Yearning for the past

I forget why, I forget what we'd been doing, I really do forget a lot of things nowadays, but we were with friends and and now it was time for lunch. The nearest place on the route back that might have restaurants was Polop so we drove into the town. We followed the signs for the ayuntamiento, the town hall. The road changed from tarmac to paving which is a sure sign that we were in the heart of the oldest part of the town, the part to expect restaurants. We passed the typical town centre buildings, the tourist office or the town hall or the parish church - again I forget. It's not that we were able to choose our route. We were funneled and shepherded, inevitably, by no entry signs and compulsory turn signs along the one way circuit through the old town. And suddenly the road became a street about two metres wide.

It happens from time to time. You follow the SatNav without realising it's set to shortest route or you simply get funnelled into the old part of a town and suddenly you're on streets that were not designed for cars and vans but for donkeys and handcarts. Now my car is loaded with sensors. It pings if you're close at the back, it beeps if you're close at the front, it chirps if you're close on the left and it tweets if you're close on the right. Or something like that. It's an all singing car. On this occasion in Polop the car was tweeting and chirping. It's bad enough having to negotiate very narrow streets, with very solid walls scuffed and marked with the paintwork of tens of previous cars, but with the Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo (SEAT) choir at its most vocal it was a particularly nerve-wracking piece of driving.

The other place you see scuffed concrete walls, decorated with the paintwork from any number of Mercedes, Toyotas, Renaults and the rest, is in the underground car parks that abound in Spain. I often wonder why the builders of Spanish car parks put bollards that are low enough to be invisible from the car as you get close. I wonder why the distribution of the parking spaces and the route to them is so labyrinthine; snaking between the very solid supporting columns. Then, of course, there are those ramps that are so steep that you can only see the ceiling through your windscreen. Even when you think you're in the clear, near the exit, the angle of approach to the ticket machine calls for some close order manoeuvring with the very solid, read car bending, ironwork put there specifically to protect the ticket machine from errant vehicles.

In fact I have this theory about car park design. As I said in a blog a few weeks ago most Spaniards now live in biggish towns and cities. The majority though remain proud of their rural roots. They may never go to the countryside but they all claim some wide spot in the road in Teruel or Castilla la Mancha as their spiritual home. They say that village life is in their blood, in their very DNA. My theory is that they subconsciously yearn for are those twisting and turning streets. So what do they do? The builders, planners and architects among them, who live in the city but whose veins course with bucolic blood, design the car parks to mimic those narrow streets with their impossible turns, very solid walls and intricate routes so as to recreate a part of their rural heritage in the city.

Around and around

Nowadays instead of working for a crust I live off pensions. One of the few things I miss about that last part of my working career, the bit where I attempted to teach English to Spanish students, is that they told me about things Spanish. One time a student told me that she was an architect. When I asked what she was working on and the answer was a roundabout. It was a bit of an eye opener. It had never crossed my mind that roundabouts were architect designed.

Roundabouts in Spain are a bit of a growth industry. New ones pop up all the time. Spanish roundabouts have, to British schooled drivers, strange rules. Basically the outside lane, the one that involves going the greatest distance, always has precedence. So, whereas in the UK you use a different entry lane for right as against left turns there is absolutely no reason to do so in Spain. This isn't particularly important where there is no traffic but it certainly makes big and busy roundabouts in cities quite interesting. As well as the priorities being different the only necessary turn signal is one to show that you are leaving the roundabout. That British thing of signalling to show you're staying in the roundabout and then changing turn signals to show you're leaving is not the Spanish way. And, as most Spanish drivers seem to have forgotten where they put the turn signal controls that leads to even extra fun in roundabouts. 

When we got here to Pinoso, if my memory serves me well, there were six roundabouts within the Pinoso boundary. We now have nine. The three extra ones have all been built since 2018. Prettifying the roundabouts seems to be quite important. One of the Pinoso ones has a huge thing built out of blocks of local marble - I've heard it called The Coliseum and Stonehenge. Outside Abanilla they have one with artificial grass and with a replica of the big stone Archbishop's Cross that they have atop their local mountain. The one by the Dos Mares Shopping centre in San Javier has a jet trainer. At la Romana there are twin marble towers. There are others with really old olive trees, with fishing boats, with wine barrels and sculptures. I often wonder about the one out at Salado Alto which is sown with lots of stones that look like the standing stones at Carnac. I'm sure some bewildered 29th Century archaeologist will fall back on the old chestnut of religious significance to explain them. Of course the maintenance of the roundabouts can be a bit hit and miss. Weeds adorn more than their fair share. 

Two of the older roundabouts in Pinoso have been getting a bit of a facelift recently. The one at the entrance to Pinoso, from Monóvar on the CV83, now boasts and awful lot of concrete. The remodelling though has left the three pine trees, similar to the ones which feature on the town's coat of arms, in place. The masonry sign embellished with the town coat of arms is still there to show why the roundabout is as it is. 

The other roundabout, the one where the CV836 comes in from Yecla or, if you prefer, the one where the CV83, as an extension of the RM427, comes in from Jumilla, has also been getting a facelift. There they have coloured and contoured the concrete. I'm sure you know, but, just in case you don't, the roads with the CV prefix belong to the Comunitat Valenciana whilst the ones that begin RM are in the Región de Murcia. In the same vein if it were a national road it would have an N designation, or maybe an A for Autovía or motorway.

I had wondered about all that concrete. Before the titivation the roundabouts were mainly soil and gravel. It's not exactly that we're short of greenery round here but it did seem slightly perverse to lay tons and tons of concrete in what are supposed to be environmentally aware times. In that way that things have of co-inciding, of happenstance, I was listening to an interview on the radio and they got to talking about roundabouts. The group being interviewed were an action group that is trying to replant trees and bushes all over Spain, their name is Arriba las ramas or something like Up with branches! Their spokesperson said that a trend in several cities was to plant roundabouts with native species. Trees, bushes and plants that can look after themselves without the need for costly maintenance. The provision of a habitat for local beasts was a bit of a side benefit. Obviously that's not a trend around here.

I'd mentioned the concrete to Maggie as we drove past. I wondered about the rain. When it rains around here it often rains in shedloads. With the gravel and soil on the roundabouts the water had somewhere to escape to. I can envisage that same rain cascading off the concrete into the roadway. Mind you, if they have architects for roundabouts I suppose they know about drains too!

The photos are of three of our Pinoso roundabouts.

The rural idyll

We all have our favourite words and expressions. One of my oft repeated phrases, when I'm saying where I live, in Spanish, to a Spaniard, is to say that I'm paleto and cateto. I thought these were two synonyms to describe country bumpkins. It turns out to be much more complex than that. And all I really wanted to say, with just a touch of humour, is that I live in the countryside.

As I write I'm sitting outside the front of our house. The birds are chirping and I can hear a tractor working somewhere up on the hillside. There are dogs barking, of course there are dogs barking!, thankfully in the distance. I can see three of our four cats in various shady spots. I can see roses and trees and lots of other greenery, including far too many weeds, and piles of fallen blossom from our neighbour's tree. Country life.

We country dwellers represent a small percentage of the total Spanish population. Exactly how small a percentage depends a bit on how you do your sums. Yecla isn't exactly a throbbing metropolis but it's not exactly thatched cottage either - is it rural or urban? Pinoso is less than an hour from a couple of cities of 200,000+ and the seventh largest city in Spain. On the other hand our nearest hospitals are half an hour distant. Even within Pinoso the access to services varies substantially from, say, a house in Bulevar to one in Lel. A figure that is definite is that 90% of the Spanish population lives in Madrid or on the coast.

