Sounds British

The rolled R is essential to pronouncing Spanish well. I have trouble rolling Rs. I told you how I paid good money to a speech therapist to try and fix my problem. Nowadays, when I remember, I can make a sound that's good enough to pass muster as a rolled R but it's not a part of my normal everyday speech, it's not something I do without thinking. That's because most of the time I speak English. I have no problem with my British R and I don't have to think about how to pronounce it.

I was talking to a couple of friends, one is Scottish and one sounds Scottish, so they both roll their Rs easily enough. They were telling a story though about making an appointment. There had been confusion between an appointment at 2pm (dos) and 12pm (doce). The pronunciation of dos is a bit like the English doss - a nice wide open o - like in bother or otter rather than the o in hello. There is a tendency for we Brits to pronounce it more like dose. The pronunciation of 12, doce, is something like dough-thay or maybe doth-thay. The way the words are pronounced is not really the important point here though. The important feature is that the stress in the two words is different. My guess is that when our friends were confirming the appointment the Spanish person heard the vowel sound from one word and not from the other.

Stick with me. Like those who wear old fashioned wigs I'm building a case.

People keep asking me what I do with myself now that I'm old and retired with nothing to do. The truth is, as an ex work colleague told me, what happens is that the things that were once shoehorned into the working day now expand to fill the void. My days are full, I often feel a bit pushed even, but I suppose that my concerns are all a bit smaller scale than they once were - have I done the recycling?, have I read a bit of my book?, have I cooked the meal?, stirred the compost?, dewormed the cat? and so on.

One of the things I do is to try to do a bit of Spanish everyday. This isn't just an excuse to mention Ben and Marina, the Notes in Spanish people again, it's because I bought a series of videos from them that gave me the idea for this post. This series of videos is full of tips about learning Spanish. You know the sort of thing - speak every opportunity you get, find yourself a native Spanish speaker to talk to, don't get flustered by getting things wrong, read as much as you can, take delight in the victories and forget the defeats and so on and so on. If you count the videos - each one is available as an English language version or a Spanish version with transcript - I think they said it was over 20 hours - or it may have been 10 hours - either way it's a Netflix series worth.

My own Spanish is alright but it should be better. I've put a lot of work into it over the years and my failings cause me existential angst. I'm not one of those people who has a particular knack for languages, I'm not someone able to mimic sounds and to pick up phrases and constructions from overheard speech without any problem. I don't think many people are. The Britons I know who speak good Spanish seem to do so because they live in a Spanish milieu - living with, married maybe, to a Spanish speaker or working in a Spanish speaking workplace. In effect those people who have no option but to use Spanish for hours and hours on end. British youngsters who have been brought up in Spain, the ones who have been schooled here more or less from the start, not the poor adolescents suddenly dropped into an alien culture, also speak first rate Spanish. Having encountered several over the years I often find that those youngsters have no real difficulty with everyday conversation in either Spanish or English but when it comes to reading and writing or slightly higher level language that it's their English, rather than their Spanish, which is weak. 

The point is, I suppose, that the majority of we British immigrants around Pinoso don't live amongst Spaniards. We just bump into them, and Spain, every now and gain. We chat with our neighbours, we order food and drink, we have short conversations in shops or with officials but most of us have rebuilt a version of our former lives in our homes; little islands of Britishness. So, despite doing classes, despite trying to learn new vocabulary, despite buying videos full of language learning tips, despite our best efforts in general, whilst we're only popping in to Spain every now and again we'll simply have to put up with those linguistic misunderstandings.

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

I remember when we made the decision to move to Spain. It wasn't because there were people with guns in the street, not a sign of religious fanatics demanding that girls stayed covered and away from school. It wasn't even as though we were working in terrible conditions for a pittance. I, we, thought it would be good to move from one prosperous, well organised and safe country with lots of personal freedoms to another prosperous, well organised and safe country with lots of personal freedoms.

I can hear the guffaws at that last sentence. I've read the Tweets and Facebook entries that suggest Spain is only one step short of being some Banana Republic, where nothing works as it should. I agree with some of the complaining. I'd like to be able to get my ID card without any effort too just like I'd hoped that my British passport wouldn't have a turn around time of four months. I might even prefer not to have to carry any ID. I understand the concerns about the ways that some animals in Spain are treated but the name of the RSPCA suggests the problem is not just Spanish. I wonder why there aren't more complaints about the strange Spanish dichotomy which is quick to introduce same sex marriage legislation (for instance) but still laughs along with the local theatre group as they parody Chinese people in the most grotesque manner. It would be nice if my Internet connection were a bit more stable but my sister says exactly the same about hers in rural Cambridgeshire. I do sometimes fret about the freedom of information in Spain and the clearly unrepresentative election system and over combative politicians but, again, Spain is far from alone and it wouldn't take much time to think of a couple of matching British concerns.

So, Julie Andrews, Sound of Music, Sonrisas y lágrimas in Spain, ringing in my ears I decided to change tack. What is it that are as good as warm woollen mittens and packages tied up with strings? And I'll keep away from the heavier stuff. Just fluff.

The restaurants. One of the things I most like about Spain, and I was reminded of the other week when we ate at Casa Eduardo here in Culebrón, is how the meals progress. My co-diners were obviously unimpressed with the food but we all seemed to be having a good time. I squinted at the pile of debris around us, the spills on the table cloth, the different coloured remnants of all that wine, water, beer and Fondillón in the glasses, the crumbs and crumpled napkins, the remains of the meal. I looked across to the family nearest to us packing up to go; the children getting their mouths wiped. The aftermath. The style of eating, the sharing, is something I approved of long before we moved here. Just as I approve of the meal times, of making the main meal of the day at lunchtime and, in doing so, saying that the essence of life is more important than work. Yep, dining out is always good fun. I like the food too. I know lots of people don't but even if you don't care for the food you must approve of the fact that it obviously didn't come, ready prepared, in a packet. 

The traffic. I know that on the coast, in Madrid and even in Petrer the traffic is just as bad as it is in Peterborough or Brum but I live in Pinoso and all of the roads around here are close to empty. I used to do a daily work trip to Cieza and I was sure that one day I would do the run from the A33 motorway to the Pinoso border without seeing a single car. I never did but two cars in 22kms isn't bad.

Car parking. It's becoming increasingly frustrating to park in Pinoso. What the terraces of the bars haven't swallowed up then the builder's skips have. In truth though there is plenty of free parking here and, even in the bigger towns and cities, you'll find something if you are willing to hunt around.

Cheap booze. I mean, honestly. Even something as recent as the newish explosion of varieties of national and local bottled beers cost less here now than they did when they were first introduced to the UK back in the 1980s. Or a gin and tonic where that description and not tonic and gin may be accurate. If you don't like booze then the price of a coffee is a treat too. Even better if you're on a nice terrace with the sun shining and the world passing by.

