Tópicos

The dancer's dark eyes flashed. Arching her back she twisted her lithe body so that her brightly coloured dress, tight at the hips but loose below her knees, swirled around her mimicking the movement of her bright blue wrap. She stamped her feet, she clapped her hands and her olive coloured skin shone with a fine patina of sweat. Spanish cliché time. As real and yet as unreal as Morris Dancers outside the pub on the Village Green.

I've just finished a book by a Spanish author. The basic premise is that her main character moves to London looking for work and ends up working in a bookshop where her life takes a turn for the better. It was an enjoyable, if slight, read, a bit like one of those US Christmas films where the hero rediscovers the joy and warmth of small town life. What struck me most about the book was that it was loaded with Spanish clichés about England and that it repeatedly and wantonly ascribed Spanish habits to Britons.

One of the principle things, that turned up time and time again throughout the book was tea. Gallons of tea. I suppose that's because lots of Spaniards truly believe that England stops for tea and a bun at 4pm. It happened in the book over and over again. The characters drank Earl Grey brewed in fine porcelain teapots and when they were not tucking into cakes they could rely on an unending supply of dainty cucumber sandwiches. The protagonist and her love interest even go to Fortnum and Mason's to drink tea at one point. There is no mention of sitting at your desk, drinking tea from stained mugs with pictures of cats on them and having to squeeze the teabag with your fingers because there are no spoons.

Drake, Sir Francis, not the Canadian musician, and Holmes, Sherlock as in 221b Baker Street, get a few mentions as does New Scotland Yard. For some reason Spaniards know these names. It's a bit like the way that the TV news here always says Boris Johnson's Government but doesn't name Macron when speaking of the French Government. Pirate, by the way, always appears in any sentence that describes Frank Drake. In this book the owners of the pub have the surname Drake and, when they are first introduced, the phrase is that they denied any link to the famous pirate elevated to the knighthood. The pub run by the Drakes is called the Darkness & Shadow which reminded me of the pub in, I think, the Reggie Perrin books, called the Desiccated Kipper. It's a bit different to most English pubs, but a lot like a Spanish bar, in that you order your drinks from the table and people serve them to you. Given my minimal bar presence I must seek it out the next time I'm near Earl's Court.

There are lots of things that we English apparently do that I missed out on when I lived there. It is, of course, possible, that they are common now. For instance, in the book, English shops wrap things bought as presents at Christmas time just as they do in Spain. When the owner of the bookshop closes for the evening he puts down a metal shutter blind. In the UK I only remember those metal roller blinds from areas like Hulme in Manchester though I have no idea if Hulme is still dodgy or not.  The bookshop is in Temple though and last time I was there it bore very little resemblance to the Mancunian badlands. There's a likeable if swotty lad in the book, named Oliver Twist, and his mid afternoon snack is bread stick into which solid lumps of chocolate bar chocolate have been pushed. It's Spanish comfort food but I don't think it's an English staple. Now if he'd had a sugar sandwich! I've heard that Britons are now very outwardly emotional and have embraced touchy feely behaviours but I don't think the smacking lips, air kisses to both cheeks are common yet - they are in the book, just as they are in Spain. Oh and Christmas Eve is when families get together for a big family meal just as they do on New Year's Eve. And so it goes. 

No I can't stop. Here are a couple more to finish. There are a few spelling mistakes, Spaniards find English letter sequences troubling at times just as we Brits stumble over Spanish words. They are going to go to Candem (sic). The best spelling mistake though led to an interesting factlet. It's another Fortnum and Mason mention. The book says that the shop's owners invented Scott eggs (sic again) as easy to eat food for Victorian travellers. Actually there was also mention of an English urban myth that was new to me. It seems that many of us think it is an offence to eat meat pies on Christmas Day. I did read the Wikipedia to check and it seems to have something to do with why mince pies are not meat pies. I forget the details though.

Ah well, I might pop down to the bull ring now or perhaps I'll just have a bit of a siesta. No, I'll do it all mañana.

