Life in Culebrón

Just after lunch a convoy of three tractors passed our front gate. They had the folding umbrella type contraptions on the back that are used to collect almonds. The tractor reverses up to the tree, grabs the tree trunk using some hydraulic thingummy and then fans out the expanse of plastic tarpaulin type material to surround the tree. With the tree grabbed and the material in place the tree is given a good shaking and the almonds fall into the fan of material and roll tractorwards to a collecting chamber. When the collector is full the nuts are usually transferred to a trailer or a lorry and taken off for processing. It just so happens that there is quite a large nut processing factory (I originally wrote processing plant but I thought that may lead to confusion) in Pinoso. On the smaller plots, you'll often see a family group going at an almond or olive tree with sticks with a big sheet or net spread out under the tree to catch the falling fruit.  The tractor driver I talked to to...

Back in April I suspected that I needed a small surgical operation so I made a doctor's appointment. It was a telephone appointment and my doctor said she needed to see me to make a diagnosis. So we met. She agreed with my self diagnosis and she referred me to a surgeon. That's how the family doctors work here in Spain. They basically act as gatekeepers, dealing only with common ailments, passing patients on for anything at all out of the ordinary. So they don't remove warts themselves, they confirm that you have a wart and send you on to someone somewhere who will remove the wart. Often the second doctor, the specialist doctor, confirms the diagnosis of the first doctor and then sets the wheels in process for whatever the next step is. You say my throat hurts, the GP sends you to the ear, nose and throat department where an ear nose and throat doctor tells you that you have polyps (if you have). You are then given another appointment somewhere where someone will cut them o...

Since Christmas we've been trying to lose weight by following some ancient meal plan from the long defunct Closer magazine, a plan that is, almost certainly, now scientifically discredited. We have both lost a fair bit of weight though. Lunch still usually comes from those diet sheet recipes but we're nowhere near as strict and disciplined as we were during the first couple of months. Nowadays we go out for meals whenever we want and I drink beer in bars and if they put crisps on the table I'll wolf them down. If anyone can explain to me how it takes a week of carefully controlled eating to lose a few hundred grammes and just a single chocolate biscuit to regain a kilo I'd be pleased to know. Today's diet meal recipe was new. I'd not tried it because it involves aubergine and courgette. I don't really care for either. The recipe also called for a splash of chilli and tomato sauce. There was none in the cupboard and I knew it was hopeless to go and see if it ...

We are going to have a cut down version of the Pinoso Fiestas next week. Less than usual but much better than nothing. Well done Pinoso! The various conditions to keep the concert type events safe means that the audience for any events has to be controlled and that involves tickets. Most of the events are free so the tickets are called invitations but, nonetheless, you need to have one in your hand to get to see or hear the event. We've had to get the same sort of thing for months, and nearly years, now at lots of venues but mostly the bookings have been possible online. That wasn't the case for Pinoso.  As well as the fiesta events next week there was a concert by a local choir yesterday and the town band have a concert today. I got the band tickets by going to their office one afternoon. A bit of a trek but easy enough. I went to ask at the Cultural Centre about the choir concerts at the beginning of the month and I was told I was too early. I tried, unsuccessfully, on two se...

Being remarkably hip and cool, or whatever you say nowadays for being hip and cool - straight fire Gucci maybe - we go to see a fair number of contemporary musicians. Just so my mum understands I mean pop festivals. We go to see the town band too so, really, we're neither hip nor cool. Never mind. At a music festival, in non Covid times, the security check at the entrance was to look for anything unsafe and to root out food and drink. Nobody likes to pay festival prices for beer or for a rum and coke. Festivals aren't permanent events, more or less by definition. The jobs they provide are temporary. Most of the staff are temporary. And temporary tends to unknown and unknown tends to untrustworthy. Years ago the daughter of one of my work colleagues went to Ibiza for the summer season to work in a bar. The young woman turned up, sober and unstoned, on time, every day, for the whole of her contract. Her boss was so unused to this responsible behaviour from his young, temporary ...