The weather. Or maybe not. I really love those days in July and August when the earth creaks with the heat but winter is horrid. Winter inside that is. The violence of the storms also rattles me, I expect the trees to fall as the wind whistles and the car to suffer as the hail batters down. When the sun shines, outside, at any time of the year, it's lovely but in an unheated bathroom on a cold December morning I'm reminded of my life in Britain when Harold Macmillan and Lord Beaverbrook were in charge.

Fiestas. I enjoy the fiestas and romerias and ofrendas and what not. The best ones, to my mind, are the ones where you end up sort of mixed in with the event, rather than the ones where you stand behind a line, real or not, to watch things go past. Nonetheless, even the pure spectator events - like Carnaval or the Cabalgata de Reyes are pretty good. I've long been a fan of pre-historic sites, Avebury is probably my favourite, I like the idea of continuity and sometimes, as the romeria carries the figure of this or that saint past the unfortunately parked Toyota hybrid, that same sense of continuity invades me, even though it's not a past I share. 

Places to visit. If the fiestas sort of come to you then the things to go to, the castles, cave paintings, ancient sites, galleries and museums and what not are everywhere in Spain. It's a long time since I spent much time in the UK but I remember lots of great places there from the Monkwearmouth Railway Station and the Crich Tramway Village through to the Ferens and Walker galleries. There is no denying though that the offer here is full and excellent. There's nearly always an exhibition or a gallery or a church or a castle or a tower or something to be visited in any size of town and mostly the entry is free.

Ironmongers. Shops with a counter and someone to serve you can be a bit intimidating in another language. Easier to browse the shelves in the Chinese Bazaar but if you want some solution to hanging something on a hollow door or the right glue for the job then the ferreterías are an Aladdin's Cave of fun. And, anyway, shops with counters that sell individual buttons or just the right sort of shirt are still an experience. 

The scenery. I mean without going to the Sierra Nevada or the Pyrenees or Guadarrama or the Gredos, the road from Pinoso to Yecla has its moments. Or that bit down from Hondón de los Frailes to Albatera and so on and so on. And what about the Med? It may be a filthy sewer in reality but it often looks spectacular. Mind you I suppose that's a bit unfair. Whether you're in Russia, Costa Rica, Australia or Dorset there is likely to be some great scenery too and it's probably true that lots of the things I like here I've liked in all the other places I've ever lived. Maybe that's a cue to stop listing.

I still think Spain was a good choice though.

Buying stamps at the Post Office

In the UK, in my youth, Post Offices were like Government outposts. They were a place to cash your dole giro, sort out your passport, renew your driving licence, buy road tax or get a postal order. You could even post a letter there. I suspect that, nowadays, lots of young people hardly ever enter a Post Office. In Spain the Post Offices have never had the same import as they once did in the UK but, for me at least, they are still one of the places to send and receive cards, letters and packets. 

At the start of each year the stamp prices go up in Spain. Quite a steep rise this year. The price to send a letter or card depends on the size and shape of the envelope as well as the weight. In fact I only really use the post for birthday and Christmas cards and as cards almost always come in non standard sizes (C5 and DL are considered standard) with jolly red or green envelopes I get charged the "non normalised" rate even though the weight is under the 20g limit. The cost of a normalised national stamp is 75c or 85c for the non normalised. For stuff to the UK and most of Europe it's 1.65€ and 1.95€.

The queue in the Pinoso Post Office is usually enough to put off anyone who doesn't have serious business at the counter. For that reason I generally buy my stamps from the only other place they are on sale, in the licensed tobacconists, the estancos. This morning though as I passed the Post Office with my first card of the new year to post there was no queue so I went in. I asked for 10 stamps at 1.95€. As I half expected I was told that no such stamp existed. OK then I'll have 10 at 1.85€ (obviously as that's the  "base rate" European international stamp, it would be available) and 10 for 10 cents please. I was told that they had neither. The conversation went on for a while longer. I asked what smaller stamps they sold so that stamps could be combined to make up the required postage. Basically the answer was none. In fact they weren't keen to sell me stamps at all. They want you stand in their queue so that they can print out a sticker of the required value presumably to avoid under stamped letters. This is, after all, the same Post Office that bricked up the post box outside their building so that it's only possible to post a letter when the office is open. By now the stamp conversation had become a little tense. I was a tad annoyed. I raised my voice. That might have been the reason they magicked up some sort of presentation packs of 5 stamps that don't show a cash value but are printed with the letters A and B instead. The A type are for normalised, under 20g national stamps. The type B are for international. Heaven knows why they didn't offer me those at the start.

I've said before that Post Office queues are only rivalled in lentitude by bank queues. The banks have been getting it in the neck from a campaign mounted by older people against the withdrawal of counter services. It's not just rural areas that have lost banks. Several branches have closed in the cities too partly because of the myriad bank mergers and partly because of the growth of online banking services. Banks, strapped for cash a couple of years ago, their obscene profits at times wobbling into losses, went for the easy target of people like you and me. They introduced substantial maintenance charges as well as charging for basic services, like cash withdrawal from machines. There are even fees for using counter services. Even if you were happy to go through the hassle of changing banks to avoid these charges you'd often find that, behind the headline "No Commission" banner, there were hidden charges for everyday transactions. Even at the counters there were limitations on what sort of operations could be carried out at what times. 

Many older Spanish people still have bank books. If the hole in the wall wouldn't accept their book they would queue for counter services only to be told that there was a charge for whatever service they wanted. Sometimes they were told that whatever they wanted to do couldn't be done at that time or that they would need to telephone for an appointment. Under the slogan of "Soy mayor, no idiota" or I'm old not an idiot, a 78 year old retired doctor collected signatures, via change dot org, to try to force the banks to look after their customers better. On the day that he went to Madrid to hand over his petition he literally bumped into a Government Minister coming out of the same building. She made the right sort of supportive sounds as the press cameras clicked away. The day after the Santander Bank announced that it would be extending its opening times.

Maybe I should think of a campaign to demand satisfaction from Post Offices. I'm old but you're idiots perhaps?

Food festival in Pinoso

We had a couple of pals who moved from Pinoso to the coast. One of the reasons they gave for their move was that the food in Pinoso was a bit boring. Its true that if you're after Mexican or Thai or French cuisine then Pinoso isn't the perfect spot. I suppose it's a matter of taste (sic) but I definitely like the local offer. And you'll know, if you've ever got past the most basic conversation with a local, that food is a safe, and always interesting, conversation in Spain. If Brits talk about weather then the Spanish talk about food.

Every area of Spain has its specialities and every region is quite sure that they have the best food. The one thing that all Spaniards agree on is that Spain has the best food in the world. 

There is something very purist about Spanish food. If you're British, and you eat meat, then your Shepherd's Pie is not quite the same as your mum's or your brother's. You add garlic or tomato or mushrooms and they don't. This doesn't seem to be the same with the Spanish. If the recipe for tortilla de patatas says eggs, potatoes, salt and oil then that's what people think should be in it (there's a debate about whether tortilla de patatas should, or should not, have onion). That's why Jamie Oliver was pilloried for adding chorizo to paella. If he'd avoided the name and said I'm going to make rice and things (arroz con cosas) nobody would have batted an eyelid.