Hasta la vista, baby.

Agility

There are ways of doing things in Spain. If you want a lunch in a restaurant don't go in much before 2pm or after 4pm. If you go out drinking then, to fit in, you need to start on the spirits and mixer drinks after around 11pm. Drinking a hot drink whilst you eat food, with some leeway for breakfast toast and pastries, is tantamount to treason. Don't start filling your car with petrol or diesel before you've given someone the opportunity to come and do it for you as the majority of filling stations still have attended service. When your everyday doctor refers you to a specialist expect another appointment in the specialist department before you actually get to see the oncologist, cardiologist or whoever. In the bank or at the post office don't be too surprised if each person takes ten to fifteen minutes to get served (even if they are only buying stamps or paying a bill) and expect the employee behind the desk to look confused as they prod at the keyboard and stare in apparent bewilderment at the screen.

Lots of "official" things can be done online nowadays, at least partially, but don't be too shocked if you have to go and queue somewhere to start or to finish that online process. It may be possible to open an online bank account by staring at a camera with documentation in hand but don't expect that sort of new fangled thinking to work for local, regional or national government documentation

Like the rest of Europe Spain has started to vaccinate against Covid. There are 17 Autonomous Regions and each one has its own Health Service. Central Government distributes the weekly deliveries of vaccines but each Region administers the coronavirus jabs. Madrid, which includes the capital city and is the second most populous Region in Spain, started vaccinations at the end of December. Anyone with any experience of organising anything new knows to expect teething problems but the Madrid programme went well wrong.  Only putting 46 teams on the vaccination (two per team) wasn't a good start but then not working the couple of public holidays or the weekends in the first week didn't help. In fact Madrid only managed to use 6% of the vaccine available to them that first week. The, always good for a laugh, President of Madrid blamed Central Government, as she always does, but as Madrid's weekly supply of the vaccine is 48,750 doses my junior school arithmetic tells me that each of the 46 teams would need to have vaccinated 1,059 people per week, one every nine and a half minutes, to use all the supply. Meanwhile in Asturias, where they got 42,000 doses from Central Government in the first week they managed to achieve something like 80% of their target. Last time I looked our Valencian Region had done about 12,000 vaccinations or nearly 20% of the 60,000 doses it had on hand. I don't know anyone who's had one.

I did see a Tweet which said  that the recruitment criteria for 'jab nurses' are set by the EU and that the requirements were two years vaccinating experience, knowledge of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, completion of a Covid online training course plus other coordination and training skills. The Tweeter said it was obvious why there weren't enough people working. I have no idea if this was a Brexiteer making a point about the awful EU bureaucracy or something normal and maybe true. I could find no other reference to those criteria but I did find plenty of information about Regions setting up much shorter training programmes back in December so they were ready to administer the vaccines when they arrived.

If the vaccination rates don't go up then Spain will never reach it's 70% of the population vaccinated by the summer target. As you may imagine, because "all" the pundits and the reporters and the politicians live in Madrid this caused a bit of a media storm. One of the radio commentators I heard said that the problem in Spain was lack of agility. An unpreparedness to find a way, an unwillingness to depart from the tried and tested and I suddenly found myself with a new theory. The lack of Spanish agility.

From the big things, like the ERTES, the temporary lay-offs for Covid, the registration of people for the new baseline for family income, the Ingreso Mínimo Vital, the problems that people are having getting appointments with nearly all Government Departments, the inability or unwillingness to provide power to the illegal "shanty town" in Madrid, the difficulty with changing the way that education is delivered, right down to the tiny things like only being able to get a substantial meal at certain times of the day were all suddenly explained. It's not a lack of organisational ability (as many of my compatriots are happy to suggest), it's not about any laziness or "mañana" attitude but it is an unwillingness to accept that the system may be flawed. Once you have something in place it cannot, usually, be altered, tinkered with or improved to suit circumstances.

Well, it's a theory.

