Far, far away

I used to visit Spain as a tourist long before I lived here. Usually I'd just buy a plane ticket and then find a hotel/pension when I got to wherever. Travelling around was done by public transport. 

I've always liked trains. For tourists cast adrift in a foreign land, they have the big advantage, over buses, of going to stations that have name plaques. Provided you know the name of the place you're going then it's just a case of being able to read. Of course this is long before trains, trams and buses began to speak or you could GPS track your position.

Now Spain isn't bad at signing things but it isn't good either. Signs are apt to be missing when you most need them. Sometimes they are there but not obvious. They lurk. Not big enough. Not in your eyeline. Not right somehow. Once you get the hang of it they are more noticeable but that's when you don't need them. When you're in a hurry, flustered, weighed down by kilos of baggage etc., they never seem to be there.

So, I'm in Madrid, I decide to go to el Escorial for the day. I get off the train. The few people who get off at the same halt go both left and right at the station entrance. I have no idea which way it is to town. I chose badly. It was the same in Almeria and in countless other places. I sometimes walked miles in the wrong direction dragging my luggage (some genius had still to put wheels on suitcases) before finally getting somewhere central. 

Monóvar is a town about 15 minutes drive from Pinoso.You pass through it going from our house to the motorway. When we first moved here we passed what was obviously a railway station with a board outside that read Monóvar-Pinoso.  We presumed it was a rail line between the two towns. We asked around and were told there was no longer a railway line to Pinoso but that the station was still in use and that it was possible to catch a train from there to far away Bilbao in the Basque Country. It wasn't true. It was just the sort of dodgy information that we Britons provide to other Britons. It was simply the old, long closed, railway station in the town of Monóvar which had also served Pinoso in the forgotten past. In the same way that PG Wodehouse always used to have Lord Emsworth send someone from Blandings Castle to meet the train in Market Blandings there must have been taxis or carters moving people and goods between Pinoso and Monóvar.

Right then, after five or so paragraphs of round the houses, my point is that Spain has a habit of putting its train stations a fair way from the town centre and without any signs for luggage hauling pedestrians. Not always I should add. Alicante and Murcia, Madrid and Valencia, for example, all have central railway stations

Spain has had high speed trains for ages. After I'd been to the Expo in Seville in 1992 I caught the high speed train, the AVE, to Cordoba just to have a go. I was given a glass of sherry and a newspaper as I boarded by a young uniformed woman who I suspect had been chosen for reasons that would not now be acceptable. When the line from Albacete to Madrid opened at Christmas in 2010 we drove the 90 minutes to Albacete to catch the AVE to Cuenca just for the experience or 300km/h travel. As we arrived there were people on the approaches to the station to watch the train arrive. They were there because it was still novel. Mind you there's not much to do in Cuenca on a Sunday. The AVE station in Cuenca is miles from the town centre. The bus that joins the old Main Square to the station takes 24 minutes to complete its route.

It was the same when the line was extended from Madrid to Alicante. We were there to try it out. Our nearest AVE station is in Villena; the most underused station on the whole of the AVE network. When the route for the line was being decided one of the possibilities was that it would follow the traditional tracks which run right through the middle of Villena. The locals weren't for that. They wanted the lines to run underground so that they didn't have to wait at level crossing time after time. So Adif, the people who own the lines and stations and so on, saved themselves a shedload of cash and hassle by running the line through open country close to Villena. Now it takes about a quarter of an hour to drive to the station from the middle of Villena. I bet they wish the unused land option was open them in Murcia. In Murcia city there have been pitched battles between locals, opposed to the route chosen, and the police. The tracks are set to run through an economically challenged neighbourhood on the approach to the city.

Anyway. Only a couple of weeks ago the extension of the line from Alicante to Elche to Orihuela. that will finally continue to Murcia, was opened. I had to go to Elche yesterday because there was some recall on the software on my car (cars used to be recalled for problems with the brakes or fuel lines or some such but now it's software) so I thought I'd have a look at the new AVE station when I was there. Google maps got me there. The station is down a twisty track in a field in one of Elche's pedanias, called Matola. It's 8 kilometres from the town centre and the signs were few and far between, a bit like putting the bus station for Pinoso in Culebrón. 