Pinoso is proud of its food. As well as things like the rabbit and snail rice, the rabbit stew, the meatballs in broth, the garlic pancakes and the sausages there is a pride too in some of the local biscuits (the rollitos), cakes and pastries (like perusas, toñas and coca). One of the things that often tickles me is that I'll say to some local that I had a particularly good rice, a paella, in this or that restaurant (in the company of lots of Spaniards) and they say they really should invite me around to try the paella made by their gran/mum/aunt because it's better than anything on offer in the overpriced restaurants.

Anyway, each year Pinoso runs something called the Mostra de la Cuina de Pinos. Well it does when some inconvenient virus doesn't make everything very difficult. It's a showcase for the local food. The idea is clever and simple. A certain number of the local restaurants participate. On the same date the main dishes, and a couple of the starters, are the same in all the restaurants but all mark the difference by adding in extra starters. Each restaurant also gets let off the leash a couple of times during the festival when they offer a tasting menu. The more "popular" dishes, the rabbit stew and the rice with rabbit and snails, get a reprise with two outings each.

The participating restaurants this year are Alfonso, el Timón, la Torre, la Vid and el Poli. There is a bit of a variation in price. Alfonso is charging 40€, la Torre 35€ and the rest 30€. The difference in price may be a reflection of the policy of each of the restaurants but it may also be reflected in the style and number of the "extra" starters. 

The main course on 15th February is gachamiga (the garlic and flour pancake), on the 16th it's fasegures or pelotas (the meatballs) on the 17th it's ajos pinoseros con conejo "picat" which is a rabbit and garlic shoots dish. The gazpacho (the rabbit stew with the "pancake") is on the menu for the 18th and 25th and the rabbit and snail paella on the 19th and 26th. All of the restaurants do their tasting menus on the 20th and 27th.

All of the information is on this link. Be careful if you just Google the event as Pinoso Town Hall hasn't updated its website (how unusual) and they are showing the 2019 menus and prices! If you've not done it before, and the prices don't make you blanch, it's well worth the experience but you'll probably need to book up early as it tends to be pretty popular.

Breakdown of the 2021 Pinoso population figures by country of origin

A little while ago I published a blog about the population of Pinoso. A lot of people showed some interest in that entry. As a result I asked the Pinoso Town Hall if they'd publish a breakdown of the figures as several people had asked about their home countries. The Town Hall published the figures. I'd like to think it's because I asked but it's probably sheer chance!
Nationalities	MEN	WOMEN	TOTAL
EUROPE
Austria	1	0	1
Belgium	35	34	69
Bulgaria	12	13	25
Czech Republic	0	2	2
Denmark	2	0	2
Finland	0	1	1
France	9	4	13
Germany	16	17	33
Iceland	2	1	3
Ireland	12	6	18
Italy	9	10	19
Latvia	0	1	1
Lithuania	1	1	2
Macedonia	1	0	1
Netherlands	34	37	71
Norway	3	3	6
Poland	8	11	19
Portugal	1	2	3
Rumania	30	37	67
Russia	1	2	3
Slovakia	0	1	1
Spain	3437	3337	6774
Sweden	3	2	5
Switzerland	0	1	1
Ukraine	23	28	51
United Kingdom	429	406	835
AFRICA
Algeria	15	9	24
Mali	2	0	2
Morocco	102	97	199
Mauritania	1	1	2
Senegal	3	0	3
Zambia	0	1	1
Zimbabwe	1	0	1
AMERICA
Argentina	4	2	6
Bolivia	5	6	11
Brazil	2	2	4
Canada	2	0	2
Colombia	10	12	22
Cuba	2	3	5
Dominican Republic	6	6	12
Ecuador	23	18	41
Guatemala	2	2	4
Honduras	0	4	4
Mexico	0	2	2
Nicaragua	9	5	14
Paraguay	0	4	4
Peru	4	3	7
USA	2	3	5
Uruguay	3	6	9
Venezuela	4	4	8
ASIA
China	10	8	18
India	5	0	5
Japan	0	1	1
Pakistan	16	12	28
Thailand	1	2	3
OTHER
Stateless	0	1	1
Former Spanish Territories	2	2	4
Total	4305	4173	8478
.

Once a Catholic

The other day someone commented on one of my photos with a, "Well Spain is a Catholic country isn't it?" I wondered. I mean "England is an Anglican country, isn't it?". I'm English but I'm not Anglican. In fact much to Maggie's amusement I have a piece of paper that says I'm a Wesleyan. Fortunately I won't have to re-sit the entrance exam. The last time I went to an Anglican Church service, a wedding, I found that the Lord's Prayer, the one drummed into me through countless compulsory school assemblies, was no longer current. I hope thy haven't changed Daffodils too or all those violent school beatings will have been for nought.

I'm not really sure how Catholic Spain is. It's absolutely true that, outside a Spanish Parish church just before lunch on a Sunday there will be sizeable crowd but, if what my mum says is true, her Anglican church is a lively place too. Google has the figures of course. The (Spanish) Centre for Sociological Investigation said that, in March 2021 just short of 60% of the Spanish population defined itself as Catholic. The same report said that many of those people were not practising Catholics but only went to church for social occasions. In fact, according to the Spanish equivalent of the UK Office for National Statistics, in October 2021 only 22% of Spaniards went to mass or confession on a regular basis whilst over one third of Spaniards said that they were atheist or agnostic. 

I think that line about social occasions is the key. Although you still see a lot of women in posh frocks and men in very tight suits waiting in ambush, with confetti, outside churches, the number of church weddings is in free-fall. In 2020 only 10% of all Spanish weddings were church ceremonies. The pandemic and same sex weddings help to explain some of that figure but there is an obvious and real drop from the 75% of all weddings in the year 2000 being in church, to just 20% in pre-pandemic 2019 Spain. It's the same with baptisms: from 350,000 in 2010 to 190,000 in 2018. Again a demographic change, lower birth rates, probably exacerbate that figure but the decline is obvious. On the other hand, as you will guess, if you've seen the child sized white "wedding" dresses and sailor suits in the children's clothing shops, or ever tried to get into a restaurant in the run up to Corpus Christi, you'll know that Communions have held up pretty well. The drop there is much less pronounced from around 250,000 in 2009 to 220,000 in 2018. The clue though is in the shocking figure that the median spend on a First Communion is now 3,000€. You'll know where a lot of that money goes if you've ever tried to book a restaurant in the run up to Corpus Christi. First Communions are good for a show of piety, followed by a party as a show of wealth or status.

