a huge gut. But it wasn't all about killing. Where there was a good supply of food the culebrones had another trick. They could attract cattle with their tail and then suckle on their milk; the culebrones were partial to a nice drop of milk. They also ate smaller animals like farmyard chickens and geese. This could, too, be an explanation for the disappearance of so many of our cats. When the snakes were satiated they'd often have a bit of a kip in the grassland or stubble before moving on, underground, to pastures new.

Culebrones were, as mentioned above, adept at guarding treasure. I don't think we're talking about Blackbeard type, X marks the spot treasure here but more about someone keeping their money safe by burying it in a clay pot in the back garden. Anyway, within forty days of burying their stash people could be reasonably sure that it would attract a culebrón. So, if the owner wanted to recover the hoard without ending up inside the snake's belly, the trick was to sprinkle the ground with the local version of potcheen or moonshine, called aguardiente. The drunken snakes were inept security guards.

Now in just the same way as wealth attracted the culebrones it was said that anyone who kept a culebrón would become rich and prosperous. Domesticating a culebrón wasn't that easy. First you had to pull the three longest hairs from a wild culebrón. That done the three hairs had to be placed in a tureen of milk. The hairs would come to life and grow. After a while, the strongest of the three would devour the other two. In time the victorious hair would grow to be a full blown culebrón. The owner had to keep a milk cow for the sole purpose of providing milk for the culebrón. What's more the owner had the annual obligation to kill an animal, or if the owner preferred a family member or relative, to feed to the snake. Whether it was a baa lamb or great uncle Edgar the blood had to be spilled in a place known only to the owner and the culebrón. These duties were sacrosanct, absolutely essential. If the culebrón keeper were to neglect this duty he or she could expect to fall into abject poverty and maybe end up as prey for the culebrón. There was another downside to this arrangement as a way of getting rich. It signalled to the devil that the owner was greedy and open to deals. Buying the soul of a culebrón breeder was easy meat for the devil. Anyone that keen to get rich would almost certainly be quick to sell his or her soul in return for earthly rewards at the risk of an eternity in purgatory.

As well as meaning big, hairy snake culebrón is the Spanish word for a soap opera, presumably because it goes on and on. And here, in this blog, the two things for the price of one.

In the dumps

I thought I'd talk about rubbish collection. True, we have a general election this weekend so I might have written about that. After all I've been shouting at the television because the right wingers, populist allies of Trump, Kaczyński, Bolsonaro and Hofer, are using their election spots to show security camera footage of illegal immigrants (they say) involved in brawls and muggings. I might equally have held forth about the incredible distortion of the truth that the British press seems to have swallowed hook, line and sinker about Cataluña in general and about Clara Ponsati in particular. Actually though I laughed out loud when I read about the rambling 59 page warrant for her arrest. I thought back to the multi page letters I get from the Tax Office or the Land Registry and just knew that that part at least was true. But no, rubbish collection it is.

Generally here, you take the rubbish, the stuff that doesn't get recycled, to some big containers in the street. In towns the containers are emptied every day. In rural locations, like ours, the schedule varies. For years and years the bin lorry came three times a week almost without fail. For the last eighteen months or so our collections have been more haphazard. Sometimes they come, sometimes they don't. I thought this was because the company had changed, certainly the name on the bins changed, but the town hall website says it's been the same firm since at least 2014 though there was a new contract in December 2017. The non collection isn't, generally, a big deal because the bin is big enough to deal with all the houses it serves for at least a week. When the bin does overflow it's generally because one of us has dumped lots of stuff that shouldn't really be going to landfill.

About a month ago our next door neighbour complained on the WhatsApp group for Culebrón that the bin was overflowing. I joined in and so did the person who's a sort of representative to the town hall from the village. As an upshot I went to the town hall office that deals with environmental stuff to complain directly. They were very pleasant and said they'd give the firm a firm reminder. Obviously nothing much changed.

We've now got into a little game. When I notice that the bin hasn't been emptied I send a message to the town hall's "incidents" number. They thank me for my message and say they will talk to the relevant department. In today's message, for the first time, I added just a whisper of sarcasm. The reply mentioned that I was the only person complaining. I agreed that was probably the case and added that almost certainly the bin lorry company was doing exactly as it should and it was just a slip, an error, a lapse that they repeatedly missed our bin out as they emptied all the rest.

The customary fig leaf

We were in Shropshire last week for a family wedding. We stayed in Shrewsbury for most of the time. I think the last time I was in Shrewsbury was 47 years ago when I went to hunt for trilobites on Wenlock Edge. Shrewsbury looked rather nice with lots of fashionable, at least for we Spanish country bumpkins, shops and eateries. Maggie pointed out an organic veg shop offering two figs for a pound, £1 that is. She noticed them because we have three fig trees in our garden. One is a small tree with green figs and the other two are larger trees that produce the earlier higos and the later brevas. Just as mares and stallions, geldings and fillies are all horses to me then all the things that grow on the three trees are figs.

Now I like figs alright. Often, when we lived in the UK, I'd eat as many as a dozen over the summer. Here, when the fruit is ripe, the birds feast on the ones at the top of the tree and leave us the rest. I think I've eaten three this year. Sometimes other people come and gather a couple of carrier bags full for jams and chutneys but, even then, most of them just fall to the ground. As I'm weeding around and underneath the fig trees the fallen fruit stick tenaciously to the soles of my boots until I have no option but to acknowledge their existence. That means raking them up and carting them away to dump. Maggie joins in this too as she finds the squished fruit on the paths annoying and often brushes them off. I've just been trying to work out how many individual fruits the trees produce. Google provided lots of different estimates of the size of wheelbarrows and the density of the loads they carry. Eventually, though, I decided that a standard load is about 60 kilos. Figs seem to weigh about 50g each so, if Miss Bushell's multiplication and division lessons haven't failed me, that's about 1,200 figs per full barrow. That just about fits with the estimates of fruit production per tree. Since they started to fall I reckon I've dumped about five barrow loads or around 6,000 figs. That's quite a lot of raking and carting.

