Life in Culebrón

Years and years and years ago I got off a train in Almeria as twilight became evening. The train station was a long way from the town centre  and it was a very warm, very sweaty evening. The thing I noticed, as I walked, rather than my dampening clothing, was people sitting out in the street. Generally they were on dining room chairs and deckchairs but some had stately armchairs. It was whole families and the neighbours. Often the telly was on the windowsill facing out.  Nowadays of course only old people watch the telly - well in the traditional broadcast telly way - so nobody would drag their telly into the street. Most likely they'll do without telly all together but I suppose the coerced youngsters can always play with their phones. It was always the relative coolness, the chatting, and maybe a few snacks and a drink, that were important anyway.  I did wonder if it still went on. I mean we've all got aircon nowadays. I've seen people outside in Pinoso but Pinoso is ...

I went to pick up my new Foreigner's Identity Card this morning. All pretty straightforward. I'm now an immigrant foreigner instead of being identified as a Citizen of the European Union. I've never cared for the glib way we Britons use the term expat. I think that it borders on the racist. It's a semantic dodge to try to make a clear division between immigrants and us. Now there's no doubt about it at all. I'm a foreigner living here with a card to prove it. Just like a Cambodian or Cameroonian. As I was waiting in the queue a couple of things crossed my mind. I was quite happy to be getting the card and yet I'm dead set against ID cards. They are an obvious and essential means of control. Nobody would try to run a totalitarian Government without first having everyone registered and documented. When Dicky Attenborough and Gordon Jackson were getting on the bus in the Great Escape what were they asked for? Exactly. Documentation. Spain introduced ID card...

I shouldn't have chosen 7.30 in the morning. It seemed like a good idea. I thought that an hour at the start of the day wouldn't interfere with any other plans. Anyway with aching bones and a weak bladder I'm nearly always up at 7.30. Besides the session was online so I only had to look dressed from the neck up - no problem with wearing loose fitting shorts and yesterday's odorous t-shirt. Skype doesn't yet transmit body odours. The reason it wasn't such a good idea was that I woke up around 5am and didn't really get back to sleep for worry that I'd miss the appointed hour! It was the first time that I'd ever done a Spanish class online. Somebody told me about an app that they had been told was easy to use to arrange online lessons. The one I used is called italki though I'm sure there are tens if not hundreds of others. I looked through the tutors first. The tutors are from all over the world so you have to think about accents - for Spanish ...

The sweat was running in a little rivulet down my back. I noticed too that my damp hands had transferred the wood-stain on the handrails on to my beige trousers. The raffia work type chair had been uncomfortable from the start but I found myself wondering if Enver Hoxha's torturers had ever thought of the possibilities of dining chairs. Wearing a surgical mask wasn't helping. The daytime temperature had topped out at 41º C and it was still nice and warm as the performance got under way just after 9pm. Maggie, who was probably the only woman in the theatre without a fan, says she was on the verge of collapse from heat and pain. I suspect a fan may not have helped much! On stage a harpist and three women, all dressed in black, were reciting poetry and singing songs based on the work of women like Santa Teresa de Jesús, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Olivia Sabuco, Ana Caro or María de Zayas. Women who lived and wrote in what is now called the Siglo de Oro (literally Golden Century...

We're just about to go to see the local brass band. The title of the event is something like "You bring a sandwich and we'll provide the music". I've bought some bread and things to go in it to make a sandwich. We've got some crisps - well actually they're some sort of healthy pretend crisps made out of soya or peas or some such - and, because my tortillas always sag in the middle, I've bought a tortilla de patatas as well. And, of course, a couple of cans of beer. I can guarantee though that we won't do this "properly". I don't know how many Spanish kids I've seen unwrap their mid morning breakfast, how many women I've seen break out the un-buttered, unoiled rolls in silver paper, how many families I've seen trudging across the sand laden with cool boxes, how many times I've seen tuppers (pronounce that as tapperr) laden with cooked dishes spread out on picnic tables, how many watermelons I've seen carved into...