The difficulty comes in separating social customs from religious customs. Consider the British Poppy Day, Remembrance Day. I don't know what the correct definition of Remembrance Day is but f you were to ask me for some top of the head version I'd say that it's about recognising the service of men and women in the military. I don't think of it as a particularly Christian or Anglican event but I suppose it is. As I remember it the Bishop of London takes over where the sergeant majors leave off. Religious views are often left unspoken but it's clear that not all of the people who have some role at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day, be they hard bitten left wing union leaders or soldiers of the Gurkha regiment, will be Anglicans. Nonetheless they keep their heads down and get on with it. My opinion is that it's exactly similar in Spain. Holy Week, with the processions, with the floats, the tronos, carried on shoulders, with the silent parades as Good Friday starts, with the saetas sung from the balconies is about as Catholic an event as you can imagine but I'm almost certain that not everyone carrying those floats is a card carrying Catholic.

I don't think there's a Spanish public holiday that isn't linked to the Catholic calendar and nearly all of the fiestas are church linked. Schools and Hospitals often have Catholic names. Until very recently Government ministers swore their oaths with one hand on a bible facing a small crucifix. Children were often named for the Saint's day on which they were born. As I write San Antón has passed but San Blas events are under way. The midsummer bonfires in Alicante are San Juan, the fiestas in Pinoso are around the Virgin del Remedio, The Fallas in Valencia are for la Virgen de los Desamparados and even the Christmas running races are named for a saint - San Silvestre. The official name for the National Day, on 12 October, is Día de la Hispanidad but for most it's el Pilar, named for the Virgen del Pilar. Again I suspect that the name is just a vestige of a Catholic tradition. For most people it's just a day to get a nice meal, to head off to the coast or to meet family. Probably most Spaniards know the religious root but consider the days to be essentially secular though, as the saying goes, once a Catholic, always a Catholic.

Getting out and about

I always say that it's a part of my cultural education to get out and about in Spain a bit. Getting out and about has several levels. If you consider that our house is a little island of Britishness then going to a bar and getting a coffee is a journey to Spain. It doesn't really matter whether the out and aboutness is big or small. Memorable things happen on the doorstep just as much as hundreds of kilometres away though, obviously, the reverse is also true!

Out and about can be villages and towns and cities and parks and castles and museums and hills and churches and, even if they fail you, your luck may be better in a restaurant with something that you've never heard of on the menu.

Out and about can be fiestas. Most countries have theatres, cinemas, museums, concerts, coastline, woodland, prehistoric sites and so on and most places have fiestas too. The Tar barl festival in Allendale in Northumberland, the one with the burning tar barrels on the head, is as barmy as anything you'll get in Spain. The big difference seems to be that Spain has these street based fiestas, often with an enormous back story, everywhere and all year round. When Coronavirus becomes just another of those viruses that we live with I'll be trying to persuade Maggie that we should go to see the Cascamorros in Baza and Guadix or the Noche en Vela in Aledo. Who knows we might even get up to Noche de las Animas in Soria or over to Manganeses de la Polvorosa in Zamora now that they've given up on tossing the goat from the church tower. Or maybe that one where they carry people around in coffins, oh, and the one where blokes dressed in rag clothing are pelted with turnips and there are so many with bonfires and demons that I could be kept happy for years. Or maybe just the Moors and Christians in Oliva or Ibi or Petrer will do for now.

One of the problems with digging out places to visit and things to do is that it's not easy to find out about them. Every time we go to Murcia city there seems to be something happening outside the cathedral that I knew nothing about. I wonder why. Much as I dislike it I spend a lot of time grinding through webpage after webpage trying to piece together fragments of information like a second rate Hercule Poirot. 

A good example of making an event as difficult as possible are the heats which will decide Spain's entry in this year's Eurovision Song Contest. If I manage to finish this blog today the first semi-final is this evening. Eurovision is quite a big thing here in Spain. It gets a fair bit of publicity because Spain is one of the "Big 5" - the permanent members of Eurovision along with France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom which means that the Spanish song gets into the final whatever its quality. Having made the investment the state broadcaster does its best to promote the event. Over the past few years Spain's showing in the competition has been abysmal. This year the TV company decided to make more of the process for choosing the song and to try harder to get decent representation. Entering a song was opened up to almost anyone who wanted to give it a crack. From all those entries an expert panel chose fourteen songs to go on to the next stage. There would be two semi final rounds and then a final to choose the Spanish entry. The rounds and the final would be live with an audience. The town they chose for the concerts was Benidorm. 

Now, as Benidorm is only just up the road, I thought we should go and have a look. I don't really care for Eurovision but an event is an event and with this new format I even knew a few of the bands or singers. The spread of styles is pretty impressive. At the last minute one of the acts pulled out because the Eurovision rules don't allow the use of Autotune, and as her song hinged around the robotic voice (a la Cher in Believe), that put paid to her chances. So, from the first moment that Benidorm Fest was mooted I started to look out for tickets. It's a long and tedious story about Covid restrictions and how the tickets were and were not made available. In the end the organisers distributed 500 tickets through a couple of organisations of EuroFans with another bundle handed out on a sort of "old boy" scheme amongst official organisations. No tickets for plebs like us. Maybe we will and maybe we won't watch it on the telly. I'm rooting for Rigoberta Bandini (in the photo), we saw her in Cartagena over the summer but the hot favourite is a song called Terra, a folky type song sung in Galician, by Tanxugueiras.

I think there's another sort of out and aboutness, though Maggie tells me that these are only events in my own distorted imagination. Have you eaten toñas? They look like rounded loaves. Their taste is basically of a sweetened bread. They're pretty typical around here. You'll often get them, served with hot chocolate, at the end of a performance of the local Pinoso group Monte de la Sal. There's a variant to the toña, more usual at Easter time, called a mona. The only difference, as far as I know, is that a mona has a hard boiled egg baked into the crown of the bun. As I did my weekly hunt for events I saw a post from Monóvar town Council reminding people that the toña season was upon us. The post, half denied to me because it was in Valenciano, talked about some tradition of eating monas every Thursday between now and Easter - apparently you need to dance and or sing at the same time. I seem to remember that someone from here in the village told me that in the "olden days," around Pinoso, in the three days after Easter week, people would sally out into the countryside armed with the toñas to do some serious picnicking. 

If you're wondering what this has to do with events you have to do a bit of lateral thinking. Because I've not lived here all my life these things are not just a part of my DNA. If these were British we'd be talking Easter egg hunts, addressing the haggis, getting a pint in the beer tent at the village fete or just setting out some laverbread for the visitors. Keeping a tradition alive. It seems to me that turning up in some field in Yecla at some ungodly hour to watch blokes cook gachamigas (those doughy pancakes made with just water, oil, salt and garlic) or walking alongside the romería, taking the Virgin of the Assumption out to Caballusa from Pinoso, complete with free coca in Casas de Pastor (no, different stuff!!) along the way, is much the same. When we lived over in Salamanca we ate hornazo, a sort of chunky meaty pie. The pie got a big boost in sales on the second Monday after Easter. At some time in the past that was the Monday when the Church let the prostitutes back across the River Agueda into the city after their banishment during Lent. The pie was to celebrate. 