It's been windy today in Culebrón. It often is. Several of the gusts have been well over 65km/h. When the wind blows it blows lots of the things off their perches but, more than anything, it sets up eddies and dumps seemingly never ending quantities of leaves at strategic points against the house and around the garden. The fig trees are one of the main producers of leaves though the pomegranates, olives, almonds, peaches, apples, quince, nisperos and everything else do their bit too. There were lots of fig leaves today.

As I brushed and raked and estimated how much painful pruning all the trees will need this year I thought vaguely of axes and chain saws but also of the value of the fig crop if I could just get it to Shrewsbury.

Stone walling

Given my remarkable range of abilities you will be surprised to learn that, after university, I found some trouble persuading any employer to give me a job. At one point I was placed on a job creation scheme where, among other things, I was interviewed for Woman's Hour on the BBC Radio 4 (or was it still the Home Service?). Anyway, one of the skills I learned, as well as how to hack down Rhododendrons with a billhook or build steps on Great Langdale, was how to piece together one sort of dry stone wall. Should you ever be on the road from Newby Bridge to Graythwaite the wall just by the entrance to YMCA Lakeside is mine. It was still solid the last time I passed.

Dry stone walling involves building in stone without mortar or any other materials except maybe a bit of soil. UNESCO has classified it as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland feature on the UNESCO list of places that have examples. The UK, of course, doesn't get involved in World Heritage listings, ploughing our own lonely furrow and all that, but if I think of Derbyshire I think of limestone walls striding across the hills and in my birthplace, West Yorkshire, the sandstone walls are an integral part of the landscape.

This last weekend Pinoso hosted the "La X Trobada Pedra Seca" which is probably translates as something like the Tenth Dry Stone Congress. I might have been interested in attending but the publicity was generally presented in Valenciano and I got the distinct impression that outsiders were not very welcome. Over the weekend there were several pictures of dry stone constructions in the local area that I didn't know.

Now one of our party pieces for visitors who like, metaphorically, to wear Rohan trousers, is to take them to see a couple of Cucos and some the Bronze Age stone carvings on La Centenera Hill. Cucos are just stone huts, built from the local field stone, and originally used as shelter by shepherds, herders and other field workers. Nowadays, in bad weather, the farmers generally sit inside their tractor cab, with the climate control and the music on, as they eat their sandwiches but I suppose the idea is the same.

Not knowing the cucos in the press photos sent me out on a hunt and I was amazed - amazed that I'd passed them so many times without noticing them and amazed how easily I found them. As soon as I got to the first one, which I saw from the road, I could see two more. From the third I could see at least one more and so on. Some of them were much more elaborate than the igloo or hut shaped buildings I'd seen before. In fact there were cucos everywhere, I soon got very bored with cucos but that didn't stop me taking a lot of snaps which are in the October 2019 album listed towards the top of this page should you be interested.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored

We went to a couple of things yesterday. One was reassuringly Spanish but the other followed a disturbing new trend.

There was a fundraising event in Novelda. Some local bands, names unknown to us, were playing a mini festival to raise money for victims of the flooding of a few weeks ago. We turned up a bit after, not much after, the advertised start time of 1pm and, as we expected, absolutely nothing was going on. Lots of people with pony tails, black t-shirts and big bellies were faffing around with bits of wire onstage but no bands. Obviously 1pm comes as a surprise every time. Normal, predictable, foreseeable behaviour. The bands kicked off with the normal, predictable and foreseeable twenty minutes to half an hour delay.

The bar was another surprise for the organising team. The surprise was that people arriving might want to buy a drink from the bar. The system was predictable enough. You couldn't pay with cash at the bar you had to buy tickets first - this is a common, but not universal, system for events with temporary staff. Someone known and trusted handles the money so that the the volunteers and the temps are not subjected to temptation. Usually, but not always, it's reasonably obvious that you need to buy tickets. This time there was nothing. The price list on the bar had € signs to help maintain the illusion that cash was acceptable right to the end. The woman in front of me in the queue was clutching her purse; you need tickets said the server and then we all knew. The woman and I walked the couple of hundred metres back to the entrance to buy tickets to swap for beer. Predictably there were no tickets. The organising team, taken unawares, by the sudden arrival of 1pm at 1pm, hadn't thought to arm the ticket selling staff with tickets. The tickets arrived in due course and then we were able to buy them to pay for beer. Now this is all pretty usual. Things starting late. Things suddenly happening. As Spanish as tortilla de patatas. It's sort of re-assuring because it's expected.

Later in the day we went to the theatre. We went to the splendid Concha Segura Theatre in Yecla. Always worth the visit just for the building. We'd booked late, the theatre was busy but not full. We'd reserved a couple of places in a box and nobody else joined us so we had a great view and a comfy spot. Curtain up time was advertised as 8pm. We've done a lot of theatre in our time here and I would estimate that twenty minutes delay is the norm. But not last night. No, the turn off your mobile phone the performance is about to begin announcement, was made before ten past. This is a bit worrying. I was at the theatre on Friday night too, in Pinoso, and Javier was up on stage to welcome everyone around ten past ten just ten minutes after advertised start. For West Side Story down in Alicante about three weeks ago that was nearer on time than usual too. I've only just realised but there's a pattern emerging. Spanish theatre times are closing in on the advertised time. I hope I'm not too old to adapt.

About Catalonia and not about my adventures at all

I presume that you have seen images of the disturbances at Barcelona's el Prat airport or the pictures of Barcelona on fire. As you may imagine it has been big, big news here and it continues to be so. 