One King and Three more

It's a sort of Spanish Christmas Day today. Obviously Covid spoiled the usual parades and yesterday's buzz in the streets but the Three Kings were out and about delivering presents overnight and today the kids are on the TV news whooping over their booty. It's been good Christmas weather. Up North there have been the usual pictures of snowploughs doing their stuff, people leaving their houses by the upstairs window to slide down snowdrifts and shoppers using skis to get to the supermarket. In the Val d'Aran, the other day, the temperature was -28ºC. Here in Culebrón, for the Christmas period, it's usually been sunny by day and bitterly cold overnight. The water we put out for the cats was solid, solid ice this morning but I am glad to report that the extra insulation that we added to our water pipes seems to have done the trick and, so far, we've not woken up to frozen pipes and no water.

Today is also the day that the Pascua Militar is celebrated. I forget where we were, maybe visiting a Bronze Age Settlement or it could have been the cuco tour or even the one about the history of esparto production, but we got talking to this bloke. He was a bit of a conspiracy theorist. He told us that we should keep an eye on the Royals and the military. The Pascua Militar is a military ceremony that happens every 6th of January in the Royal Palace in Madrid. The King receives the President of the Government, the Minister of Defence, Minister of the Interior, the Chief of the Defence Staff, the Chiefs of Staff of the various branches of the military and lots of other martial types. It is true that only the other week, at the beginning of December, a bunch of over 400 ex military officers signed an open manifesto saying that the unity of Spain was in danger and complaining about commies in the coalition government, about the danger of the present government siding with the Catalans to break up Spain and lots more blah, blah blah of the sort that you'd expect from a bunch of moustache twirling, out of touch, dried up right wingers. It wasn't taken very seriously, at least publicly, but there were obviously echoes in that open letter of the tanks on the street in Valencia and the Guardia Civil bursting into parliament back in 1981 in an abortive attempt at a coup.

Back in 1981, on February 23, King, Juan Carlos I was relatively new to the job. He was a King that had been picked as Head of State by Franco, the old dictator, himself. The King was a member of the Borbón dynasty, he was married to Sofia from the House of Glücksburg (the Duke of Edinburgh's family) and he was titular head of the armed forces. On that long night he seemed to be on the side of the good guys. He went on TV to tell the army to stay in their barracks and the coup attempt fizzled out. That same King abdicated a few years ago and handed over to his firstborn, our current King, Felipe VI. The old King stepped down because he was getting old and infirm but also he'd become very unpopular, mainly because of parading one of his mistresses a bit too publicly but even more so for the pictures of them standing over an elephant that they had just slaughtered. He's now called the King Emeritus. In August he ran away amidst the scandal of a $100 million kick back from the Saudis and just recently he handed over 600,000€ to straighten out a bit of tax that he'd forgotten to pay. Oops a daisy! Reputation in tatters.

Now I don't care about Royalty. I've always lived in countries with royals; here, in the UK and even in Saudi Arabia. Royals seem to be a bit of an anachronism in the modern world but I don't get too worked up about them. When they all married their cousins they could at least claim the bloodline and some interesting genetic deformities but now that they all marry actors, journalists, handball players and nursery nurses they're just another sort of celebrity - like footballers and people who make sex tapes. I don't worry too much about the Kardashians, Beyoncé, Dua Lipa or C. Tangana either. Our King here seems like a nice enough bloke. His children seem well behaved and I liked the story about him stopping off for a set meal at some roadside restaurant but I hope that he's just another irrelevant rich person and that the conspiracy theory man wasn't right, especially given the date.

Brexit paperwork

There are lots of English language Facebook pages dedicated to living in Spain and aimed at Britons. There are Citizens Advice pages, Civil Guard authored pages, one from the British Consulate and subject specific pages like After Brexit and more. They are all alive with Brexit problems. Twitter is also aglow with similar stuff. Originally it was pros and cons but now it's practicalities. Apparently, since January 1st, British people who live in Spain, but are in the UK, have been bumping into problems getting home. Some of it seems to be the teething problems of new requirements at the border - the officials don't recognise the documentation and stuff written in Spanish makes no sense to them - but it has left people stranded.