Spain has lots of wildfires. The number of times they are started by people, both inadvertently and on purpose, is alarming. The farmers who burn stubble, the people who flick fag ends from cars and the people who light barbecues in the countryside are oddly surprised when it all gets out of hand. There are also arsonists who start fires for reasons best known to themselves and their doctors. Fires can also start naturally, a lightning strike being the most common cause. Just like those potholes on British roads, fire breaks all over Spain are suffering from lack of spending. What should be a difficult barrier for the flames to leap, a defensible line for fire fighters to hold, is so full of weeds and shrubs that it offers no real barrier and the fires grow and spread. There have been several fires in the local area over the past week or so. On the national scale they have not been big and they have not spread widely but seeing smoke on the horizon and watching fire fighting helico...

Have you seen those photos of the Greek Islands? Blue and white paintwork everywhere and the boats apparently suspended in mid air on a transparent crystal clear sea. It's the light that makes those photos so stunning and it's the same sort of light that we have here. A popular late 19th and early 20th Century Spanish painter, Joaquín Sorolla, is most famous because of the way he captured the Mediterranean light. I often think of Sorolla when anyone comments on the limpid, flawless blue sky in even the most mundane of my snaps. So, when we first came to Spain I envisaged a house with big French windows, with gauze like curtains moving gently on a whisper of warm breeze making and unmaking pools of light on the tiled floor. Obviously we would wear, white, probably linen, clothes as we Virginia Woolfed our way through the days sipping on ice tinkling lemonade or a more alcoholic gin and tonic. Nobody sweats in those images, we would just luxuriate in the brightness of it all....

Imagine one of those dance studios. A wall of mirrors. Lithe dancers, six pack stomachs, firm buttocks and all that brightly coloured, body hugging clothing. Same idea, a mirrored wall but there's a bloke with a pronounced belly and a red nose, maybe for alcohol, maybe for the sun, sitting, facing the mirrors, on a cheap plastic chair with the sort of posture that Mr Plant would have reprimanded him for as a youth. Every now and then an acrid smell, it may be sweat from Mr Tubby or it may just be the room, wafts through the hot and airless atmosphere. It's Covid time so the fat bloke is wearing a face shield. Sometimes he blows a raspberry, well more or less, sometimes he gets hold of the side of his mouth to try and get his lips to flap in the wind. Gargling sounds. Strangled sounds. Flapping tongues. It's me and I'm with a speech therapist trying to learn how to do the rolled R that is more or less essential to speak Spanish. Something I haven't mastered in ...

Maggie and I went for our new TIE cards, Tarjeta de Identidad de Extranjero, Foreigner's Identity Card, today. The idea of this entry is to explain the bare bones of the process for someone who has to do it and who already has one of the green residence forms or cards. Now that we are no longer European Union Citizens we Britons can get this ID card, we have been able to since Monday. We don't have to, at least for a while, but we can. The advantage is, in a country that uses and demands ID all the time, we will have a credit sized card that will save us the bother of carrying around our passport and other floppy bits of paper. I think, though I'm not sure, that it also allows us to sign in for certain online transactions. The process was pretty straightforward. I saw, online, that there were some appointments available and didn't hesitate to book them up straight away. Getting appointments for lots of the official procedures has been difficult for months, no...

We're back to cold showers. The gas water heater has gone on indefinite strike. The little led panel is running through its full range of codes, E9, F0; I think that's a zero not a command. So, I thought that this time we'd call the official service people, their number is on a sticker on the water hater. I'm not particularly good on phones nowadays. I tend to cut across people and they definitely cut across me. I understand why George Clooney, as Billy Tyne, says "over" or even "over and out" when he's talking to Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Obviously it's a bit more difficult again in Spanish. Hand movements and facial gestures may be available via facetime but not in an ordinary phone call. And ask my pal Harry what radio professionals say about dead air. A two second silence in a radio show sounds lasts a lifetime. I always feel the same about a pause on the telephone. Keeping speaking is essential. It can lead to appalling language e...

