Cars as social outcasts

I'm sorry but I have to admit to enjoying Joyas sobre ruedas on the Discovery Channel - Wheeler dealers in its original. That interest explains why I asked after the hire car of a couple of friends visiting from the UK. The car had a late letter L registration - well under a year old - but it didn't have one of the emision badges or stickers on the windscreen. I mentioned this and, not surprisingly, our friends were completely in the dark about the badges. I explained. It's basically an emission thing. The idea is that electric cars, hybrids, newer petrol and diesel cars can get stickers whereas older petrol and diesel cars can't. The environmentally cleaner your motor and the fewer restrictions. The older and dirtier your car the sooner it will be forced off the road.

I remembered the badges conversation when we were in Altea town centre. "Ah look, there'll be a badge on this car", I said, but there wasn't. I walked down a row of at least 50 parked cars before I got to one with a sticker. I was truly surprised. My car has one and I just presumed that it was in the majority. In fact I recently had a conversation with a Spanish chap who was really sad that the new legislation meant that he was going to have to replace his much loved, nearly 500,000 kilometre, but still going strong, SEAT Cordoba for something newer. Hypothetically, from 1st January 2023, all towns with a population in excess of 50,000 have a low emissions zone (ZBE) in place. That's now a date that has passed. In practice only Madrid, Barcelona, Pontevedra and Zaragoza have complied with their legal obligations. A handful of other towns are nearly there and will implement this year but lots of places, Murcia Region and the Valencian Community for instance, have absolutely nothing planned.

The stickers are the basis for cars and vans entering these low emission zones. Bear in mind that there are lots of exceptions, lots of ifs, buts and maybes. The system gives a 0 sticker to the non polluting cars - electric vehicles and the like. Hybrids and gas propelled cars get an ECO sticker. Petrol engined cars after the beginning of 2006 and diesels built after September 2015 get a C sticker. Petrol cars from 2001 and diesels from 2006 get a B sticker. Older than that and you don't get a sticker. As I said lots of exceptions and lots of technical definitions. Look somewhere official if you need real detail.

There are 149 towns that have over 50,000 people in Spain. If this legislation had actually been implemented on time and you owned a nicely turned out, 2005, 2.7 litre diesel Jag S type you wouldn't be able to drive into them. Locally that would keep you out of Alcoy, Petrer, Orihuela, Torrevieja, San Vicente, Benidorm or even Molina de Segura never mind the obviously larger places like Alicante, Elche or Murcia.

The plans are in the hands of the local town halls so the what, where and how will vary from place to place. In Barcelona for instance the restrictions cover nearly all of the city but in Madrid it's just the very small area inside the M30 ring road. The idea is to use cameras to identify, and later fine, cars that enter the areas they shouldn't. Fines in Madrid and Barcelona are at about 200€ with discounts for early payment. These two cities give a clue to how other places will behave. The 0 cars enter and leave at will and street park if they can find somewhere. The B and C cars can enter but have to use designated car parks and even the ECO cars can only street park for a maximum of 2 hours. Residents currently get the right to enter the restricted areas with any old car but that right will be phased out over time. It's pretty easy to see the thinking behind this. If you're poor, with an old banger then you get the chop first. The better off, with a newer motor, get a reprieve for their combustion engines for a while but, until people abandon fossil fuel, the restrictions will bite harder and harder. 2030 is the first target date for real controls and by 2050 combustion engines will be a thing of the past. Indeed in the EU the plan is that new combustion engine vehicles will not be sold after 2035. 

It's probably true too that the idea of private car ownership is already a bit passé. Different ways of getting about urban areas for individuals and rethought schemes of planning and coordinating public and group transport for longer trips are on the way. Unless the sixth extinction event gets here first. Until then it's not difficult to get the stickers. You go to the Post Office with your Permiso de Circulacion for the vehicle in question and your ID for the owner of said vehicle - something like your TIE, DNI or, I suppose for non residents with cars parked here, their passport and NIE.