There's a shop in Benidorm that sells hornazo. That's the Benidorm where we won't be going for the Eurovision heats but where a Vicars and Tarts party might seem absolutely appropriate.

2021 Population in Pinoso

As they do each year Pinoso Town Hall has published it's population statistics. The statistics do not always match personal perceptions but you have to remember that the figures are for the municipality. So the people who live in Chinorlet or Cañada del Trigo who come into Pinoso for their shopping or to get a beer do not count in these stats.

By the end of 2021 there were 8,478 people on the padrón in Pinoso, that's 120 more than at the end of 2020. The number is made up of 4,305 men and 4,173 women (no mention of those who prefer not to have a gender assigned) which is more or less the same, percentage wise, as last year. This means there has been a year on year increase in population in Pinoso since 2017. In 2021 that increase was of 120 people.

There are now 56 different nationalities living in Pinoso with new people from the Czech Republic, Zambia and Japan joining the list for the first time. Most of we foreigners are from Europe, from 25 different countries. There are also people from 17 American countries and 7 African which leaves 7 more from various Asian countries. The UK is still way out in front with regard to number of immigrants, 835 people or nearly 10% of the population, the next most numerous group being Moroccans with 199 people. There are 71 Dutch, 69 Belgians, 66 Rumanians, 51 Ukrainians and 41 Ecuadorians. Interesting that one person on the list is considered to be Stateless.

Just over 20% of the population of Pinoso, that's 1,704 people, is foreign born. This is an increase of just under one and a half percent which by my maths means that "new" foreigners in the municipality account for 147 people, or nearly all the population increase. Obviously the logic behind that is faulty in that people die, people are born, people move etc. but, nonetheless, it's probably nearly true.

Villages and villages

We went up to Castellón for the weekend, the most northerly of the three provinces that make up the Valencian Community. The place we went was called Forcall and we lodged in an old palace. We were there to see a very odd festival where a couple of saints, Anthony and Peter, are harried by demons who try to burn them to death. My guess is that the roots of the festival are maybe older than Christianity! Whilst we were there we wandered around some of the nearby villages, mostly just over the order into Teruel, one of the provinces that makes up Aragón. If you want to see the snaps they're in this album which is just a part of the January 2022 photo album that you can access from the tabs across the home page, or here

Teruel is quite famous in Spain for being the back of beyond. At the last General Election for instance the province elected an "MP" as a member of the party "Teruel Exists". Teruel is always used as an example of España vacciada - emptied Spain. It's one of those staples of newspaper and radio articles, about how most of Spain is nowadays empty with nearly all the population living in Madrid or somewhere near the coast. The usually cited hotspots for this depopulation are the provinces of Teruel, Soria and Cuenca but, in trying to find some simple factual information for this blog post I came across a learned paper that said that Teruel, Zaragoza, Ciudad Real, Albacete, Sevilla and Asturias all had clusters of incredibly low population density similar to those in Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden. You may notice that those countries are quite a long way North with a tendency to inhospitable climates. Even in the North of Spain, where it rains a lot, or up in the high Pyrenees, Spain isn't quite in the same class, climate wise. 

The villages we were wandering around have a particular feel to them but there are similar villages and small towns all over Spain. We have a friend who runs a casa rural in Teruel and one of the villages near her house is of the same character. Huge houses with enormous wooden doors, high rooves, impressive masonry, coats of arms on the façade mixed in with much more humble houses and, of course, a big, often colonnaded, Town Hall with the massive church alongside. I wondered where the money came from. These villages look as though, at one time, they were awash with money, nowadays they are often nearly empty with the carefully modernised weekend home next to a derelict barn. A not too exhaustive bit of Googling suggests that the answer is the obvious one and that the majority of the past wealth came from agriculture. Sometimes the hillside goats producing enough wool and milk to make the local land owners rich and, sometimes, the olive trees or cherries doing the same in more arable areas. After all Pinoso had an economy based largely on wine, esparto and salt before the marble became important and that wasn't all that long ago. It always strikes me as odd though that there are so many places in the boon docks that make peacock like shows of wealth. I was born in West Yorkshire and, there too, the Pennine hillsides produced wool. That wool made the hillside villages rich long before the Industrial Revolution moved the wealth production to the valleys. But none of those Pennine villages can compete in shows of ostentation with the similar sized villages in Huesca or Cantabria. 

Over the years we have heard explanations of why this or that village is how it is. We were in one village where everything revolved around pig keeping, down to the street design and house architecture and I remember some guide, on a Duero river cruise, telling us that villages on the border with Portugal became rich through contraband coffee (Portuguese links with Brazil). In Trujillo, in Extremadura, it was the loot brought back from the New World by some of the more well known Conquistadores that built the huge palaces and churches. It may be too that the style of architecture, and the fact that the villages have largely stood still through time, marks the difference.  Novelda made plenty of money out of both marble and saffron and that money built the big "Modernista" houses in the late 19th and early 20th Century but Novelda is too contemporary to be a good backdrop for an Edwardian TV drama whereas Mirambel would be perfect for a Mediaeval one.

There aren't any of these, one time rich, now impoverished villages around here but, of course we live in a part of Spain that has an out of character rural landscape. The normal pattern for most of Spain, away from the big cities, is that houses are grouped together in villages and towns rather than peppered across the landscape. It's easiest to see at night where, in provinces like  Salamanca or Cantabria or Ciudad Real, the landscape between villages is pitch black. It's nothing like the scattering of individual houses and hamlets, the patchwork of lights that you will see shining out from the fields and hillsides around here. I've heard that the difference is because of the old Moorish system of irrigation channels of this area made that dispersion possible but that doesn't sound like much of an explanation to me. In exactly the same way as I'm still not convinced that all the rural palaces and massive churches were built on the back of agricultural profits. After all there are hundreds of agricultural villages all over Spain that look like they've never been rich and simply look scruffy. What I do know is that if you haven't had the opportunity to travel outside the immediate area it's definitely worth taking a look.

2021 Weather Report for Pinoso

Pinoso has a weather station that forms a part of the AEMET network. AEMET is the Spanish Met Office, Agencia Estatal de Meteorología. So far as I know the weather station for AEMET is in the centre of Pinoso, at the Instituto José Marhuenda Prats. I think it's at the school because the bloke who started it all up taught there though that may be wrong. The man is real enough though, Agapito - always called Cápito - Gonzálvez. He's been Mr Weather in Pinoso for over 30 years now. 

If you haven't seen the AEMET site this link should go directly to the observations over the past few days. Click around the site and you'll find forecasts and a whole lot more.

There is another weather station out at Rodriguillo, which was damaged when the reed beds there went on fire in the summer. Capito got it up and running again within 8 days. There's another another on the Yecla road out of Pinoso. These two stations log their recordings on the Valencian Meteorological Association website - AVAMET. According to that website there's a third station in Pinoso at l'Herrada which, I think, is just off the road from Culebrón to Ubeda. 