One of the things that sometimes makes me snigger and sometimes exasperates me is the lack of understanding and failure to grasp the basics of the paperwork that most of us have here in Spain. I can't guarantee the accuracy of the rest of this post but, so far as I know, it's correct.

The Spaniards lived under two dictatorships in the 20th Century. The better known one had Franco as its Head of State. He introduced an identity card system and as a part of that Spaniards were issued with a unique identification number similar to the VIN on my car but shorter. The Spanish ID is called the DNI, Documento Nacional de Identidad and it has 8 digits and one verification letter which is generated by a mathematical formula. Spaniards older than 14 have to have an individual DNI, it's an offence not to have one. So the format is 12345678Z

Spaniards are identified by their DNI, it was originally a sort of tax identifier but now it's linked to everything from buying a mobile phone to passports. Because not everyone who wants to buy a property or a boat in Spain is Spanish there had to be something similar for foreigners. The similar document for foreigners is the NIE - the Foreigner's Identification Number, Número de identidad de extranjero. The NIE is really a tax identification number but, just like the DNI, it is now linked to so much more. The number is made up of an initial letter followed by seven digits and then a verification letter. The start letter is either an X or a Y. So the format is X1234567L or Y1234567X

Foreigners who want to live in Spain have to comply with a variety of conditions. Provided things are as they should be they are issued with an Identity Card or Residence Card and that card will carry their NIE. That's what happened to Maggie when she got a job here in the 1990s. She got the Residence Card because she had a job. The process included being fingerprinted and photographed. When we came house hunting in Spain, before we lived here, we went to a police station to get an NIE. I was issued with one but Maggie didn't need one because the number issued to her in the 1990s was still good. The NIE was just a piece of white A4 paper. 

Once we'd moved here we applied for Residence Cards. On the very day that I went to get my fingerprints done to get that card it was abolished for European Citizens.  I was literally in a queue to get the card and turned away. The reason the cards were abolished was because I was not a foreigner, I was a European citizen and we European citizens had rights in the member countries. Some European agreement, possibly Maastricht, said that the Spaniards couldn't demand that we Britons carry a Spanish ID card. The reasoning being that whatever our National Identity Document was (passport in our case) it was sufficient to move anywhere in Europe. The same would be true for French, Dutch, Belgians, Luxembourgians, Italians and so on. The new system would be  a register of European Citizens living in Spain. 

Maggie and I registered as soon as the new process came into being, probably around 2007. We were given a piece of A4 paper which had lots of green on it. This green certificate which was actually officially the Certificado de Registro de Ciudadano de la Unión or Registration Certificate for a Citizen of the Union was proof that we'd registered with the National Police as being resident in Spain. In time that certificate changed shape and size to be a sort of paper card but its purpose was very much the same. Everybody I know calls that certificate/card the Residencia.

Then came Brexit. When it was complete we would be foreigners again. Not European Citizens. Foreigners, such as Canadians, Mauritians and Chinese, living in Spain have a card which is called a Tarjeta de Identidad de Extranjero or a Foreigners Identity Card. I'm not sure whether it was by negotiation or because the Spaniards baulked at the idea of re-registering the approximately 300,000 Britons resident in Spain that it was decided that the green bits of paper and the green cards would continue to be valid for Britons to show that they had registered correctly before the end of the transition year and were legal to continue living in Spain from the start of 2021. There was also the offer to swap the green certificate for an ID card much like the ones carried by Spaniards and foreigners, a TIE card, but without most of the usual bureaucratic palaver. That system started in summer 2020 and Maggie and I went and got ours as soon as we could.

To recap then the NIE is simply an ID number and has nothing specifically to do with residence. The green residence certificate or card and the special Brexit TIE card all show that someone who was living here before 31 December 2020 has continuing resident status and is legally living here. There are also, apparently, letters of intent which show that Britons were living here with their rights as Europeans but that the authorities didn't have time to process the paperwork before Big Ben chimed the last EU hour. Provided they complete the process they too will be legal.