When I was a schoolboy I was told how the Vikings, the Saxons and the Normans were responsible for lots of English place names; things like  -thorpe from the Norse for a village, as in Mablethorpe, and  -ham is from the Saxon for the same thing, as in Birmingham. In 711AD North Africans invaded what is now Spain and they controlled at least part of the peninsula for the next 700 plus years. Obviously enough, during that time, they made their mark on the land and its people. In the Spanish language lots of words begin with "a" or "al". That's because the Arabic for "the" is "a" or "al".  Over times  the sound sort of fused - like the old advert,  Drinka Pinta Milka Day, or how, when I've finished this, I'll get a cuppa. If you know Spanish you'll be able to think of myriad words that begin in "a" like azúcar, almohada, albahaca or almirante. If you don't know Spanish think of some of the place names tha...

The province of Alicante, the one we live in, like all the provinces of Spain, has its own particular characteristics. Unlike lots of Spain Alicante is not choc a bloc with cathedrals, medieval quarters and massive stone built historic town centres. It doesn't even have characteristic colour schemes for the houses (well it does but they are not as eye catching as, for instance, the indigo and white of Ciudad Real or the ochre and white of Seville). We do have plenty of impressive buildings but they tend to get lost in a general unremarkability. Say Alicante to any Spaniard from outside the area and the first thing that comes to mind will be beach. If you've ever had holidays here, in Benidorm or Torrevieja or Calpe or if you live in Elda, Monóvar, Aspe or Sax then I'd be more or less certain that whatever you appreciate about your town it is not the architecture. That's not to say that I don't like our province. Look in any direction from our house and you see hi...

On the last fourteen weeks I've only filled the car with petrol twice, I've read nineteen books though and watched more TV series than you could wave a stick at. I've weeded the garden so often that it is as weed free, and generally tidy, as it has been at any time whilst we've lived in Culebrón. I've even re-painted all but one of the exterior walls. Our area of Spain has been relatively mobile for the last two or three weeks but even then we've generally limited ourselves to a couple of outings to local bars or eateries with just one trip to the coast. We could have gone further, anywhere within the province, but we've chosen not to stray more than 60 kilometres from home. Basically we've done as we were asked, we've stayed at home. Today though it's all more or less over, for us. We can now go where we like - masks, general hygiene, keeping distance and local regulations permitting. It's back to some sort of normal. The State of Alarm h...

People, in general, seem to be very interested in food. Spaniards certainly are. I think I've said before that the first time I ever managed to catch the drift of a conversation in Spanish, when I presumed that the discussion would centre on Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or, perhaps, the novels of Kafka it turned out to be an impassioned debate about the pros and cons of adding peas, or not, to some sort of stew. Spanish food tends to plainness. Spicy is, generally, not seen as good. Recipes are often traditional and made from the ingredients to hand. It's permissible to argue about whether tortilla de patatas should have onion or not but basically the recipe is eggs, potatoes, oil, salt and nothing else. Woe betide the TV chef who thinks a clove of garlic or a couple capers might spice it up a bit. That's why Jamie Oliver got so much stick about chorizo in paella. Paella and arroz (rice) are interchangeable words in some situations but paella has fixed versions. If you want to...

Amazingly it is now 13 years since Maggie took up a job in Ciudad Rodrigo. Ciudad Rodrigo is a small town in Salamanca province in the autonomous community of Castilla y Leon. It's just 30 km from the Portuguese border. When I needed a service on my Mini, not surprisingly, the Spanish Mini Internet site directed me to the nearest Mini garage in Spain, in Salamanca city, nearly 100 km away. The nearest Mini dealer was actually in Guarda, in Portugal, just 70 km away. A little less romantically Pinoso is in Alicante province on the frontier with Murcia. Maybe here I should clarify how Spain is administratively and politically carved up. The smallest unit is the municipality. Each municipality has a town hall. In our case Culebrón is in the municipality of Pinoso. We pay Pinoso town hall for lots of services like water supply and rubbish collection and it's where we go for administrative tasks like planning permissions or licences to burn garden waste. In turn Pinoso is in ...