I presume you know that it started when the Spanish courts handed out long, long prison sentences to the leaders of the Catalan independence drive at the time of the illegal referendum a couple of years ago. Following the ruling I suspect that Spanish judges spend a lot of time reading law books but have very little idea of what's happening amongst ordinary people. The legal arguments the judges made were absolutely sound, the ruling was coherent but it took little account of the context in which it was being issued. When the Catalan politicians made their choices they knew they were acting illegally and they knew they could end up in prison. Nonetheless, if the judges had chosen to pitch the decision at a different level there may have been much less of a backlash. Instead it would have been pictures of the paroled prisoners hugging their families and heading off for a nice meal. And the ill informed foreign press might not be harping on about political prisoners and suggesting that there is no separation of powers in Spain.

Watching the live feed last night, with the video tinged orange for the burning tyres, cars and rubbish bins and with the subtitles saying that as well as petrol bombs the crowd had been throwing acid at the police lines it struck me that some of the crusties at the front looked like they were there for the fun of it rather than because they had strong political views. Not all of them though. There are obviously lots and lots of ordinary people who live in Catalonia who are genuinely angry and who feel that they need to voice that rage.

I'm not with the Catalans. I think they have handled their campaign badly. Mind you the politicians in Madrid have been equally torpid. The last President of Spain, Mariano Rajoy, will, in my opinion, go down in history as the man who started the loss of Catalonia to Spain.

But I didn't set out to take sides. I have a staunch Valencian nationalist pal who is very happy to tell me about the wrongs done to his people by the Castilians in 1714. Biased balderdash plucked randomly from history to support his completely blind acceptance of the arguments on one side. His discourse just brings home to me how pigheaded the whole Catalan thing is. On the other hand I've heard the "Madrid" side talk equal rubbish and I've never heard anything that hasn't been straight condemnation of the "Catalans" without any suggestions other than playing hard-ball. The sovereignty of Spain is non negotiable they say - they worry about Basques and Galicians. I have no real knowledge of the processes involved but it seems to me that Czechoslovakia handled its internal disputes better than say Yugoslavia or Sudan. At least the first involved fewer bullets and fewer dead.

But that wasn't the point I set out to make. The point is how do you get out of this mess? Watch the Hong Kong Chinese attack a bank and you know that sorting it out involves the central government starting by withdrawing the extradition bill. For the French Yellow Vests the starting point is about taxes and wages. In Ecuador the root is the austerity measures and the mistreatment of the indigenous population. But in Catalonia you tell me. One side says - we want independence. The other side says - you can't have it. Where does that go? Neither side can back down on the basic premise. There is no common ground. There's nothing to talk about. I like strawberry ice cream. I don't. There's no negotiation about other flavours - we're only talking strawberry.

Some Spanish politicians are demanding direct rule of Catalonia from Madrid again. How long for? Do they seriously think that the Catalans are going to put up with that for long. Last time the direct rule and the calling of new elections went hand in hand but try one without the other and watch the bonfires. Send in the army? Consider that you're an ordinary sort of Catalan (and remember that no poll has ever given the separatists the majority) - happy to be Spanish and happy to be Catalan - and suddenly you have a Leopard tank parked in your street. Radicalised or what? The Catalan president has no idea what to do except to spout independence claptrap. He sends the Mossos d'Esquadra (the regional police force) to keep the rioters in check but he has been openly supportive of the mob. After mounting pressure he did finally offer the lightest criticism of the violence but this man is a bigot and not a negotiator. And on the other side there is no unity. If a "Spanish" politician suggests talking to the Catalans they are an independence apologist threatening the sovereignty of Spain. That's something that would quite likely play badly at the ballot box so it's not a good option. Complete deadlock.

The country I came from is in chaos. The country I moved to in chaos. Is it me?

Pulpí is not a pet octopus

Have you seen those geode things at the craft markets? They look a lot like a pebble on the outside but inside they're (sort of) hollow with lots of crystals growing into the space.

The crystals that form inside a geode can be all sorts of minerals. I checked on eBay and I could have bought geodes lined with prasiolite, celestine, calcite, pyrite, barytes or chalcedony though far and away the most common is amethyst, the purple coloured quartz.

A couple of weeks ago we went to see a geode in the now abandoned Mina Rica, Rich Mine, which is in the municipality of Pulpí just on the border between Murcia and Almeria. Between 1840 and 1960 the mine produced iron, lead and a little silver.

This geode is 60 metres underground and it's a little larger than most. In fact it's 8 metres long and just a bit short of 2 metres wide and high. Eight metres is more or less the length of the old London Routemaster RM buses. Inside there are selenite crystals (gypsum to you and me) which are almost transparent. The boast is that you can read a book through the clearest. Most of the crystals are about half a metre but the biggest is over 2 metres long. They are not the largest crystals ever found, that honour belongs to other selenite crystals discovered in an underground cave in Mexico. Those crystals were some 980 metres deep and the space they were in was really hot, too hot for people to bear for more than a few minutes. There was no chance that the cave could be preserved or opened to visitors so it was re-flooded. So Pulpí has the largest crystals that can be visited.

Getting to see the Pulpí crystals required a pre booked appointment and a payment of 22€ per person. For that we got to stroll through the old mine and to have a quick look see inside the geode which we did one at a time; left foot on the rock there, balance on that foot, twist your head to the left and there you are. The guide turned on the lights when you were in place and it was impressive. I stayed longer than most but even then that was probably only around 20 seconds of viewing time.

Oh, and just in case you're wondering the Spanish word for octopus is pulpo - Pulpí, pulpo. How droll.

He loved Big Brother

I didn't sleep particularly well last night. I kept waking up with some half formed Spanish phrase rolling around the empty quarters of my mind before lapsing back into semi unconsciousness. It wasn't the thought of what the Catalans might do after the sentencing of their pro independence politicians today, it was because I was off to the Social Security office.