There is another piece of paper which we Brits usually call the padrón. Each municipality keeps a register of the people who live there. This register is used for statistical purposes, as the census for funding for municipalities and as the basis of the electoral roll. Under some circumstances the "padrón" gives you some rights but for most Britons it simply registers us to an address. Often, if you want to carry out something financial, like entering into a loan agreement, you'll need a "padrón" that's no more than 3 months old but the "padrón" has nothing to do with residency status.

Obviously there are Britons who have recently moved to Spain and all this new paperwork must have been horrible for them. I sympathize because Covid has slowed everything down and getting an appointment has been hampered by unscrupulous characters who have found a way to profit out of selling on the appointments. 

On the other hand I have been amazed by the number of people who have lived here for years and years and have also been involved in the last minute scrabble. People who have always renewed their UK driving licences by using a family member's UK address, people who have never got around to getting one of the green certificates and maybe aren't even on the padrón. Some of those people seem to be blissfully unaware of anything that is going on around them. Back at Twitter and Facebook I have seen people who have no idea which document is which and what it's good for. And can you imagine the Customs Official at Stansted presented with a letter of intent to apply for this or that in flowery Spanish when their briefing says to only allow residents to travel?

Bacon butties

I have a friend who's been vegetarian for as long as I've known her and that's nearly 50 years. Back in the 1970s she said that the one thing that had made her waiver, when she first stopped eating meat, was the smell of cooking bacon. 

Bacon sandwiches are a bit of a Thompson family tradition at Christmas time. I like them best with white, flat bread, with butter and with the bacon tending towards crispy. Bacon sandwiches are easy enough to buy in bars in Spain though they're not entirely to specification. They usually come in baguette type bread and, when I order one, I'm usually asked if I want "just" bacon which Spaniards find a little odd; the usual suggestion from the server is to add a little fried cheese or at least some mayo. There is only one remaining chain of fast food sandwich shops in the shopping centres of Spain and they sell lots of bacon rolls from basic ones with just cheese added through to ones that are full of crispy chicken, lettuce, tomato, BBQ and tomato sauce. 

When we lived in Ciudad Rodrigo we used the, now sadly closed, Jamonería cafetería Castilla. The first time we went in there we were met by the unmistakable smell of frying bacon. They were serving the bacon on toast. I asked for a bacon toast. "It's not bacon," said the waiter, "it's papada." I didn't know the word papada so he mimed; it translates as double chin or jowl. It still tasted good.

Anyway, New Year's Day today so bacon sandwiches were the order of the day. I'd bought lots of bacon before the holiday including some from our local supermarket branded with the Union Flag and promising prime British back bacon. It wasn't cheap. When I fried it up on Christmas Day lots of white liquid formed a scum on the bacon. Obviously it was bacon injected with water to make it look juicier. I drained off the water added a drop of oil and fried it up again. It tasted fine but the experience was a bit disappointing. The packet I opened this morning was the more usual Spanish style smoked streaky bacon. This stuff is cheap. It looks cheap. It's produced by huge food conglomerates like Oscar Mayer (Kraft Heinz I think) and by big local companies like el Pozo or Selva. It does not inspire confidence. As I fried it up fat in the bacon melted and the bacon fried "naturally" without extra oil or fat. It tasted better than the British bacon. It reminded me of those packets and packets of ready prepared stuff we'd seen at the British supermarket the other day. A sad reflection on modern food I thought. 

Repurpose, reuse and recycle

I have been trying to think of something to blog about for days. 

I wondered about having a go at Spanish politicians and their inability to agree about anything, ever. It drives me to distraction but it's something to do over a stiff drink, in company, rather than in dodgy prose.

I could have done something on Brexit but my thoughts on islanders lusting for a lost Empire may not have meshed with everyone's so why antagonise people over lost arguments? 