We went to see a band at the Mar de Músicas in Cartagena a few days ago. The Mar de Músicas is a series of musical concerts held over a couple of weeks in the Murcian city of Cartagena. Spain was quick to open up theatres and cinemas and audience venues in general after the total shutdown in the Spring of last year. The venues adapted. Things, generally, had to be booked online beforehand, even for free events. The programmes started much earlier than is normal in Spain. The capacity of venues was drastically reduced and there were all sorts of restrictions about entering and leaving the venue and where you could sit. I have felt much less safe in supermarkets, where the tussle for the unblemished and tasteless tomatoes went on much as before, or in bars and restaurants, where friends and acquaintances greet each other effusively, than I have over the Covid time in a theatre or cinema. Some of the Covid measures were a nuisance. I don't like giving my phone number and email address...

Last week we went on holiday. We stopped off at a couple of places but our destination was Finisterre, the End of the Earth, in Galicia. When you travel in Spain, which usually means that you will eat in a restaurant, the choice of food is simple. If you were to travel to Valencia for instance you would probably order paella, if you were to come to Pinoso the paella would be the rabbit and snails variety. Go to Cartagena you might try caldero. In Asturias the first choice would probably be fabada and in Cataluña you might try calçots. Eating the regional food is something that Spaniards do when they visit and it's something we mimic. We were in Ponferrada, which is still in León but closing in on Galicia. There was something on the set meals list called botillo which turned out to be a reddish ball like thing full of bones, lumps of fatty pork seasoned with paprika all shoved into a gut skin and served with cabbage, potatoes and chickpeas. It is an experience I won't be repeati...

A few days ago, in Galicia, where we were, you needed a light jacket in the evening. Daytime temperatures were low but, with the sun, it was perfectly pleasant. A Coruña was the worst, weatherwise. As we joined the crowds to protest the homophobic killing of Samuel Luiz it was bucketing down. I know it rains a lot up North but I'd underestimated the Northern Europeanness of the Galician climate, my shorts got a week off and I had to buy more socks. Sandals and trainers with invisible socks were just too Mediterranean. Back in Alicante the sun was cracking the flags. The news was full of weather warnings for everywhere except where we were. Pinoso is quite high up and the temperature only got to about 38ºC but other places in the province got over 40ºC. On the journey back, and yesterday too, we had dust laden skies and high temperatures. So we returned from temperate climes with greenery and rivers to the dustiness of Alicante. Yesterday was the first full day back so there were sw...

In Spanish shopping centres, like everywhere else, the fronts of shops are, often, open. The idea is obvious enough. The shops want to make sure that there is no barrier to you buying something. It's not the same in small towns. There shops not only have doors but they are also, often, locked. You have to ring a bell to get in. It's not for security, not in the jeweller's shop sense, but it is because the staff in lots of smaller businesses aren't exactly waiting, poised, for the next customer. It's not just shops. For instance you have to ring the bell to get into the Footwear Museum in Elda. So I went to buy an inner tube for my bike. The fly curtain covered the front door of the shop. There was a bell. Once upon a time I would have found this odd but I've rung so many bells here that it's just normally normal nowadays. I rang it. Nobody came. I realised there was a note on the door. It said ring the bell. It also said if we don't answer telephone th...

I'm sure you've heard my theory before that you don't learn popular culture; if you're born somewhere then the culture is yours be that food, music, TV programmes or YouTube influencers. You can't help it. The talk at work, the talk at school, the stuff your parents tell you, the memes and gifs that turn up on your phone, the little snippets you read in the newspaper all help to make sure that you know what's going on. That's how, I suppose, I learned about MOTs, Trooping the Colour, Premium Bonds, the Boat Race, laverbread, the RNLI Lifeboats, Spaghetti Junction, Engelbert Humperdinck, driving on the left and how to make tea.  Changes in language are similar. Ordinary people are in charge. Words and phrases come and go. Some old academic bloke might argue that there is a perfectly good phrase to describe keeping a safe distance during a pandemic but everyone else is going to say social distancing whether he likes it or not. Somebody once asked me about how ...