If you want to have a look at the Valencia website it's on this link though it does tend to be a bit fickle and constantly change from the Castilian version to the Valencian version. If the site plays up you want Alicante Province and mid Vinalopó or in the Territori section Província d'Alacant and El Medio Vinalopó or el Vinalopó Mitjà. You can choose the date for the records too. The button to change between Castilian and Valencian is at the top right but, as I say, it's all a bit wobbly.

Anyway Capito does these roundups for the monthly weather reports. Again they tend to get published in Valenciano so this is my interpretation of his roundup for 2021. 

During 2021 it rained 68 days and there were 15 days when the temperature fell below freezing. On the other hand there were 128 days of full sun and 163 days with sunny spells as against 52 cloudy days and 22 days with full cloud cover. 

There were 162 days with dew, 22 days with mist and 2 days with hail. There was no snow recorded in 2021. There were storms on 6 days.

The hottest day of the year was the 15th August when it got to 42.5ºC and the coldest day was the 6th January when the temperature dropped to -5ºC. 

The mean high was 23ºC and the mean low was 9.7ºC.

Over the whole year 313 litres of water fell on every square metre of Pinoso and the wettest day of the year was 23rd May when we got 44 of them.

There were 808 hours when the temperature was 7ºC or below but just 60 hours when it was below freezing. Those 60 cold hours being spread between 20 different days. 

There were 80 days when the temperature was greater than 30ºC and 7 days when more than 10 litres of rain fell.

The windiest day was 12th February when it blew at 73km/h

The day when the highest recorded temperature was the lowest of the year (get that?) was 8th January, when it only got to 4.5ºC  and the day when the lowest recorded temperature was the highest was the 12th July when it never dropped below 22.5ºC. 

The overall coldest day of the year was 5th January with a mean temperature was just 2.5ºC, and the opposite was the 15th August when the mean temperature was 31.8ºC.

Well, I didn't know that!

I've recently been in one of those linguistic slumps where I feel that my Spanish is so deficient that self flagellation seems appropriate. These dark moods are brought on when I come away from some film without having understood the plot or when I've no idea what the people in the queue behind me are talking about. It happens too frequently. This time my response was to give up on my one to one online, italki, Spanish lessons. My penance began just before Christmas.

It didn't last long though. I've spent years and years trying to speak Spanish and I'll be damned if I'm going to give up now. Well, that's today's position statement anyway. Tomorrow it may be back to deep despair and a retreat to comforting chocolate treats.

So, I'm online and nattering to Miriam. On my insistence our sessions don't have any structure. I just wander from this to that topic. It has been suggested to me that my thought patterns are a bit random anyway, which must be particularly trying for a Spaniard attempting to decipher my linguistic deviations in mis pronounced non sequitur conversations peppered with dodgily translated idioms. 

I was talking about the walk I went on in Elda last weekend. I went to collect firewood for the Hogueras de San Antón. Miriam wondered what I was talking about. "You know, the bonfires for Saint Anthony". She apparently didn't.

The event itself was interesting. A group of around 60 people set off from a little chapel dedicated to Saint Anthony in Elda to another little chapel on the Barranco Gobernador, behind the Campo Alto Industrial Estate. About a third into the journey a mule cart joined us. When we arrived at the destination chapel, and after the obligatory pause to eat a late and extended breakfast, people began collecting twigs and branches as symbolic firewood for the bonfires which are one of the traditional ways to celebrate the Saint's day next weekend. The firewood was handed to the cart driver who stacked it neatly. The whole collection routine was serenaded by a dulzaina and drum band. With the wood collected the band took to playing dance music and a group of women improvised a version of a traditional dance. Then I walked the 7kms back to the car. 

Miriam asked me why we were collecting wood for San Antón. I was a bit surprised. This particular event is, obviously, specific to Elda but, so far as I know, celebrations for San Antón are pretty widespread. We've been with a cart collecting wood in town for the same thing in Villena and I know that there are bonfires in Úbeda down in Anadalucia. There are more up at Forcall in Castellón. In fact Forcall looks about as pagan as you get with blokes dressed in overalls, daubed with devilish symbols, harassing a couple of people dressed as Saints with blacked faces, big hats and mandarin fruit necklaces. The devil's crew also bounce pigs bladders on sticks in front of pretty girls and they all dance around a huge town centre bonfire. Very Wicker Man. Whilst there are no bonfires, or misplaced bladders, in Pinoso for San Antón we usually have the horses on the street and the local priest blessing animals in front of the church. When we lived in Ciudad Rodrigo they dressed the door of the church with sausages and black puddings, as well as blessing pets. There was something in Cartagena too when we lived there, I forget exactly what but it involved choirs. The point is that there are San Antón events of one sort or another in every corner of Spain but Miriam, who's smart, she's doing her PhD, didn't know what I was talking about.

Fiestas conversationally forgotten we went on to talk about fibre washers. I wanted to know if it were a direct translation from English to Spanish - arandela de fibra. Washer is not a common word but we had no problem in agreeing that we were talking about the same thing, the small flat rings that go between two joining surfaces to spread the pressure or act as a spacer or seal. Fibre was more difficult. I tried suggesting that it was a bit like the old "cardboard" suitcases or like those storage boxes that we used last century for document storage and which got a new lease of life at IKEA as hip storage solutions. We never got there; we abandoned the conversation. I said it didn't matter anyway because, always, in an ironmonger's, you end up describing the use of the thing as you never know the technical term. "I don't know what it's called but you use it to get the juice out of oranges" Miriam agreed; she said she too had to describe things in ironmonger's and told me the tale of wanting a support to put on her gas cooker so that her coffee maker didn't overbalance. She didn't know the word. Obviously. Nobody does. She went on to suggest that sometime the technical term was useless anyway because, often, it's unshared knowledge. She gave me an example. She was cooking and she asked her boyfriend to pass her the espumadera. Apparently an espumadera is a big slotted spoon, the Spanish presumably comes from the idea of skimming off froth. Do you know the technical term for that sort of spoon in English? I don't.

And the point of these ramblings? Well, living in Spain I have less back catalogue than I had when I lived in the UK. I can't sing along to many songs here, old Spanish films mean nothing to me, when someone aged 85 dies and Spain goes into mourning I wonder who they were, why they were important. I feel that I'm sort of failing to "integrate". When Spaniards ask me if I've ever eaten a paella it suggests that they can think of us a breed apart but I'd like to be equally offended when someone asked me if I enjoy the work of Leticia Dolera. The truth is though that it's just normal to not know everything about anything. Otherwise how could we keep on learning new things till that moment we draw our last breath?

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P:S. If you're thinking of trying the online learning thing and you decide on italki if I recommend you and you take up some sessions we both get a discount of some sort. It's easy to message me.

