And I worked in Community Education for years

Yesterday I went to see the 32nd Encuentro de Cuadrillas in Patiño, an area of Murcia City. Cuadrillas are musical groups made up of between 15 and 20 people. The programme told me that Cuadrillas, are typical of the Murcia Region and first made their appearance during the 17th Century to provide music at many of the annual round of rites and festivals. It goes on to talk about the variety of musical styles and the range of instruments used (many of which I presume are not in common use) and how the repertoire has been handed down orally from generation to generation.

It's not the first time that I've seen Barandillas. On the last Sunday of January in Barranda, a satellite village of Caravaca de la Cruz, they have a Fiesta of Barandillas. I've been there three times and it has always been gloriously sunny. The groups take up positions throughout the village centre so that you can watch one group for a while and then move on to the next. There's also a big market and the town is packed to the gunwales with people.

So, the description of Patiño said something about hot chocolate and churros (pastries) to start, then a mass before the groups performed on a central stage. There was also the mention of "jam sessions" along one of the town's streets. The added incentive was that there was free food at lunchtime. Free pelotas made and given away by the good citizens (nearly all women) of Patiño. Pelotas are meatballs. It's a name that means different things in different areas; basically they are all meatballs but, that said, each town and village, possibly each cook, produces a quite distinct product. In this case the meatballs are quite small and, apparently, made from turkey. The broth that accompanies them is as important as the meatballs themselves. In Pinoso we have meatballs too which are called faseguras (in Valenciano) and relleno (in Castellano) but I think they are made from pork and sausage meat (though I could be wrong).

Anyway. So I'm expecting a central stage but music all over the place. In fact it was just the Cuadrillas on stage, one after another, with chairs for the audience. At the front, between the chairs and the stage, there was room for people to dance and lots of people had brought castanets to click along. There may have been more music on the streets in the afternoon but I cleared off after grabbing my free food so it hadn't happened by a little after 3.30 pm when I left.

I was writing this up in my diary this morning and I wrote that it hadn't been as good as I'd expected. It was a bit of a revelation because, thinking about it, the event in Barranda, with the musicians surrounded by people, with the spontaneous dancing along the streets, with music on every corner has the advantage of being much more participative, much more community like. The Patiño event had performers to be watched and listened to (and maybe danced to) but it was nowhere near as inclusive. Thinking about it all the events I enjoy most are inclusive ones. In some of those the participation is simply as a crowd but where the crowd is so close to the action as to be a part of it and there are others, like the ofrendas, the flower offerings, and the romerias (short distance pilgrimages) where the participants are the event.

I still bought a pullover

A pal tells me that Ralph Lauren clothes are, generally, badly made and hugely overpriced. I don't care really. In my time I've liked, and bought, a fair few bits of Ralph but I don't think I've ever paid full price. Outlet Centres and Sales have provided all of them. I know I shouldn't be sucked in by the label thing but in the 80s I learned the habit and I've never altogether lost it. True nowadays I buy more clothing at Primark and Carrefour than I do from Ted Baker but I still like labels.

In Spain the January Sales used to be proper sales. I vividly remember sorting through the racks in Corte Inglés where Oprah sized high waist blue denim Calvin Klein's rubbed shoulders with hipster waisted black Armani's that would be a size challenge even for Evanna Lynch. Of course it was only then that I realised I was in the women's section but you get the idea. I still think back to a really nice pair of black Polo jeans that I got for 19€ when we lived in Cartagena.

It's ages since The Sales were deregulated in Spain. There are discounts all the time now, especially online, but old habits die hard and I usually head down to Corte Inglés (the still impressive chain of department stores) sometime after Christmas. We went yesterday. Maggie said something that I realised was absolutely true. It's got 50% off she said but it's still too expensive. Absolutely right - I liked a jacket but even at 140€ it was hardly cheap. At its original 280€ it was simply overpriced. Discounts everywhere in the shop but no real bargains.

Once upon a time sales were about getting rid of the ends of lines, the funny sizes, that colour that nobody wanted, the craze that was no longer fashionable. Nowadays, with the big retailers, everything just gets discounted for a period so the January Sales are no longer the upmarket jumble sale that they once were. Shame really.