Covid is something we all share. I wondered about tales of border crossings and the differences between Tier 4 in the UK and the situation here. Boring as porridge. Actually, because you may be vaguely interested, apart from the obvious lack of cultural and economic activity our Valencian Community has done remarkably well. There may be curfews and trampling of individual rights but, on a day to day basis the people who still have jobs to go to have been going to them and although the shops, bars, restaurants, cinemas and theatres are well strange places, full of people wearing masks and bathing in hand gel, they are still open. 

Old blog standbys such as language, the cinema and my radio listening have all had recent outings. 

I was left contemplating the void.

Christmas is far from over here though. We're still in holiday mood. The problem is that the things that make up Christmas like concerts, shows, parades, the Royal Pages in the streets etc have virtually all been cancelled (that's a pun!) so there have been no little incidents to use as the stuff of a blog. Being attacked by a flock of geese in the Christmas parade, watching the egg and flour fight in Ibi, seeing the Devil in Caravaca or even the Pinoso Christmas theatre may have given me room to weave an amusing little anecdote but sitting at home with a bottle of scotch and a microwave chicken lasagne doesn't. Even eating a typical Norwegian Christmas Eve meal surrounded by toy Santas and excited dogs isn't the stuff I set out to write about. 

It was worse. When I had a quick scan back through past entries I have done the lottery, prawns, turrón and red underwear so often that I simply couldn't do it again. So I decided to do what the BBC does. 

Repeats it is. Just click the links below.

And some lemons for the prawns

Seasonal Snippets

Rather Reassuring

The Goose is Getting Fat

Jingle Bells

Drawing to a close

Christmas begins

Fat Chance

They think it's all over

Underwear, grapes and bubbly

Mainly about Benidorm

Maggie thinks otherwise but I quite like walking. The difference is that I think of walking as a means of transport or a way to see things while Maggie thinks of it more as pleasant exercise. If I need to get from Atocha to Gran Via or from the Tate on Millbank to the Tate on Bankside then walking would be my first choice. On the other hand suggest to me that I might like to go for a walk on the tracks, amongst the trees, up the hill from our house and I'd prefer to do a bit of reading. I might do it for the company, I might do it if I'd been locked in for days or so as not to be churlish, but walking in the countryside is something I don't generally care for. As Ivor Cutler said about his dad taking him on country walks  ""There is a thistle", he would say. There were many thistles in Scotland. We were soon well acquainted with them". Here it's pines.

Now we have a couple of friends who have a holiday home on the coast near Altea which is about 15 km. to the North (and a tad East) of Benidorm. They share Maggie's view of walking. Our friends know that I'm a bit offish about just walking so, to stop me mumbling and groaning too much, they try to find a walk with a focus. One weekend they took us on a walk near Calpe to see La Manzanera Resort. This is a group of buildings designed by the Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill and built between 1964 and 1982. There are three apartment buildings in the complex - Xanadu, La Muralla Roja and El Anfiteatro - with things like sports facilities, a bar and a restaurant also in the complex. It was September 2016 when we saw these buildings. I read up about the architect at the time so that I could write the captions on my photos and that's probably the last time that Ricardo Bofill entered my thoughts.

Last night we went to see a film Nieva en Benidorm by the Spanish film director Isabel Coixet. I was looking forward to it. Benidorm is an interesting place, it's full of Spaniards but also very British. It's as Spanish as you can get and yet it's completely out of character. Personally I like it but I wouldn't want to stay too long! I'd heard a couple of interviews with the director on the radio and it sounded as though she had made a quirky film and that she too had developed a real soft spot for Beni and for the Britishness that abounds there. The film had the added advantage that it had been shot in English as the two principal actors are Timothy Spall and Sarita Choudhury and that always makes watching easier. At one point Spall wakes up after a night on the tiles in a very pink building - La Muralla Roja. "We've been there!" I whispered to Maggie as I nudged her. Mind you, as the majority of the picture had been filmed in Benidorm we could have been nudging each other all the while.