Nonetheless we country folk can claim a different majority. Of the more than 8,000 municipalities here in Spain over 5,000 of them have fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. That means that nearby villages like Algueña or Salinas are a bit above average size for small municipalities and la Romana, with 2,300 inhabitants, is, well, big. About seven and a half million Spaniards, or about 16% of the population, live in rural towns - the definition being fewer than 30,000 inhabitants with a density of population below 100 people per square kilometre. That would include Jumilla but not Villena, Petrer or Yecla. Pinoso has a population of 8,478 and a density of 64 per km².

Lots of figures there but the principal point is that the population lives on the coast and in Madrid or in lots and lots of very small municipalities. 

Because we live in a small, rural, town our life is somewhat different to the majority of the population; the urban dwellers. Our lives are anachronistic because of lots of things. Examples might be that, generally, workers go home for the middy break, that lots of us have outside space, that the restaurants serve mainly Spanish cuisine, that agriculture is still an important part of the economy and that we see nothing strange in having to negotiate tractors as we drive home. It's also a place where it may be uncertain whether your house will have mains water and electric but you can be pretty sure that there won't be a traffic jam.

Of course Spanish cities aren't like that. There there are people delivering food on scooters, there are buses and taxis. Your house is probably a flat in a block and only the smallest blocks would house fewer people than a village like Culebrón. You'd expect to share the noise of other people living their lives - washing machines on spin, that click as the plug is pushed in, a bit of music or maybe the telly and, of course, those barking dogs. It's a life where if you don't have a designated parking space you will spend a few to several minutes of your day searching for one, where you will meet lots of other dog walkers, where the overflowing and disrespected rubbish bins, the stained pavements around lamp posts and graffiti are a part of the landscape and where youngsters play, and old people mutter, about the failings of the modern world in public spaces like playgrounds, parks and basketball courts.

Then again we're not really in "Deep Spain" either. The one where villages have a handful of inhabitants all of advanced years, the ones where there are adverts to attract young families with tasty offers of work or a business so long as they bring children to keep the village school open. The villages where, if you have a medical emergency, they will send a helicopter because, even in the countryside, in Spain at least, it's unacceptable to let people die because of the distance to the nearest hospital.

In the end it's all a bit of a trade off between peace and quiet and some space as against there being no arts centre or bar or shop, never mind shopping centre, or taxi or doctor or bank within striking distance of your front door. It's a choice that is conditioned by your mobility but it's not a place to forget the bread or the milk!

Do you know what a gallo is?

Humankind has a long relationship with mind altering substances. We chew mushrooms and leaves, we sniff things, we smoke all sorts of vegetation, we (not me you understand but we, humankind) drink snow laced with reindeer urine and, for lots of us there is a close relationship with fermented and distilled alcohol. Around here the most obvious local booze is wine, and the variants on it like vermouth, but there are others. In fact, years ago, I wrote an article about it for the old TIM magazine.

That TIM article was inspired by a visit to the bar in Calle Sol in the Santa Catalina district of Pinoso. We were in Santa Catalina for their fiestas, I had never been in the bar there and, once inside, I realised that every second person in the bar was drinking cantueso. I'd been blissfully unaware of its existence till that moment but it's actually readily available around here. It's fine, not my preferred tipple but, if you like the brandy based drinks like Ponche Caballero, you may like it.

In a similar way this post was prompted by reading a book and a visit. The local book club, based in Pinoso library, chose to read Modorra by Rafael Azuar. The book is set in Salinas. We followed up on the reading of the book by going on a visit to places mentioned in the text. As we stood outside the old posada (posadas are the old inns - if this were Shakespeare they're where we'd have Falstaff drinking flagons of ale, eating mutton, sleeping on paillasses and rubbing shoulders with muleteers) we read out paragraphs which referred to the building. In one section the text mentioned that the inn users were not so keen on Coca Cola and preferred tried and tested drinks like absinthe, wine, carajillo, paloma or gallo. 

I didn't know what gallo was - other than the Spanish word for cockerel. I know that absinthe is the high spirit aniseed flavoured drink, wine I think we all know, carajillo is a spirit laced coffee (usually brandy but you can ask for a splash of anything). Now paloma I happened to know because years ago, when I first arrived in Pinoso and we were doing Spanish classes with Cruz, we went over to Monforte del Cid for some sort of Adult Education get together. Monforte is well known for producing anis. To be honest I've never quite been able to work out the difference between absinthe and anise but the one from Monforte is very much like Pastis or Ouzo or Sambuca or Raki or Aquavit. Generally this sort of aniseedy tasting alcohol is taken with water. The local version turns cloudy white with water, the same colour as a dove and hence, paloma. 

Nobody else in the group knew gallo either. I wondered if it were the lemon flavoured anis. No, that one is called a canario, a canary, again, presumably, for the colour. Wikipedia doesn't know either. I think this is something we could all do, in search of cultural enlightenment you understand. We could go into as many bars as possible and ask for a gallo until we eventually find out what it is. Until we discover what it is we will have no option but to drink something else while we're there.

Mine's a pint

Spaniards don't care for British beer. They don't like it because of the temperature it is served at. Most use the word broth in their comparison. Spaniards like their beer cold. British style bitter beer isn't easily available in Spain because here, like in most places, beer means bottom fermented rather than top fermented product - lager instead of ale. Obviously, when I moved to Spain I wanted to integrate so I embraced Spanish lager wholeheartedly. It wasn't as hard as cracking the subjunctive because, when I was young, drinking Indian Kingfisher, American Rolling Rock, Italian Peroni, Canadian Labatt, Mexican Dos Equis, and so on and so on, was considered eminently cool. I had prior form.

To my mind most lagers tend to be quite samey. It's not that they taste the same but the standard light, crisp and gassy lagers, like the majority of the Spanish ones have quite a lot in common. That's presumably why most Spaniards, in Spain, don't specify and simply ask for a beer. On the other hand most Britons, in the UK at least, order their beer by name and quantity. Being a bit contrary I seem to prefer the less usual varieties of lager, the dark ones like Modelo Negra or Tres Equis for instance and the blonder ones like Hoegaarden. So, a few years ago, when craft beers started to become much more available in Spain I thought of it as being a bit like that real ale surge in the UK in the 1970s and 80s. At that time in the UK the big brewers generally abandoned the mass produced fizz and tried to produce a more traditional product. In turn that gave space in the market for the traditional brewers at the same time as providing an opening for the new small scale producers. So when the big Spanish brewers, Heineken, Mahou-San Miguel and Damm, started to add to their ranges - an IPA here, a double hopped there, maybe a Dunkel or a toasted beer - then, all at once, having a Spanish beer involved a little more choice. There were also, suddenly, inevitably, local craft Spanish beers - often with terrible copies of beers like stouts and IPA - but at least there was an option. Nowadays Spanish supermarkets offer a cornucopia of different beers.

The other week we went on a visit to the Estrella de Levante brewery in Espinardo on the outskirts of Murcia city. Estrella is owned by the Damm group. I have no idea how I've missed this trip for so long because it seems that they've been doing tours since 2013. One of the big advantages for me is that the brewery is on the tram line. I arranged the day so that I could enjoy the lunchtime tasting session and then use the tram to go to the town centre for a concert. By the time the band finished I was alcohol free for the drive home.