I think there was a point when I started to write

One of the films we've seen recently is called Legado en los huesos, Legacy in the bones. It's a Spanish film, the second in a series of three based on trilogy of crime books set in Navarre with a woman detective, from the regional police force, as the key character.

Our nearest cinemas are just metres apart in Petrer about 25kms from Culebrón. In the Cinesmax we tend to go and see Spanish language films and films which have been dubbed into Spanish from languages other than English; French, Brazilian, Chinese etc. In the Yelmo, where, for the past couple of years they've had one performance of films every Tuesday (and some Thursdays), in their original language with subs in Spanish, we usually see English language films. Hearing Ian McKellen or Margot Robbie (and legions of others) sound like themselves rather than some dubbing actor from Pozuelo de Alarcón is a joy.

Now back with Legado de los huesos; I heard the principal actor from the film, Marta Etura, talking in a radio interview. Her character is supposed to be married to a North American, James, who speaks English. Consequently from time to time, in the film, Marta speaks in English. An English that was very laboured and heavily accented. During the radio interview she was complimented on her English in the film. Her on screen husband, Colin McFarlane, speaks some Spanish during the film and that is equally laboured and heavily accented. In the books which gave rise to the film and which I'm reading, James has no trouble with keeping up his end in the Spanish conversations in the family home. His use of the subjunctive has me in awe.

Last night we were going to see the new Clint Eastwood directed film Richard Jewell before we realised that with better planning we could see Mujercitas, Little Women, on Tuesday and still catch Richard Jewell on Thursday. So when Little Women starts it's in Spanish. To be absolutely honest I didn't notice for a moment or two but then I did just as the audience started to grumble, people went to tell the cinema staff and the film, was stopped. A woman came in and told us, in Spanish, that for technical reasons the film couldn't be shown in English and we were offered free tickets, refunds and the like. There was quite a lot of confusion as the generally British audience didn't know what was being said too them. We chose to stay as did the two Spanish families. English language films are not as good in Spanish and sometimes I get lost but we don't, usually, have a problem with understanding a dubbed Hollywood film. It's harder to understand Spanish films and it's hardest when the film is from South America because the Spanish in both is more idiomatic and less clear.

And that was it really. There was some vague point about the trickiness of bilingualism but I seem to have lost the thread so that will have to do.

You just never know how things will pan out

On April 30th 1987 I was on holiday and in a bar. The bar was called the Bar Lennon just up by la Estación del Norte railway station in Valencia. Spain was still very new to me and, as I drank a beer at the bar my partner of the time and I talked about the odd looking drinks behind the counter. The barman was one of those nosy, talk to you types. "It's pacharán," he said, in nearly English. Zoco pacharán in fact, a sloe-flavoured liqueur though we didn't know that then. The drawing on the label looked like blackcurrants. Jaime, for that was his name, seemed to be keen on talking to us and singing along to the European Anthem. He, and his three pals who were in the bar, invited us to the beach the next day which just happened to be a Bank Holiday. We went to the arranged meeting spot not expecting them to turn up but they did and we went to the beach at el Saler. Not the obvious parts of the beach but to the bit that the locals know and the tourists don't. A beach that involved a trek. I have a diary entry that says there were 18 of us that day, all of us twenty and thirty somethings, and several of our number quickly divested themselves of kit and started doing what Spaniards do on beaches - talking, eating and drinking. It was a good day.

Monday of this week was the last day of Christmas in Spain, a Bank Holiday. The Three Kings had delivered their gifts the night before and people were about to have their last seasonal meal for a while with plenty of that typical cake, the roscón de Reyes. Pepa, who had also been in the bar all those years ago, and Jaime came to see us. It's been a bit intermittent over the years but we've never lost touch. Maggie and I had run out of food - no beer, no bread, so we took them over to Eduardo's Restaurant in Culebrón and he did us proud. Good food which allowed us to do what Spaniards do in restaurants - talk, eat and drink. It was a good day.

Names and seasonal stuff

Today and tomorrow are the days to eat roscón, roscón de Reyes. I've written about it several times before, check this link for earlier blog posts. So no real detail this time. It's a bit like a big doughnut, a cake to be eaten around epiphany, when the Three Kings, The Three Wise Men, allegedly arrived with their odd gifts for the baby Jesus - not a Scalextric American Police Chase nor a Linkimals Smooth Moves Sloth in sight but a couple of tree resin extracts and, always useful, gold.