Names are not always what they seem

My latest book is a political biography about the bloke who was President of Spain, on the losing side, in the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. I heard it reviewed on a podcast I listen to. Normally, when I read or hear about a potential book to read I download a sample to my eBook or save it to a wants list so that, when the time comes to buy something, I have a few queued up ready to compare and contrast. Like all the books I read in Spanish I will forget the title and author. Spanish names just don't stick. I've often had conversations with Spaniards asking if I've read something. I deny all knowledge but then, as they describe the content, I have to admit that I have.

I'd heard mention of a book by Benjamin Black on the Spanish radio; it was being offered as a competition prize. It turns out that Benjamin Black is a pen name for the Irish writer John Banville. I had never heard his name before yet I have no trouble at all remembering it. Why do I remember John Banville just as easily as I forget Josefina Carabias? I suppose the answer is because I'm British and the name John Banville (or Benjamin Black) has a resonance that a Spanish name doesn't. Of course it may be another sign of the years passing like my increasingly frequent visits to the toilet.

It's the same for Spaniards - namewise not bladderwise. My second name John doesn't flow properly for the majority of Spanish people who have to write it down. They often write Jhon instead which seems better, probably righter, to them. Spaniards typically have two surnames - dad's first and mum's second (though there's no problem with reversing them). So if I were named the Spanish way I'd be Christopher Thompson Marriot or maybe Christopher Marriot Thompson. Thompson was my dad's surname and Marriot my mum's maiden surname. Because I have two forenames - Christopher John - but only one surname - Thompson - lots of Spaniards presume that my first surname is John and my second surname is Thompson. Traditionally the first surname is used in address. Pablo Iglesias Turrión, one of our vice presidents, is usually referred to as Pablo Iglesias, for example. So I get lots of emails and post addressed to Sr. Christopher Jhon.

Keep it simple, stupid

I bought some porridge oats the other day. The supermarket ones were missing from the shelf so I shelled out double the price for some branded ones, Oatabix. There was a label on the side of the packet. It was a bit like the label you get on electrical goods to show how energy efficient they are. The one on food is called Nutri-Score. I'd never seen it before but it's simple enough. Green is good, orangey yellows are okey dokey and red is a certain ticket to purgatory.

Apparently the French invented the label using some UK Food Standards Agency scoring system. It uses seven indicators: energy (lots of calories) -bad, sugar -bad, saturated fats -bad, sodium -bad, fibre - good, protein - good. So far, so good. It's not that hard to see the sense. Obviously it's an oversimplification but that's the idea; to make it simple and fast. I think it's a good idea.

Now, imagine you're Spanish and you think that the Mediterranean diet is the bee's knees even though you actually eat McDonald's and Domino's pizza when the opportunity arises. The shorthand idea of the Mediterranean Diet is about lots of salads and fruit, a good deal of wine, some nuts, plenty of fish and litres and litres of olive oil. In fact, apparently it's much more complicated, it's a whole lifestyle. I wrote a blog about it a while ago should you care to look.

So the Spanish Government has recommended the NutriScore labelling system (EU laws don't allow countries to unilaterally impose their own food labelling system so it can only be a recommendation). The trouble is that it gives extra virgin olive oil a sort of midway label and that other star of Spanish cuisine, jamón ibérico (a cured ham), a similarly coloured label. Yesterday on the TV news journalists were out in the street with a can of diet Coke in one hand and a plate of 5Js Iberico ham in the other asking people which they thought was healthier. They did the same with tomato ketchup and olive oil. You can imagine the indignation.

Zed's dead baby, Zed's dead.