To be honest the factory tour was less than overwhelming. Malting rooms are always semi interesting but bottom fermentation, with sealed tanks, doesn't leave much to look at and bottling and canning plants are hardly spellbinding. The tasting though was really well done.

The tasting room at Estrella de Levante was refurbished at the end of last year. My guess is that the tours were halted becase of Covid and, during the pandemic, the company took advantage of the lull and rebuilt the room. As it's new it still looks very stylish as well as being clean and tidy. We all sat at long tables with a sort of big place mat in front of us. On each mat there was a space for the glass and a space to grade, using a scale provided by them, or comment on, the four beers we were offered. Any primary school teacher would be able to produce something similar but it did add a touch of audience participation to the beer tasting. We had also paid the extra to get the maridaje, the marriage or pairing up, of little snacks, tapas, to go with each beer. The tapas were really good.

As I said there were four beers - the standard Estrella de Levante lager, Verna which is their beer spiked with lemon juice (a bit shandy like), Punta Este which is a lager with extra toasted malt and a wheat beer which is new for them and which isn't yet listed on their website. As we tasted we were offered refills of everything. For the first beer, the standard lager, lots of people asked for refills. Nobody asked for a refill on the shandy stuff and nobody asked for a refill on the wheat beer (except me). Only two or three people (again I was one of them) asked for refills on the toasted lager. 

As everyone in the room, us apart, was Spanish I drew a conclusion from that session. I decided that Spaniards like their beer to taste like the beer they know. It's hardly detailed market research but it does explain why, when I'm in a bar, and I ask if they have any interesting beers the servers never know what I'm talking about. I have to explain that I'm keen to try a beer that isn't a run of the mill lager - de toda la vida - like always. I might think that a double hopped unfiltered beer is interesting but, apparently, to your average Spaniard, that would be inferior to normal lager. As long as both are cold of course!

Letting go

I stopped listening to the Archers almost as soon as I moved to Spain.  For those of you who don't know the Archers is a long running British radio soap. I know that lots of young people hardly know what radio is but this is as far as the explanations go. I enjoyed the Archers, in fact I enjoyed BBC Radio 4 in general, but I decided, when we first moved here, that if I were to embrace the culture, and the language, I needed to start listening to Spanish radio, watching Spanish telly, reading Spanish books and the rest. 

I haven't been systematic in this abandonment of things British. It's not that I wish to deny my birth right or some such. The thing is that I'm not a visitor here, this is my home. Just as I wanted to know what was happening in the UK when I lived there I want to know what's happening in Spain now that I live here. Wherever you are lots of news is International anyway, the big stuff, the important stuff, but the detail of British politics, British crime and even British gossip are all 2,000 kms away. I have trouble enough keeping up with the quantity of information I get about Spanish politics, Spanish crime and Spanish gossip anyway. 

In general I take the line of least resistance on this being a Brit in Spain thing. The supermarket I use most has quite a few British favourites on its shelves because the manager realises there's a market for such stuff in Pinoso. This means that, from time to time, I buy Heinz Sandwich Spread or Oxo Cubes or Back Bacon. If they weren't there then it would never cross my mind to buy them. For the most part we stopped hunting for British things, and went with their Spanish equivalent, years ago or simply stopped worrying that neither the original nor a substitute were available. I have toast with olive oil not because I can't get butter (there's some in the fridge) but because I've found I like toast with olive oil. It's very seldom that I get a craving that can only be assuaged with something so British that Churchill would promise that we would fight in the hills and in the streets to protect it.

Now there are exceptions. Tea is an essential as far as I'm concerned and Spanish tea is not to my taste. In fact it has no taste at all but, then again, I suppose it is not blended to be taken with milk. Fortunately British tea is easily available in lots of high street outlets. The thing that's worrying me though is Brylcreem and the stuff that I replaced it with, Ryelliss and now the last ditch replacement - Nelly.

Now Brylcreem is something that only we old people know about. It's similar in consistency to lard but you put it in your hair to make your hair more manageable. Put enough on and you can leave grease marks on couch backs and pillowcases. If you're old enough to remember antimacassars on the backs of sofas they were there to soak up the 19th Century favourite hairdressing of Macassar oil and Brylcreem has similar properties. For years I was able to order Brylcreem from Amazon UK and later from Amazon Spain. Wherever it was ordered it was shipped from the UK.  Brexit has made getting things sent from the UK so much more difficult that it isn't worth the rigmarole - ridiculous and incomprehensible import duty and delays to rival those on the A34 in Hampshire. 

Although I prefer Brylcreem there was a perfectly acceptable Spanish substitute that was a brilliantine paste which came in a tube - Ryelliss. Then one day that disappeared from the supermarket shelves. The company that made it had gone out of business. Not enough old men left to buy enough product. Never mind, another brilliantine product was still made by a big firm that markets products under the rather prosaic name of Nelly. They do a brilliantine liquid. Not as good as the paste and not as good as Brylcreem but still available. But not easily. Only one shop I know of in Pinoso stocks it and they only remember to order it in when I complain there is none left. I opened the last bottle in my supply on Sunday morning and I think I'm going to do the Frozen thing and let it go. I've hung on to this habit which, presumably, dates from my youth, despite the country change and despite changing styles - maybe the time has come. 

Then again there may be one of those myriad hair potions, that jostle for position on the supermarket shelves, that can rival a product beloved of Second World War RAF pilots as well as those Mad Men.

Club de lectura Maxi Banegas

For years and years I've been fed up that my Spanish isn't as good as it should be. It's always seemed to me that without being able to read, understand and speak Spanish we immigrants become perpetual tourists. Obviously some things get translated for us and they are accessible because the Internet makes them so but lots of stuff will sneak by if we are not able to understand the conversations of our neighbours, read about events or keep up with the current affairs type memes that pop up on social media.

I try to do something Spanish language most days. I have conversations with people on the Internet or I read a few pages from a book or learn a few words. I read and watch Spanish news, I listen to Spanish radio and other bits and bats. I'm also still on the mailing list for a couple of language learning websites too. One of them, a video blog, suggested that we should set ourselves a language challenge; do something that was a bit beyond our grasp - pushing the envelope as they used to say in my youth. Now it just so happened that, a couple of days after seeing that video, I went into Pinoso to see the unveiling of the balcony banners related to International Women's Day. One of the banners had been done by the local Book Club or Readers Circle, el Club de Lectura Maxi Banegas (Maxi Banegas was a poet and teacher from Pinoso). As I usually read books in Spanish, I thought, "why not?".

Bull by the horns time. I went directly from the square outside Pinoso Town Hall to the Cultural Centre which is where the library is, to ask about the book club. They seemed to think I was a bit strange, actually lots of people would agree but that's another blog! They told me I would be the only man - perhaps that was it. Maybe they were appalled by my very British accent when speaking Spanish but my take on that is that Bruno Tonioli's's Italian accent makes him cute to TV viewers so why shouldn't the same idea work for me?

Anyway they gave me a date for the club, a Wednesday of the next week. That meant a 270 page novel in eight days. Easy. The librarian seemed a bit shocked that I was willing to buy the book. Normally the library provides the books to the readers. In fact I bought the book in electronic format almost as I was talking to her. I find electronic books much easier to read than paper books, not because of any liking for the format but because the Kindle has a Spanish dictionary on it, so, when I get to a key word that I don't understand, I can look it up without interrupting the flow too much. 