Interior and exterior lights sweetie

We start in the UK. Back in the 1980s Anglepoise lamps became trendy. Of course they weren't real Anglepoises they were just an accessible Ikea copy. For those of you who missed the last century, or who have never been to Ikea, the real Anglepoise lamp is a balanced-arm lamp design in which the joints and spring tension allow the lamp to be moved into a wide range of positions where it will remain without being clamped in position. It was invented by British designer George Carwardine in 1932. The lamps were enormously successful, particularly the 1227 model.

Shift of scene to Spain. One Sunday in 1964, so the story goes, Luis Pérez Oliva, a designer and Pedro Martín, a scrap dealer, met in the Rastro flea market in Madrid and fell into conversation. As a direct result of that meeting the men formed a company called Fase (the first two letters from Fabricaciones Seriadas or Serial Fabrications in English) to produce desktop lamps. Fase went on to be a big success with their most famous model, the President, bagging a bit role in the Madmen TV series as in the photo here.

Now I knew, vaguely, of the real Anglepoise but I knew nothing of Fase until I heard a piece on the radio. The next week in the same slot on the same programme they talked about Caramelos PEZ or PEZ sweets. To get the idea think tic-tacs but not quite. PEZ is an Austrian brand of sweet sold as a little rectangular lozenge. They come in dinky dispensers which hold 12 sweets. The name, PEZ comes from the first flavour the sweets were available in, peppermint or pfefferminz in German. Eduard Haas began to sell these sweets in 1927 and their original market was smokers who wished to mask the smell of smoke. The little dispenser was cigarette lighter shaped and fitted neatly alongside the packet of fags. Over time the company introduced lots more flavours but, more importantly, they designed hundreds of different novelty dispensers. I think one of the first and most famous had a head of Mickey Mouse. The packaging was designed to attract children to the sweets, like Kinder eggs in reverse. Nowadays there is a flourishing market in collectible dispensers. 

I'd never heard of either of the companies but it's always good to find out things about the place I now live. The radio suggested that these products were well known in Spain but I've always found that what's common knowledge depends on who you talk to. I must say though that recently I've found out something new from almost every extended conversation I've had with someone Spanish. 

I was talking, online, with Susi this morning. I was trying to explain about the British Christmas decorations, both interior and exterior, but especially about exterior lights on houses. This meant that I had to try to explain about where we tend to live in in the UK; about the distribution of housing in cities, towns and the countryside, about town centre gentrification, about where the suburbs begin and so on - the whole nine yards. Have you ever thought how difficult it is to encapsulate the idea of a cottage? Susi, by the way, is not at all anti Christmas but she has no exterior or interior Christmas decorations of any kind in her flat and has never sent or received a Christmas card in her life. She is very young though.

We often think we have shared experiences and that the rich world is pretty standardised, that everything is much of a muchness but, when you get down to the detail, if Spain is anything to go by, the differences are generally unimportant but still quite marked.

Post early for Christmas

The queue outside the post office in Elche was pretty orderly, maybe 20 or 25 people. Not exactly military in its straightness but orderly enough with at least a long metre between individuals. The habitual Spanish queuing technique involves finding out who was the last person to arrive before you so you can follow that person when it's your turn. For months now the number of people permitted into shops and offices has been limited so that people have to wait outside. Although the "who's last" queuing system is still alive and well the atypical line type queue has now become commonplace. Lines are easier to join. 

British Post Offices have always been little outposts of Government as well as a place to post a parcel or letter. That's not the same in Spain and, even before social media, email and the rest made a lot of surface mail redundant many Spaniards hardly ever used post offices or postal services. There is very little tradition of Spanish junk mail by post or greeting cards for instance. That said Christmas is a busier time than usual for Spanish post offices and there has probably been an increase in business because of the proposed restrictions on Christmas gatherings. Lots of things that would normally be hand delivered will almost certainly go by post or carrier this year. 