When I do my online Spanish classes I talk about things that have happened to me in Pinoso. One of my teachers is obviously quite taken with this bucolic existence. He seems particularly tickled by some of the names - the Angustias, Hilarios, Artemios, Pompilias and Laureanos, - but he also likes the little stories about the more mundane names, the Virginias, Remes, Juancos, Elsas and Enriques. I think it's the idea that, even as a complete outsider, I still use names to describe people. The plumber isn't the plumber he's Lucrecio and the optician is Elsa and the bloke who sells me gas is Quique.

I was reminded of this by a literary reference to an esquela. An esquela tells you that someone has died. I occasionally hear an esquela on the local radio to say that Don or Doña such and such has died aged whatever and that the service will be at 11am this morning in such and such a church and that his or her family are upset. More commonly though I see a piece of A4 paper pasted to the side of the church or in other prominent spots around the town. They are not big, they are not flashy and I suppose that the undertakers put them up rather than kith and kin wandering around with sheaves of A4 copies. They are not looking for a lost dog after all.

Not that I usually loiter near death notices but I was close to one, waiting in the street, for a quarter of an hour or so the other day and the esquela on the side of the church got a constant trickle of visitors. Nearly everyone except the very young slowed down long enough to at least check the name. Older people tend to linger longer. Sometimes a couple of friends, or at least acquaintances, will come together at the notice. The conversation is easy enough to invent.

The book that prompted this post mentioned that there were esquelas on the wall in the author's home town. She suggested that they are not a feature of the big cities. The inference was obvious. That smaller places still have communities whilst bigger places don't. Maybe she's right. Maybe that's why Quim is so amused by my stories of Alfredo cutting my hair or even why I have stories to tell him about Alfredo and his long gone dad.

Lola sings

I presume that Spaniards know what Coplas sound like. I don't really. No, let's be honest I don't at all. I know it's a sort of poetic metre and, having Googled it, I now know that the copla is a form with four verses and four lines in each verse. Coplas have a musical form too. Again, remembering that I am probably wrong, think of an overwrought Spanish waily sort of song and you probably have it. On the other hand you may be thinking of something a bit too Flamenco. Andalucia is the part of Spain that supplies nearly all the clichés - the frocks, the hats, the dancing, the horses, the sherry, the bulls etc. and a strong and regularly mimicked accent. I think coplas are Andaluz too.

Not to let detail get in the way of a post there was a big, blousy woman called Lola Flores who was famous for singing coplas. I've half looked at a couple of videos and she does a lot of lifting her dress off the floor and stamping as she sings. Lola was famous for her performances on stage, screen and TV but also for saying what she thought and for not paying her taxes. I heard something on the radio about her today where she was standing up for trans women. Given that she died in 1995 and that her peak years were in the 1970s that must have been a radically brave opinion. 

So Lola is a long dead Spanish icon. She's all over the place at the moment though because of a beer advert. For Cruzcampo an Andalucian beer which I quite like but which has plenty of detractors. Given that it's owned by Heineken, they're probably right. The video is made with a technology called Deepfake which digitally places the face of one person on the body of another and generates moving images. So, in this ad the face of Lola Flores is grafted on to the body, I think, of her daughter Lolita Flores. The daughter does the voice too, but the moving face looks like Lola. 

In the ad Lola goes on about the Andalucian accent, which, as she explains isn't just about how you speak but how you put on makeup or how you dip your bread in fried egg - it's the essence of home, your roots and the importance of being true to yourself. There are lots of side references to Andaluz culture, like the painting that I've used in the heading. It's a stylish, modern ad that basks in Andalucia and features a couple of still slightly undiscovered but hip (if you still say hip) musicians including the band Califato ¾ and a singer a bit Rosalía like called María José Llergo. 

It's a talking point. I've seen newspaper articles about the ad, a slot on the TV news and an academic style interview, on an artsy radio programme, about Lola's lasting influence on popular culture. A soon as I looked on YouTube there are "making of" videos and lots of commentaries on it, as well as the original ad.