I turned up the next Wednesday with the book, Aquellos tiempos robados, read. The club had been cancelled, apparently a speaker was expected and, because she was ill, the session was scrubbed. They hadn't really expected me to turn up so nobody thought to contact me. 

I have been to one meeting though. I was made to feel welcome and it was splendid that there was another Briton there. I was given a booklet which gave details of the books to be read by what dates along with author's biographies, sleeve notes and the like. Very professional. Speaking in Spanish, about a book in front of a group of about a dozen people is not as pleasant as drinking beer on a sunlit terrace but it wasn't humiliating. My Spanish may have been verging on gibberish but nobody sniggered openly. There's another meeting this evening, that makes three books I've read because of the club and all have been good, well chosen. I'm on to number four and the first few pages had me guffawing so I think it will be good too.

What's more I was able to go back to the video blog and report that envelope duly pushed.

Yellow bins, green bins and more.

Rubbish collection in Spain is pretty standardised. There are big rubbish bins, of various types, scattered at strategic points in cities, towns, villages and the countryside. The bins are emptied to some organised schedule - usually every night in the cities and towns - less frequently in country areas. Householders take their rubbish to the bin. Pinoso town is a little unusual in that it has a door to door collection most nights. There are big recycling bins all over the place too - the ones in the photo are our nearest in Culebrón village centre - and there are Ecoparques where you can take those hard to get rid of things like engine oil. For bigger things, old sofas and the like, you phone either the town hall, or the company that collects the rubbish on behalf of the municipality, and they, usually, cart it away for free.

I'd half wondered about the subject of this blog, with it's not very Spanish content, when I changed the printer ink the other day. I took the old cartridges with me to town for recycling at the mobile ecoparque which parks up by the Spar shop, in the middle of town, most Wednesdays. There was a class of school children there squabbling over free, "ecologically friendly" bags that were being handed out as recompense for listening to some sort of recycling presentation. Consumption as a way of reducing consumption always strikes me as being like going to the January Sales to save money by buying something you'd not thought of buying till it was cheaper. Hey ho, maybe I'm just a bit curmudgeonly.

Then I got another prod. I was listening to the radio. The piece was on the exhibition about Neanderthals, called Ancestors, at the Archaeological Museum in Murcia, an exhibition we made the mistake of not going to when we were there the other day. Apparently Homo sapiens lived alongside an estimated eight now-extinct humanoid type species.

So now I'm wondering if I can blog something that links humanoid extinctions to recycling.  Does it surprise you that sometimes people don't follow my conversational twists and turns - especially when I try it in Spanish?!

So we have three capazos just outside our house.  Capazos, are those big, bendy, rubber buckets. We use them as the staging post for things on their way to the recycling bins. Of the three one is for cartons, tins, wrappings and aerosols; that's to go to the yellow bin. The glass goes in the green bins and paper and card goes into the blue bin. We don't have the brown, organic waste, bins in Pinoso area.

Household recycling isn't big in Spain. I think that about one third of urban waste is recycled which is very low by European standards. We try to be good and recycle as we're asked but, to be honest, I think it's all a bit of a con. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for sensible recycling, and re-using, but I do think that if the manufacturers were less interested in reducing transport costs or how their products will display at the point of sale then a good percentage of the recycling would be completely unnecessary. When this comes up in conversation people usually remember taking pop bottles back for the deposit or the doorstep milk deliveries. I don't actually know how these things pan out if you take everything into account. Is it really better, when you consider manufacturing, transport, energy, materials and everything else, to deliver milk door to door or for us to go and get it from a shop in a vaguely recyclable container? It's not the sort of information that I have to hand. I'm sure you've had a similar conversation in the bar about whether electric cars and their toxic batteries are a good idea.

The reason I think recycling (and electric cars and lots more) may well be a smokescreen is that we live in a world where the overriding concern is making money. Nearly everything that goes on in the world is about rich people getting richer. I mean how did someone persuade us that all of these tiny efforts are about "Saving the Planet?". I'm pretty sure that, in the end, the planet will be fine. I don't think we - humankind that is -  will. In fact I'm sure our selfishness and greed will continue to cause the death of lots and lots of species and make even more of a mess of the planet. In relation to the life of the planet though our effect will be very short term. When we've taken out billions more animals and birds and insects in every conceivable way, from destroying the places they live and the food they eat through to strangling them with the plastic rings from six packs, then we'll do something similar to ourselves.  It may be that we will finally unleash our nuclear arsenal or we may just die coughing in a toxic atmosphere or buried under mounds of plastic. Nonetheless, do as we will, the planet will shrug us off and go on for quite a while yet. It will be different world, just as the world that the trilobites or ammonites or even the first jellyfish and sharks knew was a bit different. No dinosaur ever saw a car, a rubbish dump or an energy saving light bulb. The graptolites didn't need an environmental strategy and they never got together, in an as yet unbuilt and unnamed Paris or Kyoto, to lie to each other about what they weren't going to do. That's because graptolites didn't really do a lot of damage. People do a lot of damage but, until there is some sort of astronomical event that does for the Earth, swallowed by the ever expanding local star or something, the world will keep on turning and some sort of lifeforms will wander the land and oceans. 

So, back from the gigantic to the insignificant. Pinoso Town Hall, like so many others has started a composting scheme. The principal reason the Town Hall got in on the scheme is because it will help reduce their bill with the waste processing plant in Villena. It's easy enough to give the scheme a bit of an environmental spin though and, being quite gullible, I was quick to get involved. In return for going to a two hour talk they gave me a composting kit which had lots of gadgets but where the key parts were a bin for the kitchen, to throw the kitchen waste in, and a big composting bin for the garden. The melon rind and tea bags and all the gubbins from the kitchen get mixed in with the garden cuttings in the composter. The stuff doesn't have to be transported anywhere and Maggie already has plans for the compost to be used on a vegetable patch.

It's too late for the Golden Toad or the Passenger Pigeon and it's a bit unlikely that the composter will save the Javan Rhinoceros or the Red Tuna but I suppose it's not doing any harm either.

Some quick, possibly wrong, information about the Pinoso Easter celebrations

Easter Week, Semana Santa, is huge in Spain. After all Easter is at the very heart of the Christianity and lots of Spanish events are still tied in to the Roman Catholic calendar.

Easter Sunday is the culmination of Holy Week when, so the story goes, Jesus Christ rose or was resurrected, from the dead. On Good Friday Jesus was executed by crucifixion and he was put in a guarded tomb. When some of his women followers visited the tomb on Sunday they found the tomb empty. It is an article of faith with Christians that Jesus rose from the dead.

Between Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered Jerusalem to the adulation of the crowd, through to his crucifixion on Friday and his resurrection on Sunday there are lots of other Easter scenes: the trial by Pontius Pilate, Peter, Jesus's follower, denying - three times - that he knew Jesus before the dawn cockerel crowed, Jesus's walk up to Golgotha or Calvary carrying his own cross and the help he received along the way, the crucifixion scene itself with three crosses, Jesus in the middle, his cross inscribed with INRI, flanked on each side by a common thief. The Roman soldier wounding Jesus with his spear. All of these events, and others, are represented in the various statues that are carried, or rolled, on tronos, pasos or floats, through the streets of Spain during Holy Week or Semana Santa.

Easter is celebrated lavishly in Pinoso. With a bit of luck the programme is here I failed to find the official programme on a website so, if you're interested, you'll have to download the pdf from my saved Facebook page.

