Life in Culebrón

I'm going to tell you some things that I think Spaniards think about the British. You may notice the teensy weensy little flaw here. Actually though, when I say what Spanish people think I should change that to what several Spaniards have said to me, over the years, about Britain and the British. So my Englishness is not, really, a handicap. When I say Britain and the British, I actually mean England and the English. Occasionally the Scots get a mention, because of the supposed similarity to the Catalans and because Mel Gibson, like all Scottish men, wore a skirt. No Spaniard I've met has ever voiced their opinion about the Welsh or the Northern Irish.  Lots of Spaniards think that we are the only country in the world that drives on the other side of the road. This belief is usually mixed with an undertone that suggests we English are a bit full of ourselves. After all, don't we use different measures for length and weight too? I know, as do you, that there are about 70 or ...

I was wearing green flares and a pink shirt with a big collar when I took my first driving test. I was a callow youth of 16. That first licence only allowed me to drive a three wheeler (and probably ride a moped) but, when I turned 17, I passed the car driving test and got a bunch of other classes of vehicles added to my little red driving licence booklet. So I've had a licence for well over 50 years now. That original "full" driving licence included specific classes for vehicles such as invalid carriages, road rollers and trolley vehicles. Later, probably when I got one of those folding green and pink two part driving licences, the classes changed to the ones that have been stable now for years. - two wheelers in class A, cars and light vans as class B, goods vehicles class C and class D for buses and the like. British photocard licences were introduced a couple of years before the new millennium and I think the design has remained basically the same till the present day...

I haven't spent Christmas in the UK for umpteen years, so I may not be as expert on British customs as I think. Nonetheless, unless things have changed drastically, the first tentative signs of Christmas show up in the shops in September. By November the telly is full of Christmas ads full of good cheer, bonhomie and cute robins. Cities, towns and villages start to turn on lights from mid-December and even with online shopping I'm sure that shopping centres, supermarkets and places like restaurants and pubs get busier and busier through December, all building up to the big day. Finally, it's Christmas Day. You do your best to look pleased with the illuminated pullover and the novelty underwear and you console yourself by setting about the mountains of food. Boxing Day you might stay at home to and eat and drink more, or it may be that you have to visit relatives. Maybe, instead, you might thirst for action after so much slouching around and go for a bracing walk or head out...

We were in a restaurant last week. The food was reasonable enough as was the price. At first the service was good but, despite repeated efforts to draw a waiter's attention, it took us around 25 minutes to get the after food coffee. This has happened a lot recently. Waiting table in Spain used to be a well respected profession. That seems to be less so nowadays and, in my opinion, service has worsened over the years. This made me wonder about other things that have changed since we moved here. My guess is that some of the changes have nothing much to do with Spain, just to do with the world. After all in our first rented flat the Internet was dial up - the modem connected to the phone socket and there was a lot of squealing and singing as it connected. It didn't matter much because there were hardly any Spanish websites that functioned properly anyway.  Ringing people in the UK used to be an expensive or relatively difficult process. I remember that nearly all of we immigrants ...

I went to get a flu jab today. Not the trickiest of procedures. The first time I did it here I was in a hospital for something else and there was a bloke giving away free vaccine in the hospital entrance so I stopped and got one. Last year, in the dark days of one of the several waves of Covid, the health centre was in silence and I was severely disinfected and made to follow arrows on the floor which pointed to the young woman with the sharp needle. I've got the jab another couple of times as well and the process has been swift and painless (in both senses). I'd booked up my jab using the health service's mobile phone app. Ten past ten. I rolled up at nine minutes past and asked someone on reception where to go. She waved to the seats where lots of people were waiting. I waited and I waited. I had a bit of a chat with Enrique and a much longer one with Dorothy. It began to get stupid. I went over and collared someone wearing white pyjamas. "No idea," she said, ...

Lots of Spaniards find my name difficult to pronounce and so they tend to Hispanicize it. I'm Crees-toff-air. I know that Ruth gets Root and I know at least one person who generally uses his name in the Spanish form, Ricardo rather than Richard. He says it's easier than repeatedly correcting the mispronunciation.  Sometimes, of course, there is pure racism in the mispronunciation of a name, as in the case of Trump supporters and Kamala Harris or the renaming of someone because their name is "unpronounceable". Suggesting that a name is unsayable is a not too subtle form of belittling people by belittling the culture they come from. Last year's Twitter storm over the University teacher who suggested to Phuc Bui Diem Nguyen that she anglicised her name, because it sounded like an insult in English, comes to mind. Anyway, although the politics of names might be an interesting post let's get back to where I started.  I was doing one of my online italki sessions thi...