Because of the media burble about it I took more interest. I was well pleased that I knew the slightly hip musicians but there were three or four words that I didn't know. Obviously I do now. I thought a couple of them were great. Quejío for instance is a word to describe the "Aayyyy!" sound in Andaluz type songs and the other was Cochinchina which means something miles and miles away. It's based on the French word for the part of Vietnam that France first occupied in the 1860s. Remember the French got kicked out of Vietnam before the USA. How arcane is that?

Maggie says I'm a bit odd at times but I was really pleased how much of Spain I was able to extract from a, finally, inconsequential sixty second TV advert. Nice job Cruzcampo.

The way it goes

Over the weekend the wind blew lots of branches off our fig trees and uprooted a two metre high aloe vera plant that I've never much cared for. It took me three trips with the wheelbarrow to haul the remains away. At least the wind means that it's not quite as cold.

When we first bought the house one of the few good things about it was the tree lined drive. We still have the trees despite the sport practised by so many visiting vans and lorries of reversing in to them - usually serially. In fact, rather as you would expect, they are somewhat taller now than when we first moved in. I was listening to the two big pointy ones nearest the house creaking in the wind. Culebrón, like Skegness, can be bracing.  The tree alongside the house is at least 10 metres tall, a plumber warned us against it. Roots under the house, blocking up the drains, he threatened. The tree a bit further away, possibly a larch, is even taller and heavier. They probably won't blow over but they might. I can imagine the interrogation from the insurers about our tree care regime.

I suppose of more immediate concern is the virus. A very pleasant chap who worked in one of the offices in the town hall in Pinoso, a bloke in his early fifties, died of it the other day, in some ways his was a more public death than the others in our little town. Our municipal cases per 100,000 figure stands at around 1,300. 

Spain's health service, like those in so many in other countries, is creaking as much as our trees. Every day on the TV and radio there is a procession of medics saying how the hospitals are at breaking point. It's as repetitive as the pictures of police breaking up some after hours party with an apparently incredulous newsreader pointing out that the young people involved were not wearing masks and not keeping apart. The measures to try and keep people from spreading the virus keep changing and tightening as much as they can given the rules of the current State of Emergency. Here in Valencia all the bigger towns and cities will be sealed off each weekend and all bars and restaurants are now closed. Ours were some of the last to go. At home the rules say that you cannot have visitors and out in the street only two people can get together unless they are cohabitees. I presume that means that the Ladybird Book family of mum, dad, daughter and son can go out for a walk together but, if they meet Uncle Billy, then only dad, or mum, or daughter, or son can go to greet him. Then again it may be that the cohabiting group counts as one person. Not that the detail matters much unless you want to have an academic argument and maintain that the virus is a hoax, that the figures are distortions, that it's all a terrible attack on our civil liberties, that the constitution guarantees freedom of movement and that you're not going to put up with a boot stamping on a human face—for ever. Otherwise, keeping yourself to yourself as much as possible seems a remarkably sensible thing to do.

As you probably know I like going to the pictures and, amazingly, the cinemas are still able to open. Lots of them have closed because they have no audience, same with the theatres, but they can, legally, stay open. I presume that's because not a single outbreak has been linked to them. Again, not that surprising as the audiences are tiny. We went to the pictures on Sunday. The shopping centre where the cinema is was locked shut. We had to ask a security guard to find the one remaining open entrance. A completely deserted shopping centre is a surprisingly eerie place. Sepulchral comes to mind as an adjective to describe something there but I couldn't think of a good way to use it.

Electricity bills and borrascas

Here they are called Borrascas, I'm not sure what they are in English but something like storms or maybe Atlantic Lows. The storms that come in from the Atlantic and nowadays, just like hurricanes, have alternating and alphabetically arranged female and male names - Ana and Bertie, Charlotte and Derek. A little over a week ago Filomena, brought lots of snow which caused problems all over central Spain, particularly in Madrid, and low temperatures everywhere.