The various groups, or cofradías, that take part wear different outfits, (the hood or capirote/capuchón, the túnicas or robes, the capas or capes and emblemas for emblems), take care of various statues, (pasos, tronos or imágenes) which are given outings in relation to the part of the Easter story they depict. Generally the participants have covered faces to show that they are penitent and to ensure that everyone has the same status. The participants are often called Nazarenos which is obviously from some reference to Nazareth, Jesus's home town, 

There are lots and lots of other traditions, religious rites, masses and church events associated with Holy Week and I don't know enough about it to write anything more detailed. However, I did think that you may be interested, if you live in Pinoso, to know who is who so that, with a bit of detective work, you can work out who will be out for each of the processions.

Sorry about the gaps between the pictures. I don't seem to be able to get blogger photos under control!

Hermandad de San Pedro Apóstol

Brotherhood of Saint Peter the Apostle

Hermandad de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno

Brotherhood of Our Father Jesus of Nazareth

Hermandad de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores

Brotherhood of Our Lady of Sorrows - it looks like a Sisterhood to me but there you go.

Centuria Romana

Roman Centuria

Cofradía del Santísimo Cristo de la Buena Muerte, Santo Sepulcro y Santa Mujer Verónica

Confraternity of the Holy Christ of the Good Death, Holy Sepulchre and the Holy Veronica - Veronica was the woman who gave Jesus a handkerchief to wipe his brow on the way up to Golgotha. The cloth was left with an imprint of his face. In fact, if you want to see the very cloth (!) then it will be on display in the Santa Faz celebrations in Alicante, this year on 28 April.

Hermandad de San Juan Apóstol y Evangelista

Brotherhood of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist

Hermandad de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad

Brotherhood of Our Lady of Solitude

Los Penitentes

The Penitents

As you may suspect I have blogged about Easter before. Here are a selection of past blogs

Link1 

Link2 

Link3 

Link4

HERE for the 2024 Easter programme I hope

Bottlenecks

Now that I'm old I'm slower. I don't worry so much about getting there, about saving time. I've come to think that a couple of minutes isn't really going to make much difference in the scheme of things - at least most of the time. It hasn't always been like that. I remember speeding down the A14 heading for a meeting, when I still worked in the UK, and suddenly wondering why I was risking my neck, and my licence, to be on time for yet another completely superfluous meeting. So, when I'm driving through Pinoso, I don't usually mind, or get flustered, when the car in front stops to let the passenger out or even when the car stops for nothing more essential than to have a chat with a passing neighbour. In fact I quite like it, a sort of Archer's like everyday tale of country folk. Over the years I've even grown accustomed to the person at the supermarket checkout first having a bit of a chinwag with the cashier and only then starting to pack away their products before the sudden realisation dawns that they might have to pay for their goods which leads to a frenzied, yet apparently fruitless for minutes, hunt for their purse/wallet.

This laissez faire approach does not extend to people who decide to have their conversation in the middle of the entranceway to the supermarket or the health centre. It does not extend to the people who stop on the stairs, as they leave the theatre, to comment on the Madrid Barça game. It does not extend  to the couple who decide to greet their next door neighbour, who they haven't seen for the past hour or so, whilst standing on a pavement hemmed in by a wall on one side and a safety barrier on the other so that everybody else has to ask to pass. There seems to me to be a substantive difference and this sort of incivility makes me cross. With just a little thought for the rest of humankind the group could walk two metres further and avoid causing a bottleneck; to leave the door clear or path clear. I'd like it too if, first, they realised that I was keeping the door open for them, instead of suddenly slowing to a snail's pace, and, second, if they said thanks for my small but generous gesture. Even though I consider it from time to time I still can't bring myself to let the door swing to in their ungrateful faces.

Now I thought this was my Britishness coming through. Hurry, hurry, hurry. After all I saw one of my island brethren (it was a man) beeping at someone crossing, with their trolley, outside the Tesco's in Huntingdon. So far as I can tell their misdemeanour was that they were not walking fast enough. All I could think was that it was maybe a barrister doing the honking and who thought that those 20 seconds were worth a wad of cash. But today, with no idea what to write about for this week's post, I was reading a Spanish novel, when I came across this passage - well the original was in Castilian so this is a loose translation.

"I suppose that we are all irritated by irresponsible people who wander around or go very slowly or who even stop without warning or who occupy the whole width of the pavement or who form groups so that it's impossible to overtake them. Even old and "lame" people irritate us too. Like you, like all of us, I have had to contain the impulse to give them a kick in the arse so they get a move on, or even to stick my little pocket knife in their fat buttocks, not only because they are a pain in the neck but also because of a morbid impulse, the same impulse we all have, from time to time, to destroy something pretty and valuable or to throw ourselves from a great height." - you get the idea, especially from the last phrase, that the man in the book is a bit off his head, but even the maddest have lucid moments. It goes on. "Well, one day, talking about this to a good friend I thought it would be a good idea to invent a horn for pedestrians. Perhaps as an application on our mobile phones with various sounds and noises to be used as a substitute for "excuse me?", "do you mind?" and "could I get past, please?".

I'm expecting the novel's hero will soon have a rant about the door opening scenario too!

To everything there is a season

This time it's about localness and the annual flow of events but, as always, there's a long and sinuous lead in.

We moved here in 2004 and, at first, we knew very little about the ebb and flow of the Spanish year. As we hunted for a house to buy we rented in Santa Pola and, one evening, as we watched the telly, I got really fed up with the thud, thud thud of a couple of drums in the street. It was obviously a pair of lads on their way back from band practice. I went onto the balcony to give them a right rollicking only to find 50 blokes carrying a big frame on their backs and practising that rhythmic swaying that they use to manoeuvre the Easter floats. The drums were to mark time. I turned round and turned up the volume on the telly. We didn't know about the enormity of the Easter celebrations in Spain.

Just before our first Pinoso Fiestas, in the August of 2005, I was talking to a bloke called Ian who'd lived in Pinoso for a while. The first stall holders were beginning to set up and streets were closed to traffic. He pointed towards where Consum now is - Over there will be a stall selling knives, over there is where you'll get the best chips and don't forget to buy a waffle from el Flequi, he'll have his van up by Lothermans. He'll be playing Rock music. Ian had done the fiestas a few times and knew the drill.

Spanish Internet services were not well developed in 2005. I was hunting for something entertaining to do with our weekend. I was pleasantly surprised when I came across a calendar of events for the town of Novelda. The calendar listed what would happen for the Fiestas of Santa María Magdalena, it stressed the growing importance of Carnaval. There was a snag though, to me a serious flaw in a calendar, no dates. Joy turned to despair. I was angry enough to send a snotty email, in my dodgy Spanish, complaining that the town only cared about people whose grandparent's grandparents had lived in Novelda and they should be aware that life in Spain was now conditioned by the arrival of lots of we foreigners. They didn't reply of course, nobody ever replied to emails in Spain in 2005, but they did add dates to the calendar. 

This last Sunday I saw an event advertised for a guided tour of the Teatro Wagner in Aspe. I went and did the tour. It was interesting. As we looked around it became obvious that I was the only person who didn't live in Aspe. Lots of people on the tour knew the guide, Mariano, and those who didn't know him directly knew of him. They also knew the local councillors who were shadowing the tour. When Mariano talked about this or that event, this or that local personality and this or that place then everybody else knew what, or who, he was talking about. There was no problem with me being there but why would someone from Pinoso go to an event in Aspe?