I've bought roscones lots of times. Buy them from a cake shop, made to order, and they cost an arm and a leg, well around 25€ which is pretty expensive for a cake. In supermarkets the price varies a lot. You can get some for five or six euros but the one I'd seen judged as the best for this year was from one of the low price supermarket chains, Día. I was expecting to pay around 10€ but I couldn't find one. I went back and forth to our local branch five times over three days and I tried another branch in another town. They said they had sold out and were waiting for deliveries. No success cakewise.

From my experience of a couple of countries I am going to extrapolate. Once upon a time, in the UK, to talk about a vacuum cleaner you would say Hoover, to describe a vacuum flask it was a Thermos, sticking plasters were Elastoplasts, Armco for the crash barriers, Jacuzzi for the hot tub baths etc. In the same way similar things and their brands may be well known in different countries whilst others are world brands. I know very little about guns but I think that British soldiers of my dad's generation used Lee Enfield rifles, and that British soldiers on the streets of Northern Ireland used something called an SLR. I suspect that is peculiarly British knowledge whilst the "Soviet" AK-47 Kalashnikov and the US Americans, M14 rifle are so well known as to be almost cliches. For some strange reason I know that the famous Spanish rifle is called a CETME.

Now a little while ago I heard someone say they were going to buy some Chirucas. I thought it was a word I didn't know but it turns out to be a trade name for a brand of Spanish boot - the sort that hunters or mountaineers might use. I decided that I could be Spanish minded and link this idea of doing the Camino with buying something intrinsically Spanish. It turned out that Chirucas and I are not a match made in heaven. The 44 is too tight, the 45 is floppy. Also, very unsatisfactorily, the label inside the model I liked said, in English, Made in Vietnam. No success bootswise.

For some reason Madrid doesn't load a bunch of fireworks skyward on New Year's Eve. There are plenty of New Year traditions though. One of the main ones is eating grapes. Again I've written about this so check it out here if you're interested. Anyway we were at a party on New year's Eve. The house we were in usually watches platform based telly - Netflix, Amazon Prime etc. - rather than broadcast stuff. For a live event though it needed to be broadcast telly. The two main choices were the state broadcaster who broadcast from in front of the most famous clock in the Puerta del Sol Spain in Madrid and a private station which now has a tradition of being hosted by a team which includes a woman in a revealing "dress". As the most technically adept person in the house struggled to fight past the adverts and cookie warnings to connect his laptop to the telly in time for the midnight chimes we missed the critical moment. We had no chance to eat our grapes. New Year was declared at about 00:02 hrs. by someone in the room. No success grapewise.

Looking forward to a torchlight procession as part of the Kings parade tonight though.

The back of beyond

Jesús, a pal, said to me the other day that he and his chums consider that there are three classes of "friends" - amigos, conocidos and reconocidos. Amigos are friends, proper friends, the ones you know well and may even lend you money if you were in a scrape. Conocidos are the ones you might drink or eat with and with whom you can have an extended and detailed conversation. Finally the reconocidos are the people that you vaguely know - the people you nod at in the street and who get a description rather than a name when mentioning them.

The official lists say that 7,966 people now live in Pinoso. Those same figures say that if we were to corral a representative sample of 100 people from the streets of Pinoso then 42 would have been born here, another 25 would have been born in Alicante province and another 18 in some other region of Spain. That would mean that something like 15 people in the sample would be foreigners. The biggest group of foreigners, by far, in Pinoso, are British. If I've got my sums right nearly 7 people from our sample would be Brits. Obviously there are stacks more Britons in Torrevieja, or Madrid, than there are in Pinoso but, as a percentage of the total population Pinoso ranks as the municipality with the fifth highest ratio of foreigners to home grown stock. Who knows, that may be why Vox (a right wing political party) made such a strong showing in the last General Election in Pinoso.

Considering that Pinoso is so small we have one surprisingly trendy clothes shop. Now I'm not but, for one reason or another I ended up in the shop on New Year's Eve. A couple of young women were in the shop gearing up for partying later that evening. I'd taught one of them a little English and the other works in a bar I frequent. The bloke in the shop was laughing and joking with them as he served. It was obvious he knew them. He knows me too, well enough to nod in the street at least.