Rubbers, crayons and ball points

I noticed that Marina, the Spanish half of the Notes in Spanish team, used the verb to hoover in one of their videos instead of to vacuum. We Brits do that all the time, use trade names as nouns and verbs: Thermos flasks, Astroturf, App (apparently it's from Apple not application), Cashpoint and Lilo being examples. So do Spaniards. I've mentioned things like Danone (yogurt), Mistol (washing up liquid), Minipimer (hand blender) and Táper (from Tupperware but which you have to pronounce as Tap-per in Spanish) before. Every now and again I come across new ones, Chirucas for climbing boots and Camisetas de Abanderado for a singlet type vest. I suppose it's a bit like we old people used to buy Jockey's and Y Fronts.

In English, for ball point pen, I usually say Biro (Named for the inventors as I understand it) and instead of saying boli (short for bolígrafo) in Spanish I've tried to use Bic. Apparently though, for most Spaniards, Bic is precise, it's for the sort of cheap Biro with a hexagonal see through barrel and a colour coded top. It cannot be used to describe ball point pens in general. Then I read a story which suggests that there are other things quintessentially Spanish down at the papelería or local stationers. Alpino crayons, the ones with the crayon doubling as a signpost and the little fawn on the box, and, for this piece, Milan rubbers (The thing for removing pencil lines though I notice the Cambridge English Exams now uses eraser, presumably to stop the North Americans giggling).

So the article in my online newspaper said there has been a Twitter storm about the news that Milan was going to stop producing their model 430 rubber. The eraser was described in the article as "legendary" (mítica) and "the rubber with which generations had grown up". 

What the company had actually said was that they were going to stop producing the green rubbers but that production of the white and pink ones would continue. The number of comments, and the vehemence of them, on Twitter, became such that the company responded, and they didn't forget to add in a bit of advertising. They said that they'd been producing the particular model of rubber since 1918, that it was just one of the 60 models of rubbers they marketed within their 2,000 lines of stationery and that, as long as there was a demand, they would continue to produce the green ones even though their market research suggested that people preferred the pink or white ones. 

So, now you know. I bet you never considered buying the correct model and colour of rubber was another way of integrating into Spanish society.

Equivalence

Often, when we encounter something new, we describe it my comparison to something that we recognise. A turnip?- well, it's a bit like a swede. We Britons living in Spain often use this equivalence for things Spanish. Sometimes the idea is spot on; IVA and VAT, the sales tax, is alike in all but name and rate. It doesn't work for lots of things though. The car roadworthiness test for instance, the ITV, isn't really much like the MOT but it's sort of the same and we know what we mean. And MPs are not a bit like Spanish diputados except that they are the rank and file national politicians. After all the blue whale and the field mouse are both mammals, they suckle their live born young, but they're not quite the same. Morning, afternoon and evening are different too. If the plumber says they'll be around in the afternoon then you shouldn't give up on them till about 8.30pm just like 1.30pm is still very much morning. I still get caught by someone saying we must get a drink "por la tarde", I think afternoon and they're thinking just after work.

I have great difficulty in trying to explain about the difference between British style public holidays and Spanish style non working days without misusing the word holiday. The idea I have, entrenched with me since I was a lad, is that non working days are holidays. Easter Monday and May Day are holidays and the couple of weeks in Skeggy in July are holidays too. For Spaniards a holiday is a holiday and a day off work is a "festive" day. Amongst we Britons the idea of a public holiday is that it's a part of our holiday entitlement. So, if Christmas Day and Boxing Day, both of which are UK Public Holidays, fall on a Saturday and Sunday then we will get compensatory days on Monday and Tuesday. The Spanish idea is different. Spaniards have working days and non working days. Their "non working" calendar includes certain days and anniversaries which are national non working days - Constitution Day, All Saints, Good Friday plus some regional non working days decided by each Autonomous Community and, finally, a couple of local non working days which will be different in Pinoso to the local days in say Monóvar or Elda. If the day off falls on a working day, that's Monday through Saturday, then lots of people, won't have to go to work. If the non working day/anniversary falls on a Sunday then people won't have to go to work either. So, to a Spanish legislators way of thinking, the effect is the same. Last year for instance The day of the Valencian Community fell on a Saturday. The day was marked in the calendars as a non working day but, as most working people don't habitually work on Saturdays, it made absolutely no difference to the vast majority of working people in Alicante, Valencia or Castellón. They finished on Friday afternoon and went back to work on Monday morning. It was the same with Christmas day in 2021 and January 1st 2022 was another Saturday. Father's day is a National non working day but, in 2022, it will fall on a Saturday so most people won't really notice the difference - well, except for the meal. That's why neither Mother's Day nor Easter Sunday feature as "holidays" in Spain because Sunday isn't a working day. It also means that the public days off work vary from year to year.

This idea of finding an equivalent struck me the other day when someone asked me about their Suma. Suma is a tax collection agency that was set up by the provincial level government of Alicante back in 1990. It basically assesses, bills, collects and enforces local taxes for the municipalities in Alicante Province. Suma doesn't set the taxes, the local municipalities do. So, Pinoso, our town council, uses Suma to collect Road Tax and so does Sax Town Council but the tax for the same type of cars, the least environmentally friendly, is 154€ in Pinoso and 201€ in Sax. And there you have an example - I said Road Tax but that tax here is qualitatively different to the Motor Duty payable in the UK. The tax we pay here, el impuesto sobre vehículos de tracción mecánica, is a local tax that pays Town Hall wages, the fiesta fireworks and the Christmas lights rather than the upkeep of the nation. That's one of the reasons why, traditionally, there are a lot of toll roads in Spain. Actually with the ending of so many toll road contracts and the bankruptcy of others the National Government is considering ways to raise money for road maintenance from mileage type charges through to a general vehicle duty. 

Now Suma doesn't collect in three of the five municipalities which share a border with Pinoso because they are in Murcia and the person who was talking to me lives in a village that "belongs" to one of those Murciano towns but which, generally, see Pinoso as being their town. It's not surprising that they use the shorthand of saying Suma when they refer to local taxes, "I've not got my Suma bill yet" or "When does the Suma bill come?" because, amongst other things, Suma is much easier to say than alcantillarado or exacciones municipales. Ah!, the joys of foreign living.

Dust and lard and no Joseph Beuys

I think Quality Street are yummy. Not that good for the waistline perhaps and a bit of a type 2 diabetes problem but, hey ho. Both they and I come from West Yorkshire. When I was a lad, I went on a school trip around the Mackintosh's factory where Quality Street were made. They gave us hundreds of free samples and I'm still grateful. Not that I have a problem with Celebrations or Heroes but, if I were forced to plump for just one, it would still be the Halifax product. I live in Spain though and here the Christmas habits don't include Quality Street. There are no mince pies either. Instead the customary sweet things are turrón, polvorones and mantecados. 