When I was last in that office, just before Christmas, I was told that my old age pension would include a little from Spain and a lot more from Britain. I started to get money from the UK, on time, in May. I expected a top up from Spain last month.  But it didn't come. Worse than that, trying to find out why not, I found, online, that my health care had been downgraded from a constitutional right as a worker to a bit of a dispensation for foreigners. Given that the UK has been a hotbed of political idiocy for a few years the less I have to depend on anything coming from there and the more I can rely on things directly from here the better.

I was worried about my appointment on two scores. The first, the perennial, is simply being able to present my case in Spanish. The second is that if my Spanish work history, dodgy and short as it is, was going to be disregarded then all those times I had stood out for a legal contract were going to be wasted. I also know that challenging a wrong, unfair or unreasonable bureaucratic decision is a hard and thankless slog.

My appointment was on the dot, no waiting at all. I told the bloke behind the desk that all I wanted to know was where I stood with Social Security - did I have Spanish rights or just foreign ones? We talked for a while, he looked at paperwork and then he said the magic words "If you've paid in to the system here then you have the right to health care". That was all I needed to hear. I was as happy as Larry; anything else was largely irrelevant. By the way apparently the phrase comes from the state of mind of an undefeated Australian 19th century boxer, Larry Foley, on retirement. But then  he made me happier. I was asked why I hadn't claimed the Spanish part of my pension. It seems that going in December hadn't been enough. I should have gone back when I finished working in April. We filled in the paperwork. All I have to do now is wait.

The handshake, as I left , was as warm as a manly, cisgender, handshake can be.

Not the playing fields of Eton

I remember sport, things sporting, at school with a mix of horror and shame. Rugby was shivering on frost hardened mud with my hands down my shorts waiting to be crushed. On my cricketing skills my report noted that I would do better if I didn't run away from the ball. At university I did a fair bit of sailing and canoeing but they never captivated me nor did I show any particular skill for them. Between then and now I have generally avoided anything that involves wearing shorts, Lycra, oddly shaped sunglasses, vests or neoprene; in fact anything that smacks of sexual fetish or sweat.

Yesterday though, for some strange reason I spectated at two sporting events. No neoprene you understand. Street clothes for me and well away from the activity. Just watching.

You know that round here there is a local language, a lot like Catalan. I usually call that language Valenciano. The Spanish that the world speaks is called Castellano. It can become a bit odd at times - why do I say Valenciano, which is a Castellano word, rather than say Valencià, which is the name of the language in the language or just translate directly into English and say Valencian or Castilian? 

The next town down the road from us is called Monòver in Valenciano and Monóvar in Castellano. That's where I went to watch a sort of handball game yesterday. Despite Monòver producing nearly all its publicity in Valenciano I can, normally, get the gist of what they're saying and if I get stuck Google translate set to Catalan bails me out. The poster said 1 Autonòmic de Galotxes de Monòver and showed some people playing a version of handball. Fair enough I thought the game is called galotxes. When I was there, I began to wonder if the courts were the galotxes and the sport was called pilota because on the walls were things like Galotxa Antonio Marhuenda (so something named for Antonio) and Galocha Oficial De la Matinal (La Matinal sounds like a club so this is their official Galocha). It's probably the first time that I've been to something on purpose and not known what I saw!

The games were a bit boring to be honest - it was played by hitting a squishy tennis sized ball over a net rather than against a wall but those reverse shots from the back wall were allowed. As a spectator I had no idea who was winning and who was playing well. There were lots of quite heavy people, plenty of middle aged players, a few women but, not too surprisingly, the fastest and most competitive game I saw was between two teams of fit young men.

The football I've been threatening to do for a while. Someone who Maggie knows plays in the local Brass Band and he and his wife go to the games of Pinoso FC. They said they'd take me along and they were good for their word. The Pinoso team did really well last season and were set for promotion to some sort of league that, whilst it was still pretty low, was good for such a small town. I guessed, though I don't know, that it was a bit like the old Fourth Division. Anyway there was some political argy bargy about funding with the town hall and the team folded. More argy bargy and it reformed but by now their place in the division was gone and they had to start again from scratch in the deepest pits of the lowest leagues - well Grupo XI de la 2ª Regional sounds pretty modest to me.

It's the sort of ground you'd expect. They do well to have grass given our climate. There is a covered stand along the length of the pitch with plastic seats on concrete terraces and otherwise it's all pretty open. No fancy scoreboards, the dugouts are bus shelter style and just 3€ to watch. Season tickets are 10€. Maybe a couple of hundred people watching though I may be being a bit over enthusiastic. Despite the five nil scoreline it was hardly an action packed game but at least I knew what was going on.

That's probably enough sport for a while though.

Dealing appointments

Spaniards are very ID conscious. They carry ID cards and use them all the time. One of the first tasks of anyone moving here is to get a foreigners identification number, the NIE. It's a bit like your own personal VIN. It will turn up on all sorts of documentation from your tax return to your driving licence. It's not difficult to obtain but it does involve form filling, fee paying and going to an immigration office or National Police station. In the past it meant a lot of queuing but nowadays appointments can be booked beforehand, usually online. Appointment systems are now used by nearly every agency including traffic, social security, land registry, employment and immigration.

Europeans from the European Union have more rights in Spain that someone from Senegal or the US. We're also able to sidestep some of the things that we should do from tax registration to driving licence swapping. Brexit will put us on a par with the Senegalese and Americans so there has been a bit of a rush of Britons trying to put their administrative paperwork in order before that happens. There are Britons all over Spain but most of we pinker and older ones live in Alicante and Malaga provinces or on the Balearics and Canaries. People began to have problems getting citas previas, appointments, in these areas and the presumption was that it was sheer weight of numbers.

My paperwork is, basically, in order. I didn't need to run off for a residency certificate or a driving licence because I already had them. I also felt pretty smug about my healthcare. Then the Social Security people turned down my application to renew my European Health Card. This was not good, I was pretty sure I had health cover because of my status as an ex-worker but it now looks as though it's a concession to a long term resident.