You will remember that I have a theory that the majority of Spaniards classify birds into just three types : 1: Pajaros are biggish birds like blackbirds and pigeons. Pajaro in English translates as bird. 2: Pajaritos are smallish robin or sparrow sized birds. This is just the word pajaro with the termination -ito which is used for diminutives. An English example might be book and booklet or pig and piglet where the -let suggests something smaller. 3: Pato is used for birds with webbed feet, swimming birds like geese and swans. Pato translates directly as duck. On more than one occasion I have asked a Spaniard to identify a bird, for instance, what I now know is a hoopoe or, maybe, I describe a magpie and and ask for the Spanish word for such a bird. The answer to both questions is pajaro. I find this amusing. Obviously my observation is partially true at best; there are lots of Spaniards who know birds. However, I have never been one to let the truth get in the way of a goo...

One Friday, ages ago, at the monthly few minutes of silence organised by the Plataforma El Pinós contra la violència de gènere  I got talking to a couple. The bloke was a patent and trademark lawyer and he wanted to learn a bit of English.  We swapped phone numbers and later arranged to meet in a bar every week to speak to each other for a while in Castilian and for a while in English. Oh, and just in case your Valenciano is a bit rusty, a clumsy translation of the event would be The Pinoso Platform Against Gender Violence. It's important here that I say Castilian or Castellano and not Spanish because there is no doubt that Jesús does not consider himself to be a Castilian; he's Valencian. He identifies as Catalan. At first that caused a bit of tension. He's really quite vehement in his nationalist views, but over the months it has become just one of those things that we are able to joke about. As he explains some Catalan point of view to me I am often reminded of that...

Spain is bespattered with Chinos, Chinese owned shops. There are two principal types. One is like the old British corner shop where the family work all the time. It opens late, it sells sweets, pop and stuff plus basic food and all sorts of things that seem a bit out of place - piles of flip flops in over brittle and discoloured plastic bags piled on top of the crisp boxes. Here in Pinoso we don't have one of those. Our 24 hour shop, or it may be shops, are Spanish run.  We do have two Chinos though; ours are the sort that sell everything except food. There are tools, cleaning products, stationery, earphones, phone cases, reading glasses, clothing, cleaning products, photo frames, light bulbs, pet supplies and a trillion other things. We Brits love them. We can hunt around the shelves looking for whatever it is rather than having to mime and splutter to, for instance, the person behind the haberdashery shop counter, "Err, I don't know how to say knicker elastic in S...

I was trying to think of what to write. I wondered about something on having to wear masks in public. I thought about the slight loosening of restrictions - being able to get a beer outside a bar or go into a shop. Neither smacked of Herodotus nor even of Stephen King. And the message has all been a bit mixed up too; freer movement promised to people living in small towns, announced last weekend, still hasn't been enacted. Next I considered the political argy bargy. I have been thoroughly appalled at the way that the opposition parties have been trying to make political capital out of the continuance, or not, of the state of alarm, the constitutional state which allows for a "unified command". Then it turned out that our President had done a secret deal with a political party that has a dodgy, terrorist, background, and kept it from his colleagues. Bang went the moral high ground. What about the unrest on the streets, the people banging pots and pans to protest abou...