The cyclical nature of things isn't particular to Spain. All over the place night follows day, Summer follows Spring and Easter and Christmas (at least in nominally Christian countries) come around year after year in a predictable way. It's the same everywhere and for lots of things from the Grand National to Halley's Comet. The date of Eid ul Fitr Eid is based on the sighting of the Lunar crescent and Diwali is on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Indian calendar. It always seems to me though that Spain, at least rural Spain, is more cyclical and more locally orientated than the place I was brought up. 

Spanish people seem to be happy to repeat what they do each year and to do it in the same place. It's unlikely that someone from Valencia would think to travel to the rival Fallas in Denia or that someone from Jumilla would go to see the Easter floats in Tobarra. Spain also seems very keen on the permanency of things even if they aren't that permanent. I often snigger at the posters that say that the Christmas Circus will be in the "usual place" even though it moves every year or the fiesta programme that says that the route for the Flower Offering will be the traditional one. The assumption is that the people who are going to a local event will know where the circus is or where the traditional route goes. One year Pinoso only did the leaflet for Villazgo event in Valenciano even though the town shares a border with three Castellano speaking municipalities!

There is though a feeling of permanece, of repetition, to so many Spanish events and something too of geographical immediacy. As the Easter procession in Pinoso moves along Calle Monóvar it will stop for someone to sing their saeta from the balcony and I'll be as emotional as I get when they shout ¡Costaleros! - ¡al Cielo con El! as Easter Thursday becomes Good Friday outside the Church in Pinoso. Over in Elda the torchlit procession will wend it's way down Monte Bolón at Epiphany. In Holy Week, in Malaga, the Legion will carry the Cristo de la Buena Muerte on their shoulders. On the 6th July at 12 noon they will launch the chupinazo, the rocket, from the 2nd floor of the Town Hall in Pamplona to get the Sanfermines under way and in Elche on the 14th and 15th of August lots of men and boys will dress up to deliver the Misteri d'Elx mystery play in ancient Valenciano in the Basilica just as they have done from the middle of the XV century.

And so on because: to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

Tapas trails

Tapas trails are probably a bit old hat now but I still like to do one from time to time. In fact we went over to Novelda last weekend and, between dodging puddles and downpours, we did four stops on their current tapas route. It reminded me that I hadn't written anything about the trails for several years and whilst, for some of you, there may be a touch of "been there, done that" for relative newcomers it may still be one of the untried delights of Spanish life.

The first tapas trail or ruta de tapas that we ever did was in Sax, probably in 2005. I don't suppose that was the first one ever organised in Spain so they must have been around for ages. There are lots of variations on a theme but the basic idea is pretty straightforward. Some body, often the local Chamber of Trade or the Town Hall, persuades any number of restaurants or bars to take part. Each participating establishment prepares a tapa, often two tapas, for the route. They agree to sell the tapa and a drink, usually limited to beer and wine, for a fixed price to an agreed timetable. There is often a supplement if you want a soft drink which always seems a little contrary to me.

With the tapas decided the organising body then produces a leaflet and, nowadays, a website that features photos of the tapas along with a description. Being the 21st Century there are often nods to the fact that some people are vegetarian/vegan or gluten intolerant with little symbols to show which tapa has which characteristics. Often the times when the tapas are available is generalised for all the participating establishments and sometimes each place has different hours which makes it a bit more difficult to navigate the route. How long the route is available depends. In the past they tended to stretch across a couple of weeks and be available every day but now it's more usual for them to be weekend only events lasting for all the weekends in a particular month.

As you order, eat or pay for the tapa you traditionally get a sticker or a stamp or something to show that you bought a tapa in such and such a place. I'm sure there is an electronic variant but I've never encountered one. When you've collected so many stamps/stickers and/or when the event finishes you can take your completed leaflet to some collection point - maybe the Tourist Office or the Chamber of Trade offices. The winning establishment gets the publicity and some sort of award and there is nearly always a draw among the participants with prizes which range from a bottle of wine or a free meal through to a luxury cruise.

The organisation varies from town to town. The one in Novelda (which is still on for another week or so as I type) was for both savoury and sweet tapas. Each offering cost 2€ and that didn't include a drink. What's more you voted not only for the quality of the tapa (which is habitual) but also for the service which was a new idea to me. Usually you only need to go to a percentage of the participating establishments or try a set number of the tapas but the rules for each route are different. The number of places you need to visit is determined to some extent by the size of the town. If Alicante or Murcia runs a tapas trail then asking people to visit ten or even twenty places is easy because there are, potentially, hundreds of bars that may be involved. On the other hand there may only be twenty bars all told in Monóvar so each route has to be adapted to the particular circumstances. The possibilities for routes are manifold. We've done routes which have centred on varieties of coffee, on cocktails, on cakes and pastries and I've seen routes based on seafood or on traditional recipes. 

Pinoso has had a couple of stabs at a tapas trail, though they used the Valencian word mossets to describe tapas. They changed the rules slightly each time but of all the tapas trails I've ever been on I think the Pinoso ones were, uncharacteristically, the least well organised. So often Pinoso does things really well. The most basic mistake was that, at least on one of them, you had to go to every establishment and eat every tapa. This took no account of people's tastes; you don't like seafood - tough. There were also a couple of places that were out of the town centre - excellent in itself but, if you were transportless - tough. But the worst thing about having to go everywhere and eat everything was that some of the bars were really cynical about the event. Whilst most made an effort to produce something special a couple made no effort at all and did an anchovy on a bit of bread which devalued the whole event. There were also a couple of places which didn't seem that happy to sell tapas to people when they could sell something more expensive. Oh, and when we tried to do some of the places advertised as open on Sunday evening we found they were all closed.

Still, worth a go, especially if you haven't done one before.

The Fallas

I'm late with this. I also wrote it much more quickly than I normally write my blogs so apologies for any failings of style. If you want to go to the Fallas they finish tonight so, if you're interested, you'll probably have to wait till next year. Put it in your diary now, March 19th, that's the date for the burning. There are things to see during the week leading up to the 19th, particularly after the 15th. Towns, like Denia and Xàtiva, have Fallas too but the big one is in Valencia. Oh, and Elda has Fallas in September.

This is not a Wikipedia article and I haven't done anything other than the most basic check of my facts. It's just what I know, or think I know, so it's quite likely that there will be factual errors. But it's enough to get the idea. Honest. There will probably also be inconsistencies in spelling because I speak English but sometimes I will have used the Valenciano expression and sometimes I'll have used the Castilian translation.

The basic idea is easy enough. Most of the districts in the city of Valencia, think Pimlico, Mayfair and Kensington, set up a Commission which then organises the details for an event that is called Fallas. They co-ordinate the things in their neighbourhood and decide how to arrange contributions towards the city wide events. Each Commission also selects a young woman and a girl sized woman to be their senior and junior "Carnival Queens", the Falleras. One young woman gets to be the city wide embodiment of the Fallas, the Fallera Mayor. 