Pension systems all over Europe are creaking and soon we'll all be to working till we drop. Not me though, I'm getting money already. I have enough time worked in the UK and Spain to claim a full pension. Last December the bloke in the Social Security Office told me that I would get a proportion from both countries though my Spanish State Pension wouldn't become due till four months after my UK pension. I've just passed that date. Not a dicky bird though. So, all of a sudden I'm concerned that my health cover is not as it was and maybe I'm not going to get a Spanish pension. I could have to depend on the UK and with Brexit wobbling towards us that's bad. I decided I needed an appointment to talk to someone about my status. I went online to book an appointment - six weeks! This was Social security not Immigration. Why the wait?

Yesterday morning I heard on the radio that there was a demonstration planned outside Extranjeria, the Immigration office, in Madrid to protest the lack of appointments. If, as a newcomer, you can't get an appointment and you can't sort out your ID card or number then you won't be able to get a job or rent a flat or even take on a mobile phone contract. Indeed, technically, some people could be deported. I delved a little deeper and found that all the offices are backed up, not just the ones besieged by Brits, mainly due to staff shortages. Some of that is cuts but apparently it's also because we still have a caretaker government so things that need parliamentary approval, like taking on new government workers, are not happening. And it's not just Immigration there are problems with Traffic and Passports and lots of other agencies.

But the thing that really surprised me about this story was that some people have found a way to take advantage of this situation. I found several complaints about "mafias" operating in the appointments game. I'm not sure how - maybe by simply transporting people to areas where there are appointments are available, maybe by block booking appointments and then selling them on in ticket tout style but it looks as though, as usual, poor people are being robbed by the unscrupulous.

I don't suppose we Britons will generally fall into the hands on mini gangsters but I do wonder what will happen when Brexit actually happens and nearly 400,000 Britons start looking for an appointment to get new ID cards.

Señor Martos and us

We went to see Raphael last night. For those of you who don't know who or what Raphael is this is what Wikipedia has to say about him:

"Miguel Rafael Martos Sánchez, born May 5, 1943 in Linares, Spain, usually simply referred to as Raphael, is a worldwide acclaimed Spanish singer and television, film and theatre actor. A pioneer of modern Spanish music, he is considered a major influence in having opened the door and paving the way to the flood of Spanish singers that followed on the wake of his enormous success."

This is something like an English person going to see Cliff Richard. Incredibly famous at one time, still very popular with the faithful and even today most young people would still recognise the name.

I always think there are three things about seeing a band or a singer. There's the show, the presence, then there's the content, the music and finally there's the atmosphere; the chemistry between audience and performer.

I'll use old bands as examples. Hundreds of years ago I saw Bruce Springsteen (actually it was thirty four years ago in Roundhay Park). Ten years before that I'd seen the Rubettes. Presuming that you're of a similar mind to me you think that Bruce is a tad better musician than the Rubettes but as performers, working the crowd, they were both excellent. Van Morrison is also musically superior to the Rubettes, but, as a performer, he has about as much presence (from the one time I've seen him) as a telegraph pole. And then there's the Rod Stewart and Rolling Stones type performance where the audience does as much to make the show enjoyable as the performers.

I was expecting Raphael to be poor musically - he's old, his voice isn't what it was and he couldn't rely on me singing along, getting carried away with the event, because I only know a couple of his songs. I was expecting him to be a great showman, working the audience, and I expected him to get the crowd going. I was wrong of course. Musically he did OK (plenty of provisos but not bad at all for a 76 year old). Crowd wise the whole thing was spectacular - the crowd roared and swayed and chanted and danced. Performer wise he was a huge disappointment. Hardly a word spoken to the audience - no anecdotes, no references to the greatness of Murcia, no topicality.

When I told people I was going to see him nobody said "who?" though several said "why?". The answer is obvious. I can now say I've seen Raphael.

Deflated

Last year we couldn't go to Yecla, to the Jazz Festival. We went to St Petersburg instead. Tough call - eighth largest town in Murcia or the jewel of Tsarist Russia.

We went to Yecla in 2015, 2016 and 2017 though. Absolutely cracking event, usually five nights. The bands are often really good - good enough to cost money with Amazon later. And the acts are introduced by one of the wise, avuncular Radio 3 DJs which adds to the fun. Even better it was free and, because it was free, you could sit where you wanted. Given that the Concha Segura is all red velvet and gilt choosing between stalls, boxes and the dress circle is a difficult but pleasurable call. We even tried the Gods one year. All we had to do was to turn up early enough to get the full choice.

The Festival started yesterday but Lord Grantham, Maggie Smith and the rest won out. Dubbed versions are fine but the once a week English language version film is better. Downton Abbey in Spanish? Hardly!

Just before we set off for Yecla tonight Maggie asked if I'd noticed that the Festival was no longer free. I hadn't. Tickets were 3€. We've never had any problem finding a seat when it was free even when we arrived close to kick off so we thought that, by arriving early, half an hour before curtain up, we'd be fine with the, new to us, ticketing system.

There weren't any tickets left. I'm away tomorrow, we have another concert on Friday, "Anything for Saturday?," we asked. Nothing. So no Yecla Jazz festival for us this year.

Sad. And a note in my calendar to buy early next year.

The Home Counties

Maggie has a plan for a bit of a rebuild of our house. Demolition and rebuild apart there is also a long list of ancillary jobs. One of those is putting a sliding door between the kitchen and living room. Maggie has something specific in her mind's eye, something rustic, something wooden, and a visit to the Fundación Casa Pintada in Mula yesterday made her wonder about reclaimed doors.

I remembered that we'd been to a market where they had a supply of antique doors. We misremembered (something that seems to happen more and more frequently) the name of the market and ended up going to a place called el Mercadillo el Zoco in Algorfa rather than the Mercadillo el Moncayo in Guardamar.