You'll probably find this really boring and almost incomprehensible so don't feel you need to read on. During the late 1970s and 1980s there was a quiz show in the UK called 3,2,1 hosted by Ted Rogers. The original format for the show was invented in Spain by a bloke called Chicho Ibáñez Serrador. The Spanish name was the other way around - Un, dos, tres or 1,2,3. It was hugely successful here partly because, at the time, there were only two Spanish TV channels and the one that didn't carry 1,2,3 was rather highbrow. On the same TV channel, but some 36 years after the last Un, dos, tres was broadcast, we watch a Spanish TV programme called El Ministerio del Tiempo - The Time Ministry. The idea behind El Ministerio del Tiempo is that there is a covert government ministry whose job it is to ensure that Spanish history remains unchanged. They are able to do this because they have access to a system of tunnels which lead to specific dates and places in the past. One of th...

I'm a bit of a list maker. Any job has a validity all of its own. Watching a TV programme, blowing up the bike tyres or even having a beer can all be jobs. So, for instance, completing my tax return or looking through the new book of photos that I've just bought have a similar status. In reality, I suppose, the tax return is probably more pressing but the new book gave me a photo for the blog! The mummified nuns were dug up in Barcelona at the start of the Civil War. One in the eye for the Church. So, for eight weeks lots of the limiting, delimiting, factors went away. You can't paint a wall if you have no paint and the shops are shut. You can't not be able to do something because it's time to go to the theatre when there is no theatre. This week though the world regained some of its normality. Watching the scenes on the telly of people getting together I tend to think that we may have a bit of a rebound to the killing fields but, by then, the Government will ha...

We're going to have takeaway for lunch. I'm almost beside myself with excitement. Well no, not really, but it is a bit of an event. At the moment almost anything at all different is an event. Of course Maggie is going back to work tomorrow so that will be a big change. With the easing of our confinement we could even go and get a beer outside a bar. I'm not sure how keen I am on that. Great to get a beer and to watch the world go past but it's still a world full of masks and latex gloves and having waited eight weeks I don't want to be too previous. Latex, of course, can be quite interesting. I once went to a club in the West End where everyone wore latex. I'm amazed to this day that they let me in wearing my interview suit but I think it was along the same lines as the Sioux not killing the geologist from the wagon train because they considered he was slightly mad grovelling amongst the stones and mumbling to himself. I talked to a bloke in the club, Skin Two...

I've been thinking about the changes that happen slowly. I'm not talking about the sort of time needed to form the Himalayas or even the period of time that the Chauvet Cave was active. I'm thinking about how Marlon Brando, Dan Aykroyd, William Shatner and Alec Baldwin became so much bigger. Really I'm thinking about seven, going on eight weeks. I'm thinking about why so many people were champing at the bit to get to a haircut when the hairdressers re-opened yesterday. I suppose all those weeks is a big slice of the year. I was doing reasonably well at knocking off weight before I was given detention in March. I'd lost about 11 kilos from Christmas but, this morning as I jelly rolled my stomach the distance between the shower and washbasin, ready to shave, apply brylcreem and brush my teeth I couldn't pretend that I wasn't putting it back on again. I also realised that I wasn't wearing slippers. No need for a bathmat on the floor to protect ...

Today is May 2nd. It's an important date in Spanish, and Madrid history. It is the reason that the famous Goya painting at the left exists. Years ago I wrote this article for the old TIM magazine. ---------------------------- The 2nd of May 1808. A Monday morning in Madrid. We've had French soldiers swaggering all over the city since March. I blame the old King, King Carlos IV, when he let that lackey of his, Godoy, do a deal with Napoleon to invade Portugal. Imagine that! Our troops fighting alongside all those Frenchy gabachos. Why would we side with that lot after the way they let us down at Trafalgar? Those cowardly Frenchy sailors ran away leaving our lads in the lurch and letting that one eyed, one armed Brit dwarf sink our navy. Lot of good it did the old boy anyway. Napoleon forced him to abdicate in favour of that son of his, Fernando VII, Now old Boney has both our Kings in France at Bayona planning to do goodness knows what with them. This morning's rumou...