In the local theatre just yesterday the man on the box office nodded in vague recognition before he sold us our tickets. Inside the theatre we nodded, smiled and waved in this and that direction and even had a couple of conversations with people; fleeting and superficial conversations in both Spanish and English but conversations nonetheless. On stage and in the audience there were other people we half knew and there were others who are small town celebrities - the bloke who organises the singing group, the woman from the cancer association, the local rally driver  - butchers, bakers and candle stick makers. All around people were greeting and being greeted.

In the Post Office today I asked who was last in the queue and exchanged a few words with the person who answered. He later had a conversation with a woman who was wearing a post office uniform. As she left the post office worker shouted across to Enrique, the chap who works behind the post office counter and who always calls me by name, "take care of him, he's my nephew". We all tittered.

There's an old woman who wanders the streets of Pinoso. I've heard that she's Romanian but I've never checked. Everyone knows her by sight. Just before Christmas I saw a car stop beside her. A man got out of the motor, handed the woman an envelope and a blanket, mouthed something, that may well have been Happy Christmas, and got back in the car. I suspect an act of generosity.

Small town life.

Walking to Santiago

I have friends who love to walk. They stride out across moors, along coastal paths and through forests carting tasteless cereal bars and bottles of water in their high tech backpacks. They comment on the fauna and flora and marvel at the views. I have no problem with the basic idea of walking as a method of shrugging off a mild hangover or as penance for a good lunch but serious walking has never appealed.  Now don't get me wrong. I don't have any problem with people enjoying walking for walking's sake and I definitely approve of walking as a form of transport. For instance, if I were in the British Museum and still lusting for enlightenment the walk down to the Natural History Museum, with the promise of all those landmarks along the way, would get my vote over the Tube. As a young man I worked in Leeds and often caught the last train to Huddersfield. With a following wind that train might get me in early enough to catch the last bus home to Elland but, as often as not, it didn't and, usually, I quite enjoyed that four mile walk home

I'm sure that you've heard of the Camino de Santiago, The Way of St. James. It's said that the bones of the Apostle, St James, lie in Santiago in Galicia. The pilgrimage to get there is, I think, number three on the priority list of Christian pilgrimage sites after Jerusalem and Rome. Nowadays walking to Santiago is a big tourist draw. People do it for all sorts of reasons. Religion is one of them, for others it's a broader idea of fellowship, for some it's the physical challenge whilst some people do it in the same way as they'd walk the Light Wake Walk or stride out on any weekend. I have several friends who have done it - generally by foot though at least one by bike. Most have found it hard, painful work.

People often wrongly think of the Camino de Santiago as a route, something like doing the Pennine Way from Edale to Crowden. That's to miss the essence of the Camino. The whole point is the pilgrimage, the destination, the tomb of Saint James. When Christianity was a driving force behind European society getting to Santiago was worth mega points in your bid to get into Heaven; into Paradise. Getting the Compostella, the certificate that proves you did the pilgrimage to Santiago, was the real life equivalent of the get out of jail free card. Nowadays there is a non religious version but I understand that most people still opt for the much prettier religious version. I'm also told that, for obvious promotional reasons, the Church tries to persuade walkers to take the religious document.

That's not to say that there are not recognised routes to Galicia. In the Middle Ages, to get to Spain from the British Isles, your average Irish or English pilgrim would take ship to A Coruña or Ferrol and walk in to Santiago from the coast. On the other hand the common or garden French pilgrim would probably walk in at Roncesvalles via St Jean Pied de Port and do the French Way. There are plenty of other routes too. If you've ever done the Lonely Planet type trip around Guatemala or Turkey you know that you keep bumping into the same people. It was the same for the early pilgrims. Walking in from Southern France the Arles Way or the Catalan Way made sense whilst the Swiss would walk the Le Puy Way and the Portuguese, very properly, the Portuguese Way. I was in Pinoso town hall years ago when a bloke turned up with his credencial, the passport that you get stamped as you walk. He was asking about getting some sort of official stamp to show that he'd done his distance. Pinoso isn't generally on the major routes!