I've been here, in Spain, a while. It's not new to me, not novel, but it still takes me by surprise when we go somewhere public and Britons apparently outnumber Spaniards. It can happen in bars, in housing estates, and even in towns. It happened today. Maggie was sure that there were lots of Belgians, Dutch, Germans and French at the market, which is almost certainly true, but there was no doubt that the lingua franca was English, not Spanish. Also, in my opinion, the overriding presence was British.

Knobs and knockers

I bought a new car yesterday evening. I mean new new. Pensions mean I have an income. Pensions mean I can get finance.

The registration letter has just flipped over from K to L and my new SEAT Arona has an L registration. There can only be about 23,382 cars in front of mine in Spain with that registration letter. So far I haven't seen another on the road.

I parked the Mini outside the dealer and drove away without saying goodbye after nearly 220,000 kilometres or around 137,000 miles together. The SEAT had just 10kms on the clock. They'd put a red cover over it. As though there would be champagne and stuff. It wasn't like that. I sat in the drivers seat whilst Juan Carlos tapped the screen where the radio should be to tell me that this activates the automatic parking and that is the on/off for the mirror blind spot warning and so on. He wanted to know what colour I wanted the ambient lighting! I remember my mum being dead pleased that her Ford Prefect had a heater and rubber mats - it's a long way from there to mood lighting in the doors. At least the Arona still has some things I understand like the steering wheel and a normal six speed gear arrangement. It even has a handbrake lever and not just a switch. I suspect there will be hours of fun trying to work out the park assist, lane deviation warning and even how to work the music system

I drove it home stopping off at Lidl to buy some brandy. It seemed fine, a bit sluggish maybe, the car, not the brandy. Maggie came out of the house to wave us home.

Shine on you crazy diamond

For years and years I used Brylcreem. Not a lot you understand but some. More like those 1970s adverts about a little dab of Brylcreem on your hair giving you the Brylcreem bounce. Nonetheless, as we entered the 21st century it became more and more difficult to find. Not impossible but difficult.

Then I moved to Spain. No RAF here, no Brylcreem back story. I asked people to bring it in their hand luggage but the terror bombers and HM Revenue and Customs put paid to that.

But luck was with me. Pinoso is a bit backwoods, a bit short on the latest trends. Juanjo had some in his shop. It said Ryelliss, Abrillantador del Cabello - hair brightener is one possible translation. It makes your hair shine is the idea. It was brilliantine. Then I realised that the biggest supermarket chain in Spain carried it too. So Juanjo and Mercadona kept my hair in place and shiny for years without Brylcreem.

There was none in Mercadona last time, Juanjo has none. Online everyone is out of stock. I can only assume that the various gels and waxes have done for Ryelliss. It's a shame. But the game is still on. Amazon UK has a supplier of Brylcreem and they'll deliver to Spain.

The rain saves a soggy post

I started to write a blog earlier this week. I didn't post it because it was boring. That's not going to stop me now though. Here it is.

"Leaves are swirling around in eddies outside our front door. More sweeping. It's what I expect. September has come, the weeds have started to grow again, there are piles of rotting figs under the trees. Where the branches overhang the path it is painted purple with gravity squashed fruit. The flies are out in squadrons and the crickets have stopped singing. Out in the vineyards the tractors and grape harvesters are doing their stuff and the air smells of sweet fermenting wine. Temperatures have dropped considerably and before setting the washing machine going I need to scan the sky to decide whether it will be a good drying day or not. This morning I couldn't even sit outside to read with my second mug of tea because it was a bit nippy and a bit blowy. The one good thing about the hot weather going away is that everyone stops moaning on about how it's unbearable and how did people manage without air conditioning ad nauseum and I can go back to wearing shoes and socks and jeans without lots of stupid comments.

When I was at school, sometime shortly after the wheel was invented, my headteacher often said that whilst  most of the world had a climate the UK had weather. It's one of the few things that the bullying fathead said that I would not disagree with. In England, in August, one day can be sunny and the next can be cool and wet. It's not like that here. Obviously the weather can change, a cold front can come in or we can find ourselves in a heatwave and time after time we have tremendous storms with torrential rain or hailstones the size of Cadbury's Creme Eggs but, in general, we get the same sort of weather for days and days, and sometimes weeks and weeks, on end. It makes it easy to predict. It will be hot and dry in late June and all through July. August will be hot to start and cooler later and by September the cooling will be noticeable. Although most days from November to February will be sunny with bright blue skies we'll be cold in the house. And March will be a terrible disappointment, temperature wise, and we'll have to wait for the official Spring before we can change to lighter bedclothes".

That's as far as I got. Now to start again. Our yard is awash, the garden looks like a lake, there is water everywhere. The kitchen floor is a pattern of muddy cat paw marks. Lots of schools, including the Pinoso ones, were closed today because of the threat of rain. It has been wet, the rain has been heavy but we've been lucky.  So far as I know, it's not been catastrophic locally. Close at hand though it has; utter devastation. Torrents of water flowing in and out of people's houses. People killed in Caudete (not far away) when their car was washed away with them in it, two more killed further South, Orihuela cut off, both local airports under water and big towns like Cartagena and Murcia with serious problems.

As I was checking closed windows this morning Maggie made a throwaway comment "Well, it'll soon be back to being warm again, we're not done with the decent weather yet!"

You see she agrees with that long dead headmaster too!

Slippery when wet

Spaniards seem to like napkins more than Britons. Now I'm not trying to say that we Britons don't like napkins or that there is something intrinsically right or wrong about using napkins. Go into a British restaurant and there will be napkins. They give you piles of them in McDonald's because, as the bun disintegrates, you will end up with a palmful of slimy hamburger patty, lettuce and ketchup and you will need them to clean up. If my family home was anything to go by the English use them only when we are being a bit posh; Christmas or when friends came to dinner. Normally though, especially at home, no serviettes, no napkins. Spaniards on the other hand put napkins out as naturally as they put out the cutlery and bread when they are setting the table and there is no Spanish restaurant, bar, barbecue, picnic or home without them.