Every year these Spanish Christmas sweets cause just a little friction when Maggie and I go to do our joint Christmas food shop - I think we should and Maggie thinks we shouldn't. She has no problem with turrón, she likes the two local versions - turrón is often translated as nougat in English because, like the French inspired pink and white confection, it's made from almonds and honey. It doesn't look the same or taste the same but that's something else for another day. The two traditional Alicantino turrones are the soft one, the one that drips with almond oil, often called Turrón de Jijona and the brittle one or Turrón de Alicante. If you're in Consum or Mercadona you'll find tens of flavours of turrón, most of which seem to me to be more like chocolate bars than traditional turrón. I thought that it might be that they merited the name because they had a high content of almonds but the one bar we have left in the cupboard has a warning that it may contain traces of nuts so bang goes that theory! I did have a quick Google but the few websites I looked at ignored the bastardised versions of turrón and only talked about the traditional varieties.

Anyway, enough about turrón, because what I meant to write about were mantecados and polvorones. If Maggie is ambivalent about turrón she is definitely hostile towards mantecados and polvorones. Polvo, amongst other things, and stop sniggering those who know other definitions, means dust. Maggie refers to polvorones as dust cakes. Actually we use the same description for the perusas, those melt in the mouth cakes that you get with a glass of mistela around here after eating your rabbit and snail paella. But that's another post. Now, I have to be honest and say that polvorones and mantecados taste pretty similar to me and, whilst they're alright, I'm not that enamoured of them. Spaniards have told me that's because I buy the industrial versions from the big supermarkets and I should go for the more expensive, traditionally made ones to get the authentic experience. Being meek and mild I have done as I was told and bought hand crafted versions but, having done so, I still don't know which is which and I'm still not bowled over by them. They taste fine but I wonder if they continue to be popular more through tradition than for any other reason. After all, for years and years my mum bought Eat Me Dates at Christmas and nobody ever did. 

I asked Wikipedia for the difference between mantecados and polvorones and the definition that I found, at least in the English language version, said that they were, more or less, the same thing. "Often both names are synonymous, but not all mantecados are polvorones. The name mantecado comes from manteca (lard), usually the fat of Iberian pig with which they are made, while the name polvorón is based on the fact that these cakes crumble easily into a kind of dust in the hand or the mouth". To add a bit of detail the Wikipedia entry goes on to say that mantecado is a name for a variety of Spanish shortbreads, which includes the polvorón, and that both are a type of heavy, soft, and very crumbly shortbread made of flour, sugar, milk and nuts (especially almonds). In the Spanish entry (my translation) it says "And what's the difference between a polvorón and a mantecado? The mantecado can have almonds, or not, and it's made with ordinary sugar and flour (actually it says raw meal but I have no idea what that is) and sometimes egg whites, whereas the polvorón is made with toasted flour and icing sugar with all those ingredients being ground down to a very fine or dust-like consistency. Hence the name".

And, as you know if you're in Spain, Christmas is still in full swing so you still have the opportunity to do a bit of market research if you haven't already.

Rooted in the land

Last week we booked up for an Experiencia Gastro-Cultural in Novelda. The hook was the word gastro rather than on the word cultural. 

The morning consisted of a couple of visits to the two "principal" Modernista or Art Nouveau houses in the town. Both are on the Calle Mayor in Novelda. One is run by the Fundación Mediterráneo and has an entrance charge whilst the other, the Centro Cultural Gómez Tortosa, is owned by the Town Hall, so it's free, and is home to the Tourist Office. Both are pretty stunning in their detail and, every time we go, they seem to have improved their offer of things to see.

So, if the Modernista heritage was the cultural part of our visit, what were we going to get on the gastro side? Novelda has long been associated with saffron. The crocus flowers that provide the saffron originally all came from Castilla La Mancha (nowadays a lot of the saffron also comes from Iran) and it seems to be by sheer chance that Novelda became the place to process the saffron and then sell it worldwide. I have heard that, like the marble industry located in Novelda, the saffron trade owes a lot to the 19th Century railway boom. Nowadays, businesses that began with saffron have branched out into associated areas. If you buy one of those kits of "botanics" to mix in your gin, if you have a salt cellar with pink Himalayan, or black truffle salt or even if you just look at the spice and condiment section in Mercadona, you'll often find that the company that did the packing and marketing is based in Novelda. So that's where our tour guide took us next. To the LayBé factory where a small team puts saffron into nicely designed tins, worries about the ideal qualities of salt cellars and frets about packaging up varieties of paprika. There wasn't a lot to see to be honest but the talk we got from one of the owners was pretty interesting and it just shows how important marketing and image are nowadays.

Next, the bloke who'd been showing us around changed his hat from tour guide to winemaker. Apparently his family has been in winemaking, as Bodegas Ortigo, since 1880 with vineyards near Las Salinas. At one point the vineyard, and its wines, had all but disappeared, then, a few years ago, the guide and his family decided to give it another go. We got to taste the result. The white, the rosé and the red all have a bit of a twist on the typical wines produced around here. We got to do "the cata", the tasting, outside a shop called El Escaparate. It's one of those places that sells, nuts and chocolate, olive oil, salt, honey and a whole host of similar edible things in cans and jars at inflated prices. The wine was served with coques or cocas - the local variant on a pizza but only in as much as it has a bready sort of base and a topping. I like cocas but Maggie always refers to them as fat pies!

As I drank my wine I thought about bodegas selling "odd" wines, about the young woman at LayBé selling salt that tasted of fried eggs and saffron packaged in fancy little tins. The man selling his wine was passionate. Although all the businesses, the saffron place, the trendy shop and the bodega, were simply businesses, and business is easy to understand; selling things to produce profit, there was something else to each of them. People dream up new businesses all the time. Not long ago food delivery on bikes, leasing cars or the idea of selling a unique digital image would have seemed ridiculous. Nowadays they are just another business. There was something though that the businesses we'd seen and the places we'd been, had in common. The man, Angel by name, was waxing lyrical about "nuestra tierra", our land, our home, our traditions. It's the sort of thing you hear folk musicians talking about, it's the stuff of local historians, it's the reclamation of their place in history by women or by communities and by groups with a common bond. It's something that's there in the foundation trying to preserve the variety in citrus groves or the farmer herding rare breeds. It's there in the towns that depend on tiger nuts for the horchata but have found hundreds of ways to market products made from the nuts, it's the people who still make the lip balm that was developed by their great grandad for local farmers in the huerta of Valencia. 

Maybe they're just another business, maybe they are simply looking for that unique selling point but I got this feeling there was more heart and passion in this than that and that it highlighted a way of doing business. Angel had sounded proud of "his" town as he showed us the houses, as he took a pride in the development of the town, as he talked about Modernista houses about the quality of the local buildings, that Modernista past, the pride in the Novelda woman who had been given the pejorative nickname of the Pitxotxa but had gone on to build up a business empire in a hostile world ruled by men.

Or maybe I'm just getting sentimental in my old age.