After a few drinks we've often talked about doing the Camino. Some friends took this more seriously than most and bought a guidebook and did a bit of planning. We are now pretty sure that we're going to do it in the Spring and there may be more friends going to join us. Now for someone who has just said that he doesn't care to walk this may sound like madness. But I'm working on a theory, a theory that, like Ernie's, is one what I have and is not backed by anything specific. Santiago has been attracting pilgrims for hundred of years. As those pilgrims trudged the new routes other people, entrepreneurs, saw the opportunity to make money by opening hostels, brothels, taverns, cobblers and bakers, along the way, aimed specifically at the pilgrims. In turn, that influx of people, and wealth, along the route made lots of other services, like flour mills, vets and blacksmiths, into viable business ideas. Over time those original routes have lost importance. Like drovers paths and canals the traditional route has now become become something of a backwater. The motorways and train lines still go to the same major cities but by slightly different routes. This, I hope, has left the old route laden with history so that it's going to be nearly as interesting as that walk through Bloomsbury, Mayfair and Knightsbridge.

Down the bar

I was in a bar this morning. The bar is called Arturo but the boss isn't; his name is Salvador or Salva to his friends.

Arturo is a nice bar, an ordinary bar. Plenty of Britons use it but we tend to be mid or late morning users. Earlyish morning it's a pretty Spanish environment. Clientele wise it's for anybody and everybody from pensioners and office workers to parents on the school run and working class blokes.

From what I can gather lots of Spaniards seem to leave home without a decent breakfast. I get the idea that most shower the night before so they're ready to go in the morning. It seems to be up and out rather than dawdling over toast and cereals. But regular food stops, and a real interest in food, are very Spanish traits. Anytime between nine and eleven in the morning overall wearing blokes down tools and open up their lunch-boxes. In a similar time slot bars the length and breadth of Spain fill up with people getting something to eat as a sort of more substantial mid morning breakfast.

Back in Arturo's it's around ten-o-clock and I'm sitting at the bar waiting for someone who never turned up. The noise level is high, I mean high, really high. Spaniards are not particularly quiet people as a rule, especially where they feel comfortable. It's not class related. The after show hubbub in the theatre lobby and the noise level in a truck stop transport cafe are pretty much the same. In Arturo's, every now and then, laughter, raucous laughter, breaks through the general din. The young woman who's only been serving here for a couple of weeks looks a bit shell shocked. Salva is working like some sort of machine handing out bottles of wine, bottles of vermouth, cans of soft drink, finger spreads of wine glasses. Ice chinks, the coffee machine hisses, the door bangs. Salva can I have more bread?, What's that there Salva?, Salva give me some of those red chorizos, Gachasmigas Salva, Three with milk and one black when you can Salva, Toast with cheese and tomato today Salva, Salva, how much is that?, Go on then Salva I'll have a brandy too.

A group of four men hit the bar at the same time, two of them have their shoulders against mine, they all have that sort of workshop smell - oil and grease. They're talking to each other, they're asking for things. Salva is answering all four of them and talking to the cook in the kitchen at the same time. I marvel. It's not something new, it's not something unknown, it's not even surprising but I did notice it and it did make me chuckle.

Sorry about the snap. I didn't have any pictures of busy bars and none of the Google ones were any better.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, o, ho

We were talking to some Americans - North Americans, from the United States. We were in the Gods, the gallinero or chicken coop in Spanish, at the top of the Teatro Principal in Alicante. We were high enough to consider breathing apparatus. The seats were so steeply raked that Maggie worried about plummeting.  It was absolutely roasting presumably because the people in the stalls were at just the right temperature. Heat rises, rich people comfy, poor people sweltering. First I took off my jacket and then I took off my pullover to reveal my Gas Monkey T-shirt. That was the talking point to begin the conversation. All four of us were there to see a zarzuela. Say it like Thar thway la.

Have you ever seen a zarzuela before asked the Americans, "Yes," I said, "No," said Maggie. In a way we were both right. We've seen several scenes from various zarzuelas in full costume and three concerts of zarzuela music. It was the first time though that we'd seen a full production.