Order a beer in a Spanish bar and you probably won't get a beer mat - sometimes yes and more and more frequently but not usually. The beer on the other hand will be cold so water will condense out on the glass and, after a while there will be a little puddle of water on the bar or table. But fear not, there will be a handy dispenser full of serviettes and you will be able to mop up the liquid. Only you won't or at least you couldn't but more and more you can.

I've just realised, pushed by an article that I read in el País, that it's ages since I've seen the sort of napkins that were everywhere in Spain at one time. They were a bit like the old Izal hard toilet paper and about the same sheet size too. They usually had a pattern around the outside in blue or red - sometimes chains, sometimes rhomboids, sometimes aeroplanes and the name of the bar in the middle. They came in spring loaded dispensers that were called miniservis and the serviettes were called servilletas zigzag (or sulphite glazed paper napkins to anyone in the trade). When you tried to pull out one you would be rewarded tenfold. No matter though because they actually seemed to repel liquid rather than to soak it up so you needed the whole ten to redistribute your puddle. It was similar if you were eating tapas with your fingers. By the time you'd finished you would have a whole pile of these sodden, grease, oil or sauce covered bits of paper piled alongside your plate.

Nowadays the normal serviettes are more like Andrex than Izal. This struck me as I was pulling an effectively absorbent black napkin from the little box in front of me in a bar the other day. They were held in place by a daintily painted pebble. Very pretty. Not as trendy though as the unbleached yellowish napkins that you get in the gastrobars on the coast or in big cities. There was, though, one advantage to the old slippery sided napkins. When they were put under food on a plate, like a sandwich or a croquette, they acted like grease-proof paper forming an effective non stick barrier between plate and food whereas the new sort tend to sort of attach themselves to your food in a most unpleasant way.

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I have used the terms serviette and napkin interchangeably. I thought, for sixty four years, that napkins were cloth and serviettes paper but, in checking for this blog post I found that although there used to be some distinction in the way distant past that hasn't been the case for a few hundred years.

How much?

My foot hurts. It's been a bit of a problem since I made the wrong choice of footwear for wandering around the Benicassim Festival site. The blisters were very big but that was ages ago now and, although the blisters are long gone, my heel still hurts. More worryingly it's getting worse rather than better.

I thought strapping it up or cushioning the heel may help. I went to the chemist and wandered around the displays. I found a couple of silicone heel cushions and, according to the box, they were just what I needed. Then I bought some lint, twenty individually wrapped pads, and a roll of sticking plaster. Total price 23.80€. Of that nearly 12€ was for the lint. Bit of a shock.

To be honest it wasn't a surprise. I just didn't like it. For years I've thought that the stuff they advertise on the telly that you have to buy from pharmacies (and lots of medical stuff can only be bought at pharmacies) is exorbitantly priced. You know the stuff; the spray for your aching knee which means you finish the marathon, the capsules that stop your nose running so you can be feted by your work colleagues for such a brilliant presentation or the haemorrhoid cream that allows you to throw away that blow up cushion. For all I know things may be equally expensive in the UK but I don't remember any angst the last time I bought lint or a roll of plaster in Huntingdon.

It's not the same for prescription medicine. My experience with prescribed medication is that it's affordable. The amount you have to pay depends on your financial and medical situation. Lots of people with chronic problems or work related injuries pay nothing whilst pensioners pay 10% or 60% depending on their income and they are also protected by monthly caps. Workers pay 40%, 50% or 60% of the actual cost of the medicine with no caps or limits.

Every now and again, I hear or read that the average Spanish salary is such and such an amount and it always makes me guffaw. At the moment they say it's just a bit short of 27,000€. I can only surmise that there must be a lot of very well paid Spaniards balancing out the miserly Spanish salaries I'm aware of.

Last week though I heard something that sounded much more realistic. It said that the most frequent salary (the sort of pay packet that most people get) in Spain is around 16,500€. When I went checking the most recent figure said that is now nearly 17,000€ year. Take off the tax and whatever and that translates to somewhere around 1,000€ per month take home pay.

You will be surprised to hear that I just happen to know the salary scales for teachers working in language academies. Non school teachers are unusual because their working week is shorter (34 hours) and they have longer holidays (10 weeks) in a country where a 40 hour week and 4 weeks holiday are still very common. Anyway the highest salary for that sort of teaching work is a bit under 15,000€. I never had an employer who paid the full rate but that's another story.

Your average Spaniard on that most frequent salary, or a language school teacher, paying rent or a mortgage might have to bind their injured foot with old rags so maybe I should think myself lucky!

Don't it always go to show

Maggie and I may be among the last few people in the world who are awoken by a clock radio alarm. A thirty year old clock radio at that. The wake up programme is Hoy empieza todo on Radio 3, a contemporary culture and music station. We don't listen for long, even if we're very slothful it will only be about twenty minutes though the programme stays on in the background.

I change the bedclothes on Friday. As I fought with the duvet cover the main presenter on the programme was talking to the organisers of a "pop" festival that runs in Miranda de Ebro in Burgos about 700km from home. They said that they were giving away a package of two tickets, travel and accommodation for the festival and to enter all you had to do was to make a comment on their Twitter account.

Now I've never quite mastered Twitter but, eventually I posted something as to why I wanted to go. I said I was old (and may die before the next one), because I was poor (and I wouldn't be able to afford to go with my own resources) and because I was English so that understanding anything around me was more or less impossible. I added that one of my delights was complaining and that at a festival at two in the morning I could complain mightily about my aching back.