In the 1970s I wore cheesecloth shirts and loons. I don't now. Looking back I shouldn't have then. In the film Beau Brummel, the one with Stewart Granger and Elizabeth Taylor, Beau caused a bit of a sensation when he appeared at court wearing full-length trousers rather than knee breeches and stockings. Watching the Pinoso Half Marathon it struck me that the competitors were wearing clothes that would have been outlandish at best, and scandalous at worst, not so long ago. Fashions change as they always have. If not I'd be dressed like Francis Drake or Somerset Maughan and Inditex and Primark would be customerless. Despite this constant change lots and lots of events in Spain feature something that we tend to call traditional dress. I was reminded of this when we went to see the start of a romería in Yecla the other day. There was no traditional costume there but it was something traditional, the repetitive, apparently unchanging ritual of rural, and not so rural, Spain. One...

In time honoured fashion I used to start every English teaching session with questions. You know the sort of thing. What have you done this weekend?, What did you have for breakfast? As an answer to the second question I was surprised how many youngsters told me that, if they had anything and most didn't, they had milk. Then I realised that, when they said milk, they meant chocolate flavoured milk. Nesquik for instance. A Spanish tradition is chocolate with churros. We Brits usually describe churros as being like doughnuts except that they are made with a different dough and have a different taste but it's close enough. It's a typical breakfast in lots of Spain, a popular treat and it's a particular favourite on Sunday mornings. It's also one of those things that young people do at five or six in the morning after a night on the town. The churros are nearly always served with a thick, sugary, chocolate drink. We have an Industrial Estate in Pinoso. It's like tho...

Lots of the local town halls near Culebrón offer guided walks and visits. The most straightforward are things like a visit to a castle or a Bronze Age settlement where, often, the description is a routine list of dates and facts. There are, however, other visits which are much more innovative. To be honest I couldn't remember all of them if I tried but things like "theatricalised" visits are reasonably common; pointed Maid Marian hats and velvet doublet and hose in Sax Castle to explain the building's history or frock coats and Beryl Patmore uniforms at a Victorian house in Bullas through to people dressed in Civil War Republican overalls explaining the anti aircraft gun emplacement in Petrer. We've done horror stories in the Casa Modernista in Novelda and wandered around Yecla with live music to complement the buildings we were shown. For that one think musicians, using 15th Century instruments and a song relating to plague victims with the backdrop of an arch kn...

One of my first ever brushes with Spanish rules and regulations was when I decided that we needed a second butane bottle for the heater in the flat we were renting in Santa Pola. What now seems eminently sensible - that before you can start using bottled gas in your home somebody needs to check that the installation is safe - seemed very Orwellian back then. A future with a boot stamping on a human face - forever. All I wanted was to buy a gas bottle and they wanted to see ID, they wanted me to prove where I lived, they wanted me to sign a contract and they wanted a technician to visit to make sure it was all safe. Having lived here a long time now and having seen the news stories of blocks of flats destroyed with dodgy gas installations and having heard how insurance companies love to avoid paying out if you can't show proof of a current five year check or even if the rubber pipes are past their sell by date, then I am very happy to do as I should. Anyway, there was a bit of a loo...

Ruth, Dave, Maggie and I had a conversation about sandwiches the other day. Ruth wondered what you had to do to get sliced tomato in a bar ordered sandwich. It's true that, if you ask for a ham or cheese sandwich with tomato in a Spanish bar, you'll get the bread moistened with tomato pulp. So, if you want slices, you have to be determined and specify that you want sliced tomato. This will be considered a little eccentric by the server. I'm a simple sort of bloke and when I think sandwich I think of something like meat or cheese between two bits of bread. I know that for some Britons the word sandwich is more specific - sandwiches, for them, are made with slices of bread and they use other words like roll or baguette to describe different but similar, items. Most Spaniards would tend to agree. Just to be clear here I want to emphasise that there are a lot of Spaniards and I've not spoken to all of them so my generalisations may or may not be 100% true for every Spaniar...

One of the worst films I've ever seen in Spanish, and I've seen some shockers, is called Balada triste de trompeta by the director Álex de la Iglesia. There is one good scene in it though. The protagonists have just finished their meal. The waiter asks if anyone wants coffee and every one of the fifteen or so people around the table specifies a different type of coffee. This is not the Starbucks/Costa/Nero thing. No big coffees served in everything from bucket sized mugs to drinking through a hole in a plastic topped, hand scorching, paper cup. No expensive buns either. No this is just common or garden coffee in a common or garden bar or restaurant. It's one of those things I'd stop noticing but we were on holiday in Andalucia last week and I, we, noticed this very specific ordering because of the accent - the Andalucians have a way of swallowing letters - and because, as good holidaymakers, we were gawping around us. From time to time people still ask about instant co...