The production was La revoltosa, the Troublemaker, set in 19th Century Madrid and written by Ruperto Chapí, a local lad done good. He's considered to be one of the foremost composers of zarzuelas. The Revoltosa features poor folk, poor but happy folk. Lots of singing and dancing and chatting up of sultry maidens. Zarzuela is the name of a Royal Palace on the outskirts of Madrid.  The building is supposedly named for the blackberry bushes, zarzas, that surrounded it and where, so the tale has it, zarzuelas were first performed.

If anybody asks me, and as you may imagine it's a common question, I always say that zarzuelas are light opera - I think Merry Widow and Gilbert and Sullivan. The Spanish Wikipedia entry is very scathing about comparisons with other operatic forms. It pooh poohs the idea that zarzuelas are anything like the French Opereta and says it's more like the German Singspiel but that really it is a uniquely Hispanic form. Interesting eh? No, I didn't think so either. The English Wikipedia entry says that zarzuela is a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes, the latter incorporating operatic and popular songs, as well as dance. And that will do for me.

It wasn't as good as I'd hoped. I quite like the zarzuela style music but as a live performance it was a bit gutless. We didn't understand most of the spoken parts - Maggie said it was because we were so far away, I think it's because our Spanish is terrible. On the other hand, as an experience, I thought it was pretty cracking. Maggie didn't. She said that the heroine warbled like Gracie Fields. The Americans said it was good too but that may have been because they were tourists.

Oh, and being old and nearly senile I managed to scrape the side of my new motor as I reversed out of the underground car park. Nothing significant really but enough to make me swear like a trooper all the way home.

Queuing for Peter Pan

We have a couple of very active theatre groups in Pinoso. One of them, Taules, was even the joint winner of a prestigious national award for amateur theatre this year. Taules usually put on a show for the August fiesta and another for Christmas.

For some events in Pinoso you can buy tickets online but for most of the events in our 400 plus seat theatre you have to get tickets, or invitations, from the box office which opens for a couple hours for a couple of nights before the event. It's a bit of a pain for us because we're not usually in town in the evenings so we have to drive in specially. We've learned that normally we can chance to luck and there will be tickets available on the night. You can't do that with Taules though.

I'd misread the programme information. I thought tickets were on sale from 4pm. In fact it was 6pm. I didn't realise though because, when I got there, there were about 40 people waiting. Now the Spanish have a queuing system that I've mentioned before. They don't, usually, stand in a line but, as you arrive, you ask who is the last person in the queue and so take your place - let's call that virtual queuing. This causes confusion when foreigners, like we Britons, stand behind the person we think is the last in line. We may be queue jumping because the line usually only represents a part of the virtual queue. I asked who was last in the post office the other day and a woman sitting on a chair pointed to a Briton and said "He is, but he doesn't know, so I probably am." She may have been just a little peeved.

As I arrived outside the theatre I was assigned my place in the order. Over the next fifty minutes though the system started to creak as people came and went, children, coming from school, joined their waiting parents whilst cousins, aunts and brothers in law stood with other family members. The noise level was rowdy. I still didn't realise I was early and I was seething about the delay and unfairly cursing Spanish organisation.

When the man from the theatre group did turn up there was a loud cheer so I still didn't realise I was early; I just thought he was late. We all jostled and pushed into the theatre lobby behind him and any semblance of place in the queue vanished. Then the theatre bloke explained. Tickets would go on sale at the advertised time, 6pm, about an hour away. There were going to be separate desks for each of the three performances and they were going to set up posts and ropes to organise a physical queue. We were asked to organise ourselves so that the new physical queue had the same order as the original virtual queue. That involved leaving the theatre and finding your rightful place. I'm not good at forceful and I realised I'd end up at the back of the queue if I did as asked so I hung back a little and dropped into the reforming queue more or less where I belonged. Then we waited for the sales desks to open.

Progress to the three desks was painfully slow but I did, finally, get there. Choosing seats involved a Biro and a photocopied diagramme of the theatre. Paying involved banknotes and coins. I was surprised how many seats had gone. People must have been buying shed loads of tickets at a time because I wasn't that far back in the line. Not many people behind me were going to get in on Sunday evening so maybe all the bumping and shuffling and standing around was actually worthwhile. If I'd turned up at six I'm not sure I'd have got any tickets.

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.