Yesterday evening someone from the programme sent me a message via Twitter and asked whether I would go to the festival if I won. The messages went back and forth in very dodgy Spanish on one side but the last message said "Me das un email y un teléfono para gestionarlo todo?" - can you give me an email address and a telephone number so that I can arrange it all.

I presumed that I had just won something. I broke out the gin that I'd promised myself I wouldn't drink.

This morning, three minutes before the clock radio burst into life, I got another Twitter message. "Lo siento Chris, al final en la última ronda no os ha tocado! Quizás el año que viene." Sorry Chris, in the end, in the last, round you didn't win. Maybe next year.

Very disappointing.

A clean pair of heels

There's a shoe museum in Elda. You have to ring a bell to get in. They have some very odd (sic) shoes. Elche has hundreds of shoe factories. Nowadays lots of them have signs with Chinese script characters over the door but the product still carries the label "Made in Spain."

If Elda and Elche are the most important centres this area, in general, has a tradition of shoes and leather goods. The tiny village of Chinorlet about 3km from us has a factory that makes handbags. Our next door neighbour has a company that produces bows and buckles and the like to stick on leather goods.

Pinoso too has a history of shoe making.  In the middle of town there is a small square dedicated to the shoemakers, (just like there are places dedicated to marble and to wine the other big industries of Pinoso). A local firm, Pinoso's, always has a stand at the celebration of the town's identity, the Villazgo celebrations, where you can don an apron and pose with a shoe last looking like you're doing something very footwear. When I taught one of my students said that her family had a firm that produced a part of the soles for shoes and another was a sort of shoe broker selling designs overseas. Just beside the library, on one of the principal streets of the town, there is an anonymous building which always attracts my attention when I walk by because the powerful smell of epoxy resin that issues from its open window. I have no idea what they are up to but unless they are the glue sniffing unaccompanied minors that the far right party Vox is always going on about then it's something shoe related.

So Pinoso is still a shoemaking town. I don't quite know where the factories are though. I had a vague idea there was one near the sports centre, Maggie thought so too, and maybe on the industrial estate. I asked a Spaniard I know who seems to know almost anyone local over a certain age. He wasn't quite sure where the companies were either - maybe on the industrial estate he said but he also wondered if it were more backstreet workshops than big factories. I asked if he thought a factory on the corner of Calderón de la Barca and Camino del Prado was shoe related - "Could be," was the response.

Sometimes it's amazing what you don't know even after ages and ages even if you're home grown.

Dancing the night away

We've just had a bit of a debate about where we were going to go this evening. The wine harvest fiesta in Jumilla is in full swing and tonight they have a Queen tribute band. Down in La Romana there's a Moors and Christians parade with music and bull running later. Chinorlet, the nearest village to Culebrón, is also partying for the weekend. Tonight they have a children's parade and then a band. In fact, within 45 minutes maximum travelling time we could go to Elche, Aspe, Cañada del Trigo or Fortuna instead. Oh, I nearly forgot and one of the outlying villages of Pinoso, Paredón, is at it too. In fact August 15th, a bank holiday for the Assumption of Mary, is the day when there are more fiestas in Spain than on any other day, the official count is more than 1,000.

Jumilla is probably our first choice but the tribute band are not due on till half past eleven which means a start nearer midnight in reality. My guess is we wouldn't be home till maybe 2.30 and we're a bit old to miss out on our nightly Horlicks. Maybe we should go to the less exciting La Romana and pop in to see the live band in Chinorlet at eleven? Given the inevitable late starts we'd still be home by around one which would leave time for a soothing hot beverage before bed.

The fiesta programmes reminded me of the importance of music in these events and of one sort of music in particular. The band on in Chinorlet (Permanent population 192) is called Kalima, last night in Caballusa (where just four families live all year round) there was a singer called Leandro. At the recent Pinoso fiestas (the official population of Pinoso is only just over 7,600) there were several bands. We did go to see the top twenty band Dvicio but we missed most of the rest including Trio Amanacer, Me and the Reptiles, Grupo Zafiro and Orquesta Athenas. We could make amends for missing Athenas by seeing them in La Romana tomorrow. La Romana has another orquesta, Orquesta Shakara the day after.

Spain, obviously enough, has every sort of musical grouping you can imagine. There are individual musicians doing the rounds, there are groups that do rock or pop or indie or grime, there are brass bands, string quartets, opera singers backed by pianists and flautists, there are folk groups, bagpipe bands, symphony orchestras, Colombian Cumbia groups, Mexican Mariachis and lots of Brazilian Samba bands to name but a fraction of the styles. There is, though, a species of band that exists predominantly to do fiestas and verbenas (verbena is a loose term but it usually means a bar, food, dance and music area which constitutes part of a larger, city wide fiesta) and that's the orquesta. Guess the English translation.

The orchestras have a simple enough mission - they have to ensure that everyone from the smallest child, to the least nimble grandma and even the sulky teenagers get up and dance. They fulfil their mission with a mixture of timeless classics and this summer's hits. It's a while since I've seen one to be honest but they have a style which is sort of trashy and glamorous at the same time. The men often have a bit of a belly whilst the women wear tight clothes with sequins and short skirts or shorts. Obviously that's a massive over-generalisation - some of the men are bald and wear sequins too! The repertoire is international though Spanish hits predominate even if they were originally sung by foreigners like Shakira or Luis Fonsi. I've just read four different lists of "indispensable" songs for orquestas and, apart from the incredibly successful and timeless Paso Doble tune Paquito El Chocolatero there wasn't a single song that was present in every list. That doesn't mean that all the lists weren't very similar with the same styles and names turning up again and again. A very danceable style called reggaeton was definitely over represented and Rosalía, the fusion flamenco/pop artist seemed big this year too.

Anyway, whilst I've been typing we've decided and it's nearly time to go. Jumilla it is and Queen  - so songs that we'll know. No Soldadito Marinero, Princesas, No rompas más, Cannabis or A quién le importa to add to my cultural education this evening then.