One of the principal activities of each Commission is to raise enough money to build a Falla, a monument. The money comes from local fund raising and sponsorship. Apparently the only monument that involves any public money is the one built in front of the Town Hall. Some of the monuments are modest and some are huge. They are made of wood, papier maché, polystyrene and glass fibre. Each Falla has a theme - usually some satirical comment on a current affairs story but it can be almost anything from a Royal affair to the argy bargy around a TV competition. The individual figures are called ninots and I think that before the Falla is put together the ninots are often paraded around the local streets. The individual Fallas monuments start to be put up a week or so before the big day, the 19th, when all but one of the ninots and Fallas are burned. Each Commission puts up a smaller, children's Falla, as well as the principal one. The last day on which the monuments have to be up and finished is by the day of the Plantà, usually the 15th of March. The actual burning takes place around midnight on the 19th, going on 20th, but it depends a bit on the availability of fire crews to make sure that the bonfire doesn't get out of control. Lots of the monuments are surrounded by impressive displays of lights. Visitors may not notice but the locals are often as interested in the lighting around the Falla as they are about the impressiveness of the monument itself.

The Fallas are based on the celebration of Saint Joseph, so there are any number of masses and religious events during Fallas but, for your average non believer, the days during the celebrations start with some unrepentant bands wandering around making a lot of noise from 8am each morning. The Fallas wouldn't be the Fallas without fireworks so expect lots of loud explosions too from the same time.

Each day, at 2pm, the Mascletà is set off. The Fallera Mayor gives the order from the Town Hall balcony. Various firework companies get the job of designing a soundscape in fireworks. There is hardly anything fired into the air, just batteries of fireworks that go bang, bang, bang, bang a bang. Lots of the bangers are hung from washing line type supports. This year I noticed on the telly that one of the mascletas featured blue and yellow, Ukrainian coloured, smoke. The crescendo usually produces a rolling, rumbling thunder which is easy to appreciate. I've heard a mascletà booming out beside a rock band - each one alternately taking up the melody. Once upon a time it was easy enough to get quite close to the bangers in Valencia but nowadays they are set off in a cage type structure and the crowd is kept well back. I think all of the local Commissions have their own mascletá at some time. I remember one time, years ago, staying with friends and going to check that my hire car was OK. I found that it was the only car left on the street and that it was now parked under lots of mascletá type bangers. I had to drive down steps to extract it because they'd built a Falla on my obvious escape route!

There is also a huge firework display each night at midnight in the river bed. It's an hour later when the flower offering, the Ofrenda is on. 

You may have noticed this fire, fireworks, burning sort of theme. On the evening of the burning, the Crema, there is the Cavalcada del Foc. I'm sure that you've seen one of the local Corre Foc, running with fire, events where people dress up as devils and run around the streets exploding fireworks all over the place. This is much wilder. The picture alongside is from Petrer.

Away from fire and explosions one of the events I like is where all of the Commissions make their flower offering to the Virgen de los Desamparados. She's actually a big wooden frame that's set up in the square by the side of the Cathedral and all of the Commissions arrange for lots of their people to parade to the square with offerings of flowers. The people parade into the square for three or four hours on two separate days! Somebody makes a design each year for the cape that the Virgin wears so each of the Commissions is asked to bring this or that colour flower to make up the final design. Each Commission, usually led by their Fallera, troops into the square almost certainly with their band playing the tune Valencia. The clothes they wear are spectacular, the men less so than the women, but even the men look pretty dapper. The women's frocks can, apparently, cost as much as 20,000€ but I understand that most cost a couple of thou. Given that there are 392 Commissions in the 2022 Fallas and just short of 100,000 registered participants the clothes themselves must be quite an industry.

As you might imagine there is a fair bit of revelry associated with the Fallas. Each Commission will arrange street parties which are called verbenas. There are set rules about when and how but I think there are three nights, starting at 10 and going on till 4am, when there are dances in the street with musicians and DJs. When they're not allowed to have the street celebrations they put the music inside the big tents that each of the Commissions sets up. If you're in Valencia during Fallas don't expect to get a lot of sleep.

What else? If you do go buy yourself some of the buñuelos, the doughnut type things that are actually made from pumpkin. A bit of a variation on the churros and porros theme. And, if you feel like it, buy some of the little bangers, the petardos, so you can hold your own in the firework throwing stakes.

Quite a few snaps somewhere in this album of March 2022 photos.

Personal bias

Watching the TV news in Spain on Thursday afternoon. Thinking about the untrammelled stupidity of it all. About the actions of men, and it always seems to be men, like Putin and Sergey Lavrov sending people to kill and be killed. Wondering who is making money from this because behind almost every indecent act someone is making money.

Back at the news the next item was that the Partido Popular (PP) in Castilla y León had done a deal with VOX to form the regional government. It's not on the same scale but it is on the same spectrum of human wickedness. It's the first time that VOX has actually been in a coalition government. It's the first time since the restoration of democracy in Spain, in the period after Franco died, that the far right has actually been in government. It may be the first but it probably won't be the last.

I'm not sure how genned up on Spanish politics you are. I try to keep up but sometimes I despair because, every now and then, there is some event that those in the know know and I don't. Well at least I didn't till I did. There's just been a palace coup in the PP for instance and, until the moment it happened, I thought that everyone in that party loved their leader. Apparently not. All the journalists told me, after it had happened, that it had been on the cards for ages and that everyone had seen it coming. Not me.

Anyway. The basic plot of Spanish politics is easy. There's a traditional left wing and a traditional right wing party, a growing far right party, a fading far left party plus a crumbling centre. Oh, and lots of regional parties.

On the left there's the long established PSOE, Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the Spanish Labour party if you will. They're not that left really but they remember to talk about poor people every now and again. They don't forget Bill Clinton's campaign message "It's the economy, stupid" so they try not to upset the people with the real power too much or too often. Their problem is that they don't have a parliamentary majority. They are propped up by a coalition with Podemos. Podemos are to the left of the PSOE. Podemos are not that keen on kowtowing to the money men so they give their coalition partners a lot of gyp. Even with Podemos the PSOE still don't have a clear majority and they have to prop up each crucial vote with a rag tag collection of parties.

Podemos, as I've said before is further to the left than the the PSOE. For some people there is an equivalence between the nutcase left (Podemos) and the nutcase right (VOX). Podemos, formed in 2014, was born from a popular political uprising that said it didn't trust politicians at all. As soon as they got a few people elected though they stopped talking about radical alternatives and elected a party hierarchy just like everyone else. They also subsumed the remnants of the communist party. As everyone else clamours to show how pro Ukrainian they are this bunch got into bother for saying that sending weapons, going to war, wasn't a good thing. Podemos is losing voter support all the time. The PSOE and Podemos keep having little fallings out because, from time to time, Podemos stands up for something it believes in - like a decent minimum wage or rent controls - whilst the PSOE think this will alienate their more right leaning members and it wants to pick up the remnants of the next bunch, Ciudadanos.

Ciudadanos is a party in the centre. They started well, back in about 2006, but it's all gone wrong and basically, they're a spent force. They had a bit of a power struggle in their ranks a few years ago which did for them as they forgot to stay central. Instead of continuing to broker this concession from the right and that concession from the left they drifted right. Now nobody remembers why they voted for Ciudadanos instead of just continuing to vote PP.

The PP, the Partido Popular. The sensible right, the Conservative Party. They are a post Franco party with roots in a bunch called Alianza Popular but the PP, as such, was born in 1989. Like the PSOE this lot have been in power a couple of times. They're just in the middle of a meltdown at the moment. Their young (ish) leader had a dust-up with a young (ish) woman who heads up the Regional Government in Madrid. Isabel Diaz Ayuso, the Madrid president, is dead popular for doing that Boris thing, the Donald thing, of saying whatever comes into her head. The idea is to make real people think she's a real person too and not a scheming politician. As a result of that internal dispute the leader of the PP is in the throes of resigning and he's about to be replaced by a steady hand on the tiller politician from Galicia. Nothing is decided yet but if it doesn't happen, if he's not the next leader of the PP, then the drinks are on me.