Last night, well this morning I suppose, the windows started to rattle and the wind howled and the thunder thundered and the lightning lit the bedroom from time to time. When I got up a couple of hours later the sun was shining on the puddles on the patio and the cats were tiptoeing from dry spot to dry spot. It's a sign of the time of year. Like my feet hurting. Neither is new. I've complained about this, the feet that is, a lot. It stems from walking miles in flat bottomed sandals at Benicassim pop festival but the foot pain was always bad each summer long before the Benicassim debacle. Really the trouble starts as I move from proper shoes with proper socks to sandals and lighter shoes worn with those funny short socks. In Spanish the socks are called pinkies. Isn't that a great name? So Summer, early Summer when it's still Spring, is big storms and uncomfortable feet. And flies, hundreds of flies, thousands of flies. No, not just flies really; all sorts of small flyi...

Our neighbours have been putting up a new fence over the past couple of weeks. Facing each other across the footings for what would be the new fence Vicente, for that's the name of our neighbour, was complaining about the builders. I sympathised - one has to with builders. Even builders complain about, other, builders. Taking advantage of his sunny disposition towards me I asked him if he could spare a couple of the concrete blocks that were piled up in his yard. The question I asked was something, in translation, like "Are two of the concrete blocks in excess for you?" I got them and I went away well pleased with myself not only because I had the blocks, but also because I'd used a phrase that a Spaniard would use without having rehearsed it beforehand.  I mentioned this phrase to my online Spanish teacher. I was bemoaning the fact that this, and other, fleeting victories over Spanish are wasted on the audience. I may be pleased with myself for having got the constru...

Luis Garcia Berlanga was a Valencian born, Spanish film director who made some 19 films between 1951 and 2002. He was born on 12 June 1921, 100 years ago give or take, and his centenary is being celebrated all over Spain through lots of screenings, exhibitions and new books. I went to see one of his films, el Verdugo, The Executioner, at the Fundación Paurides in Elda on Wednesday evening.  Now Elda is our nearest large town so I know it reasonably well but I'd never heard of the Paurides Foundation. The bit of town it's in didn't seem particularly salubrious. The woman who dragged her three kids past me as I was locking the car gave me a very fierce look as though I didn't belong. I double checked that I'd locked up securely. Google maps, on my mobile, refused to speak and was almost invisible in the bright 7pm sun as I searched for the venue. I found it though. The Paurides Foundation turned out to be a neighbourhood based arts and culture centre with a nice lit...

We went to see some street theatre last week. It wasn't good. Blokes talking in funny voices wearing tight trousers and red noses as they tripped over imaginary obstacles. What was good was that it was on. We couldn't get past the barriers that marked off the performance areas because we hadn't pre-booked our tickets but it didn't matter much as there was a bar beside two of the three spaces we went to and we were able to sit at the bar, non alcohol beer in hand, and half watch the performances.  If there is still a limitation on the permitted number outside a bar (for ages it was 30% of capacity then 50%, keeping a couple of metres between the tables etc.) it is no longer noticeable. We're all still wearing our masks. I sometimes wonder, as I wash the car down in the local petrol station or tramp across some field looking for cucos, why I'm wearing a mask but I still do. The tea leaves suggest it won't go on much longer. I decided not to add a pack of ten o...

Thanks to William Blake, and probably more particularly to Hubert Parry, we know what colour England is. It's a green and pleasant land. I heard the tune the other day and it made me wonder what colour Spain is. Round here my first thought is dust coloured. Alicante is summer and the summer is all orange and yellow and buff with a bright yellow sun.  Blue as well. People often comment on the blue of the Alicantino sky. And the Med of course, despite being, apparently, full of plastic and other even more horrid things often gleams bright turquoise or sky blue. Just over the border into Castilla la Mancha, where they are a bit short of Mediterranean colour, they like to paint their towns white and indigo blue to compensate.  If the Manchegos paint their towns blue and white the Alicantino tradition is of different colours to the facades of adjacent houses. Villajoyosa is well known for it but even in the streets of Pinoso the tradition is there if you look. Alicantino houses als...

I was in town this morning, on Bulevar, drinking coffee and reading a really interesting book about doors. A car stopped, the driver jumped out and went into the paper shop to get a newspaper. While he was parked, in the middle of the one way street, a van came up behind and had to wait. When the paper purchaser came out of the shop the van driver shouted to him "You couldn't do that in Madrid".  And it's true Nobody would describe Pinoso, or even Culebrón, as "Deep Spain", la España profunda. That's the Spain that's empty, without services, left behind by the modern world. No mobile network, no health services locally, no Internet access, no shops. But lots of Spain is like that; nearly empty. There are hundreds of villages that only have a few inhabitants, usually older people, and there are even villages that are totally abandoned apart from, maybe, occasional weekend and summer occupants. There's a whole movement about la España vaciada, empt...