When it gets cold, and more so when it gets hot, Spain uses more electric. This is not a great surprise. The nuclear power stations never go offline but all the other forms of electricity generation have ups and downs. You can't pull so much from wind turbines if there is no wind, the solar panels don't work so well at night and even the hydroelectric stations are affected by droughts and rainstorms. When all else fails the gas and oil fired power stations are brought on line. The power generated from these fossil fuel plants is the most expensive to produce. Through some complicated mathematical formula a Spanish Government agency calculates the cost of generating each individual unit of electric at any given time. This fixed price is based on the most expensive generating capacity in use. So when the demand is so high that the gas and oil burning power stations are fired up the price goes up to match. This fixed price affects the bills of ordinary consumers. More precisely it affects the price of users in the regulated market because Spain has two sorts of domestic electric contracts: the regulated market and the free market

The energy market in Spain was liberalised years ago. When it first happened I looked around a bit at different providers and I couldn't see any advantages in changing. With the passing years, that situation has changed and I should have shopped around but inertia and I have always seen eye to eye. 

We don't get cold callers in Culebrón, actually that's not true, a couple of Witnesses turned up in 2005 and occasionally the melon man blows his horn outside the gate but, in general, peace reigns. I hear it's not the same in the big cities with an endless procession of smooth talking salespeople bearing electric and gas contracts pounding on people's doors. It's not something the telephone sales people try to sell us either.

Every now and again the price of electricity gets media coverage. Last week we apparently reached the highest price ever. The kerfuffle in the media made me curious and I had a look to see how it was all organised and what sort of contract we had.

Although the devil's in the detail there are, fundamentally, just two options for those properties with a supply of less than 10kw. The regulated tariff and the free market tariff. The regulated tariff uses prices per unit of electricity set by the government. This is the one that gets the media mention. This is the tariff that we have. If you're in Spain and you have this sort of contract your will have the letters PVPC somewhere on your contract or, if it's written in English, VPSC. It's Precio Voluntario al Pequeño Consumidor for those who are interested.

The second tariff, the free market tariff, is the alternative and it's available everywhere from over 270 providers. What the contracts offer, how much they cost and what they include and exclude is only limited by the ingenuity of the contract writer. Potential customers compare the various offers and sign on the dotted line for whichever option they think is best. My guess is that the permutations between the fixed costs, the unit price, inclusion of service contracts and other factors are almost boundless. This is where the price comparison websites must come into their own. If you need a supply of more than 10kw this is the only option available to you.

The regulated tariff, the one affected by the official government price, is only available from the eight power companies which are called Comercializadores de Referencia which, sort of, translates as the Reference Marketers. In the regulated tariff contracts the fixed or standing charges and the per unit price are separate. There are three options or modalities about how the units of power are offered and charged. Option one is that the charge is the same at any time of the day or night, option two is that the day is divided into two twelve hour periods with a higher and a lower price for each period and the last option is that the day is divided into three eight hour slots with three different prices per unit at the different times - the last one is particularly useful for people with electric cars to charge.

The Comercializadores de Referencia can also offer a fixed price annual tariff. In that case they tell you how much each kilowatt will cost during a calendar year and you sign up (or not) knowing that will be the price without being subject to the ups and downs of the market.

With trying to work out how our regulated bill was put together I read the bill properly for more or less the first time ever. Generally I just look at how much and when I have to pay. We get our electric from Curenergía which is a part of Iberdrola and I realised that they had already done most of the donkey work for me in the small print at the bottom of the bill. They do an analysis which gives comparisons between how much you have paid with your current modality and how much you would have paid under one of the other modalities. I still couldn't be bothered to go hunting around for the best deal on the free market but I did realise that simply by going to the sort of bill where the prices are different for each twelve hour period we could save maybe 100€ a year and I could do that online in a few minutes.

So I did.

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The photo by the way is from back in 2010 when I taught English to people who worked at this gas fired power station in Cartagena. The plant was later bought by Gas de France. I remember being told that the whole plant had been on standby for a whole year, not used at all, and that if they were needed it took a few days to bring the plant online.

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.