Then there's VOX. They're a bunch of racist, misogynist, radical right wingers who came into being in 2013. They couch their hatred in dodgy logic. They don't say they think black people are worse than white people but they do complain about immigration, not immigration per se, illegal immigration. Those are the people who clamber over border fences and cross the Med in toy boats. You know what colour illegal immigrants are don't you? Or they say they don't think it's fair to centre on the violence against women, after all women menace men too, so what we should centre on is violence in general. VOX are gaining in popularity. This means that the PP is careful not to stray into territory where they may appear to be too liberal so as not to lose the most right wing of their supporters to VOX.

Then there are lots of regional parties. Some are there on a single issue - fair deals for rural areas is big at the moment for instance - but most are well established regional parties particularly from Cataluña or The Basque Country. There are left and right leaning parties in amongst the small parties, there are parties who want independence for their region and groups that have historic links to terrorism. If you're British just think SNP or Plaid Cymru or Sinn Fein with a bit of Caroline Lucas or George Galloway thrown in.

So we've got the political spectrum which goes from issue parties through regional parties on to left, right and centre parties.

The structure is straightforward too. At local level there are the town halls. Spain still very much votes for personalities rather than parties at the municipal level.

Next up is the Regional Parliament - Valencian Community, Andalucia, Basque Country, Cantabria and so on. The Regions are very important in Spanish politics. It's they who take care of the services that affect people all the time, like health and education. The presidents of the regions are often referred to as Barons (most of them, obviously, are still men with grey suits) because just like the bunch that made King John sign the Magna Carta they have a lot of political clout at all levels.

Finally the National Parliament, the Congreso de los Diputados. This is the one that meets in Madrid. Just like in the UK it has two "houses". The difference from the UK is that both the upper and lower houses are elected. The deputies, just like British MPs, but elected in a completely different way via a party led system of proportional representation, are the rank and file, everyday politicians who do as their party leaders tell them. The upper house, the Senate, like the Lords, is used to park politicians and to reward loyal service. There are actually some real politicians in the Senate too who do their bit in keeping the country running.

Perhaps I should have heeded the advice to never talk about politics or religion!

At table

One of the people I talk Spanish to, online, asked me about how the bar bill is settled in the UK. I'm sure that, if you live in Spain, you've witnessed the scene where people, men, fight to pay the bill. Let's presume two traditional couples. Someone asks for the bill. When it arrives the two males lock horns, like a couple of fighting rams, each is determined to pay. Both wave a largish note (or a credit card) at the waiter/waitress who smiles on benevolently until someone triumphs. I had no idea what the answer was to the question. If someone else wants to pay my bar bill I cede gracefully. By way of answer I told my conversational partner that, because we tend to order drinks in rounds and pay as we order, the same situation doesn't usually arise.

Well, what about when you go to a restaurant who pays then?, asked my interlocutor. Again, if anyone ever offers to pay for my food I say thank you, so I had to invent the answer. I said that, generally, we knew when someone had invited us to a restaurant and that meant they were going to pay. It would be different if we simply happened to eat with someone because we were out together at mealtime. Then the bill would be divvied up with a bit thrown in for a communal tip. Only people you never want to eat with again do that thing where they start dribbling on about how you had three glasses of wine while they only had water at bill reckoning time. I was cogitating now. I explained that there may be an ulterior motive for picking up the tab; a business deal or the possibility of underwear removal for instance. In fact, given such circumstances, if someone started to renegotiate the unspoken deal - no let's go halves -  that would be a sure sign that the hoped for deal was off.

I also said that the idea of inviting someone out to eat, in the UK, was almost exclusively an evening affair and that the invitation to dine at someone's house was much more common in the UK than here in Spain. Of course, as it's ages since I've socialised in the UK and as I hardly ever socialise with Spaniards I could be plain wrong or out of date on all my answers.

It did set me thinking though about some other eating and drinking things that were usually different here in Spain. We'll ignore breakfast for the moment. British and Spanish breakfasts are so different, and so individually different, that I'll leave them aside this time.

I suppose the biggest difference is that, if you go out to eat with friends in Spain it is much more likely that you will eat at lunchtime than in the evening. It's not a crime to eat out in the evening or anything but it's not the norm.

The chances of eating, in Spain, without bread on the table are minimal. A Spanish pal who went on holiday to Shropshire confounded a number of waiters and waitresses by asking for bread. He told me he got to quite like the plates of Mother's Pride which were the best that most places, unused to serving bread with the meal, could manage. He also wondered why they brought butter. And what do we say about the sort of Spanish establishment that charges for the bread. Well, obviously, we won't be going back there.

In lots of restaurants, particularly in the warmer bits of Spain, there is a sort of generosity that sometimes surprises visitors. A basic sort of salad will be placed on the table unasked for, free and sometimes unadvertised. Nice as that is most visitors are even more shocked that, having asked for a glass of wine, the bottle is left behind on the table on a help yourself basis. Visitors suppose it will be charged by the glass. It isn't of course. Beware of anyone who asks for the cork and takes home the half empty bottle. They will never understand Spain. 

I've been told that Spaniards were always admonished in their youth to keep at least one hand on the table when they're not eating. My mum used to do the same with me about not eating off my knife and not spooning up peas with my fork. I've also heard that it's considered bad form to put you elbows on the table. You will see both "rules" broken all the time though. Whilst we're on manners, going back to bread, it's not high end good manners, but it's not unacceptable, to use bread to push food onto your fork

Only foreigners will think to order a starter for themselves in the belief that the person next to them will do the same. Usually the people around the table decide on a few starters which will go in the middle of the table so everyone can take what they want, bounded only by good manners. There is a phrase in Spanish used to describe the shame of taking the last potato or prawn or croqueta or whatever. It's not uncommon to see one item left behind on each plate. Sometimes the main course will also be placed centrally on the table and you may eat directly from there. Paella rice, for instance, is often eaten directly from the big paella pan in the centre of the table. Obviously this doesn't apply the the menú del día where you get something for you and I get something for me.

If you're in a restaurant there will be napkins or serviettes but it would be very unusual for a Spaniard to eat anything without a napkin or something similar to hand at home or in a bar. 

Cutlery, in posh restaurants, is taken away with the various courses but in ordinary sort of eateries you will be expected to hang on to your cutlery for the next course. The plates go but the knife and fork stay. United Statesians are always surprised that there's none of that thing they do of moving the fork to the other hand after cutting the meat but then we Brits think that's a bit odd anyway.

You drink cold drinks with food. Water (often for everyone), Fanta, Coca Cola (it's not Coke in Spain) beer, wine etc. are all fine. If you ask for a coffee to drink alongside your food the waiter will presume that you are ordering for after the meal. One Spaniard once told me that she thought it was dangerous to drink hot drinks with hot food. I think she meant it. It reminded me of the way in which lots of Spanish parents still warn their children not to go swimming too soon after eating because of the potentially dire consequences of stomach cramps and a watery end. Coffee and tea are for after you've eaten. It's bad luck, serious bad luck, to toast with water.

¡Que aproveche!