Most in the Elche queue stoically accepted the situation, took their place and only looked up from their mobile phones when they sensed movement in front of them. Except for the bloke who I presumed was last in line. He was standing in the gutter. His mask was keeping his neck warm. I had to ask if he was the queue. 

The queue outside the post office in Pinoso has, for days, been long and slow. I have heard stories of people waiting hours. That was one of the reasons I'd taken my packet to Elche with me when I had other things to do there. I guessed that a city post office, a bigger office with more staff, would be faster. The same strategy had worked well for buying stamps in Murcia the week before. Nonetheless I'd taken a book for the queue. My reading was interrupted by the bloke I'd already spoken to. He wanted me to keep his place in the line as he had a little errand to do. When he came back he started nattering to me again. He told me that Covid was a scam. He told me there was a cure. In fact he could sell me the cure for only 20€ per dose. He proved how effective the medicine was by showing me an interesting video of someone pouring liquid from a glass into sawn down plastic water bottle. He gave me his card. I kept my comments to the minimum and hoped for a faster turnover of customers at the post office counters. I wondered if I attract people like him or if it's just that I remember the mad ones more than the ones who comment on the weather. Either way I was overjoyed with the rapidity with which the postal workers in the Passeig de la Joventut cleared the queue and separated me from the snake oil seller.

If any of you wonder what I was doing in Murcia, crossing the uncrossable border, the answer is that I'd left my home region only to drive a pal, who is currently unable to drive and has limited Spanish, to a hospital appointment. Justification enough.

Fattening of geese

I know that Christmas cards are a thing of the past. I know that they clutter up all the surfaces not occupied by the Laughing Santa and the Nativity Scene. I know that they are only read once - usually quickly - but I also know that they are homely and nice. A reminder that we still have some friends. Of course, it's a return on investment landscape. To receive cards you have to send cards. I didn't in 2018 and it didn't feel right. Where to get some for this year?

We had a bit of a look around locally. Not very seriously. Actually it was more like a virtual tour - we thought our way around possible local suppliers. We knew of places with hand crafted cards and obviously the Post Office would be selling the UNICEF ones but either option would be a bit pricey for a bulk mailing. If we'd thought harder or started earlier we'd have found somewhere but we didn't and we hadn't. I looked at Amazon but delivery dates were sometimes dodgy and it's difficult to tell how flimsy and even how big the cards are from the on screen photos.

So we drove the 60kms to San Fulgencio. Everyone calls the supermarket Iceland even though the sign outside says Overseas. They are scattered throughout Spain. The last time we shopped in one was probably in 2018 though it may have been 2017. Generally we pop in around this time of year with thoughts fixed on Christmas stuff. When I say Christmas stuff I actually mean Quality Street (or Roses or Celebrations or Heroes). "I'm only going to buy sweets, sauces and chutney, oh and maybe some Stilton, and Bombay Mix," I said, as we got out of the car. 

Hah! I've just finished off a pork pie and we have some Gregg's cheese and onion pasties warming in the oven. As always we fell prey to fondly remembered tastes even though we know that the memory nearly always tastes better.

It's an interesting place is the Overseas Supermarket. There is very little concession to the store being in Spain apart from the prices being in euros. The buyers and sellers are Britons, the music is British Christmas staple, the language is English and the products are "British" too. Usually there is a Spaniard who has learned to love Robertson's jam, Princes Corned Beef or Gray Dunn Caramel Wafers but today it was just us, just Britons. Even the public information announcements, which punctuated the in-store music, about wearing face coverings and keeping your distance, were from England.

Right then now for an Army & Navy sweet and maybe then I'll start writing cards.

Doctoring up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Widow's mite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Horlicks and a Wagon Wheel, please.

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

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

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

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

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

So no. Apparently there's no blog there.

Keep on truckin'

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burning certificates and Bonfire Night

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't really have an opinion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flexible friends

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

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

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

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

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

Peanut butter isn't really a Spanish thing

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

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

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

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

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

This is where we live

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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