We were in a traffic jam this last weekend. A proper traffic jam. A traffic jam that kept stopping and starting and which we took half an hour to clear. I felt quite sorry for the bloke in the Porsche Cayenne Coupé. He was originally alongside as we put on the hazard warning lights and slowed to join the tailback. He was so pressed for time though that he had to dodge from lane to lane. It worked. He was at least 100 metres in front of us when the traffic started to move again as the RM19 motorway, the one we were on, merged into the A30 that skirts Murcia city.  I seriously don't remember the last time I was in a similar traffic jam here in Spain. We don't have traffic in the countryside. We really don't. Sometimes, where the Monóvar road meets the Yecla road in Pinoso, there's a police officer to make sure that you don't have problems turning left across traffic but that's only around the time the industrial estate kicks out. On the main roads in and out of Pi...

The modern world is leaving me behind. I've said before about paying for things with my phone. I keep meaning to but, well, I don't really see the point. It looks as though using an app to pay may be slower than taking a plastic card out of my wallet and waving it at the payment terminal. I know I'm not keeping up though. My outlook is wrong. Lots of things that are, apparently, essential, from gaming to only tucking in half of my t-shirt seem a bit pointless to me. It smacks of my dad complaining about my musical tastes. Tom Eliot put it so well in his poem Little Gidding "let me disclose the gifts reserved for age".  It's not that I feel that dinosaur like. I know about Google lens. This morning the arty Spanish podcast I was listening to (on my noise cancelling bluetooth headphones may I add) talked about the 40th anniversary of Bob Marley's death (who I proudly admit to seeing, in concert, in London in 1976). The music that accompanied the piece was a...

Not that I expected a marching band or anything but I did expect a bit more of an event. A queue of people waiting for the vaccination would have made it more memorable, serried ranks of desks each one attended by a little group of medical personnel all in purple gloves would have been good. But none of it. Yesterday I got a phone call on the landline. It was the local health centre and they gave me a time for an appointment today. I left home fifteen minutes before the set time. "I'm here for the jab," I said and I think the person on the door already knew my name rather than reading my name from the health card she asked to see. No temperature check or anything. I was taken to a chair in the corridor, where people normally wait to see the doctors, and told to wait. I was given a couple of stapled bits of the sort of photocopy where the second copy was made from a copy and the third copy from the second copy and so on for forty generations. Stencil quality. The first she...

I always called it Road Tax and I suppose that's what it really was, in the beginning. You had a car and you paid tax that was then used to build and repair roads. It's not a principle that's applied to schools or social services but I can see the sense.  Not everybody needs roads so the people with vehicles pay. But UK road tax was abolished in 1937, long before even I was born, and replaced by Vehicle Excise Duty. This is, and was, a tax on cars, not roads, and it goes straight into the general fund. Here in Spain I pay a vehicle tax too. It's charged by the local town hall and collected on their behalf by a tax management agency, called SUMA. SUMA is a local organisation created by most of the Alicante town halls, working collectively, to collect local taxes. The tax on the Arona for this year is a bit short of 18€. Obviously comparing a local tax with a central government tax is unreasonable but it looks as though the Vehicle Excise Duty in the UK for the same car w...

Valencia, the region we live in, has had less severe Covid restrictions than some other regions. Bars and restaurants, cinemas and theatres, shops and hairdressers have been open, with varying restrictions, since May of 2020. We've been confined to our region and there has been a curfew from ten in the evening for months and months but, overall, we've got off pretty lightly. On May 9th the State of Emergency will end and, when it does, heaven knows what will happen. The Spanish Constitution outlines rights and duties and free movement is one of the rights. I'm interested to see how things go as the regional governments try to enforce restrictions that will be challenged as unconstitutional in the courts. Spain hasn't yet reaped many of the apparent benefits of mass immunisation because the vaccination programme has been very slow. At first the organisation was a bit slapdash but now the main problem seems to be the supply of the various vaccines. The regional health aut...