Lumi, Elena and José Antionio were most amused. We were in the Culebrón village hall and I'd just asked if the collective name for people from Culebrón were Culebronista. They put me right, I'd be a Culebronero. The Spaniards told me that the -ista ending was usually for supporters of something. I thought Culebronistas sounded good but I was probably thinking about the Nicaraguan Sandinistas from the time when Dani Ortega was still a bit of a hero and not the raving despot that he is nowadays. You're going to have to stick with me now for a bit of Spanish grammar. I'll try to keep it brief. Spanish has two genders for its words so Lumi, being female, would be a Culebonera and Jose Antonio, being male, would be a Culebronero. In the language sense sex and gender don't always match. Of the many Spanish slang words for penis at least four I know are, grammatically, feminine - picha, polla, chorra and verga - while a couple of the many slang words for a vagina are coño ...

When I was young I was confused about many things. One of them was the Martini adverts. There were beautiful people Martini drinkers in floaty fabrics with red or white coloured drinks and sunny backdrops. Then there were Hollywood Martini drinkers at posh parties in elegant frocks and dinner jackets with conical cocktail glasses and swizzle sticks. It took me years to work out that Martinis and Martini were different things.  Anyway, Martini, the stuff with the bright young things, like Cinzano is just a branded vermouth and, as so often, we Britons think of something Italian when we think of Mediterranean staples. Vermouth is, basically a wine with various herbs, spices, barks and plant extracts added to give it a particular taste. Wikipedia tells me the name originates from the German word wermut which means wormwood and wormwood is used in nearly all vermouth to give it that particular flavour. So, years ago, in a Spanish evening class, the teacher told us that most bars in Spa...

Eating is a bit of a thing in Spain. Not a bit of a thing like it is in South Sudan, not in the sense of needing to eat to avoid dying, but eating for pleasure. It's also a never exhausted topic of conversation. Lunch is the main meal of the day in Spain and cheap set meals, a few euros on each side of 10€, are available all over the place. I know that most Britons living here don't agree with me but I can't remember the last time I had a memorable set menu in that price range. They're fine, some are better than others, most are perfectly pleasant but few, none actually, come to mind as showing much flair. For a bit of cooked sea bass or steak the set menus are incredible value. The ones I enjoy most though are the restaurants that have set meals costing something like 25 to 35€. Its enough money for the restaurants to be creative but, when the bill comes, I don't wonder about the sanity of just having spent a new mobile phone's worth of cash on something that w...

I've lived in houses with gardens before - but small gardens, a bit of earth to turn, a patch of grass to mow. Nothing much to speak of. Gardens that were more useful as places to park the bike or to hang the washing than to grow gladioli or fennel. Nowadays we have a biggish garden, plenty of space to build a pool for instance. There may even be enough space for a tennis court. Or not. I don't really know how big a tennis court is. The last time I played tennis was a while ago, when those yellow balls were a bit of a novelty, when one of my closest pals was called Spud and when I used a bike as my form of transport.  The style of garden is bare earth, to help prevent scrub fires, with quite a lot of fruit trees and a few bushes and plants. I don't know what most of them are called but I do know that we have olive, quince, peach, apple, pomegranate, fig, loquat, almond and cherry trees as well as various grape vines and a healthy looking passion fruit that has spread all al...

I've been trying to learn Spanish for ages, long before we got here 17 years ago. In fact I started my first Spanish class in 1983. I'm talking about evening classes, maybe an hour or two per week for a ten week term. It takes a long time to clock up the hours especially when you consider that you're usually in a class with maybe a dozen other people. The important thing about the classes was the routine, the commitment. Doing a class meant homework exercises, grinding through verb tables and learning lists of vocabulary. However many times someone tries to sell you a course that they promise will teach you Spanish (or any other language) in a few hours just consider this. Imagine you want to learn a poem or a literary quote in your native language. You'll know the words and you'll know the pronunciation, all you have to do is remember the words in the correct order. How long do you reckon it might take? It used to take me ages to learn those "O" level Sha...

The other day I rang someone who I've been friends with for nearly 50 years. We talked about trees, we talked about fish dying in the Mar Menor and we talked about when organic veg aren't really organic veg. We also talked about language learning. It was that conversation which prompted me to write this two part blog. My pal, who has been learning German for years, recommended a YouTube series called Easy - Easy German in her case and Easy Spanish in mine. I watched the video and thought crikey, if that's easy my Spanish is worse than I thought. Here's the link if you're interested.   The particular episode talked about things not to do in Spain. Here's the list. 1 Never turn up on time - the example they use in the video is a party. Spaniards do turn up on time for lots of things but the basic notion is good. 2 Never go to the shops between 2 and 5 in the afternoon. Again lots of town centre shops and supermarkets open in the afternoon but the basic premise is ...