The impetus for this blog was my surprise at realising that so few cars have the sticker. It is not intended as a guide to the legislation. For good information go to a reputable source, like the DGT website or, for something in English, maybe the N332 Facebook page.

Routine

I try to be frugal with toilet paper. One sheet at a time if possible. It's not because I'm particularly mean, it's because toilet paper blocks up Spanish drains. I've never quite been able to bring myself to do that thing you are instructed to do so many times in Spanish "public" toilets, the ones in bars and the like, to put the soiled paper in the wastebasket. It just seems a bit too close to living in a cave and wearing skins.

That primness caught us out once though and we had to have the floor ripped up to clear the blockage. In order for that not to happen again I now go around our three bathrooms each week and tip buckets of water down the toilets, clean the hair from the plugholes and other routine things to avoid a reoccurence. When we have houseguests who use up a couple of toilet rolls in a weekend I'm hard pressed not to reprimand them sternly.

Our house is old but it's a bit like that bucket that has a new handle, a new bottom and a rewelded seam - there's not much of the original left. Almost everything has been rebuilt or altered while we've been here. We don't live in some sort of back to nature existence, we may have a cesspit and our electric supply may lack a bit of oomph, by British standards, but it's perfectly normal herabouts. Sometimes the low power needs to be taken into consideration. The pellet burner ignition system, for instance, seems to need all the power we have to set fire to the fuel so we have to remember not to boil the kettle until the pellets are aflame. Once it's lit though we can boil kettles, run tumble dryers and what not to our hearts content.

Obviously every house needs its routines. Cleaning out that pellet burner or changing the beds or doing the laundry are the sort of repetitive tasks that people do the world over but there are certain things that I do, on a regular basis, because of where and how we live.

For example I clean the leaves and other detritus from the drain in the back patio every month because one time, when the need to do so had never occurred to me, the torrential rain was too much for the semi choked drain and in minutes the yard turned into a paddling pool which lapped into our living room.

I check the water meter every week to make sure that we are using about the same amount and that the meter isn't spinning when we don't have any taps open. It hasn't happened to us but the stories of underground, unseen, tubing splitting and spilling water unchecked for weeks or months are legion. And the resulting water bills are eye watering. 

Whilst we're on pipes our water often used to freeze up when it got cold in Winter. The pipe runs along the side of a North facing wall so I put some foam insulation around the exposed pipe. That seemed to do the trick. No frozen water. But the plastic of the insulation didn't cope well with the weather and it soon split. So I added more insulation and then taped the whole lot up in the time honoured, WD40 or duct tap to fix everything, manner. Every month, I check that the foam and the tape are OK and I usually end up with a happy half hour balancing on a stepladder to rebandage the pipe. 

I'm not sure whether this falls into the same class. This may well be more like checking the tyre pressures and oil on the car or pruning the trees, raking up the leaves and hoeing out the invincible weeds. Just a routine. But our palm tree is under constant threat from the picudo rojo, a beetle type creature, that flies around looking for a place to lay eggs. Once the eggs hatch the larvae feast on palm trees. Every six weeks I strap on a backpack spraying kit and douse the tree.

I discovered a new routine just yesterday. We have a gas water heater for the showers. It started to cut out after a couple of minutes. Naked with soapy hair and freezing water is horrid. I was just about to call out the repair people when I realised that it only happened when I changed from tap to shower. The water here is hard. That's why I clean or change the inlet filters on the water supply every three months to keep the amount of limescale in the system down. If you don't clean out your kettle or use anti-lime tabs in your washing machine then you'll soon notice. Everything furs up. People are always having to change electric water heaters because the elements are, effectively, covered in stone. The problem in the shower was that when the water flow diminished some sort of safety mechanism cut in on the gas heater. All I had to do was clean out the shower head and the taps and it seems to have sorted the problem. I've put that job onto a four week cycle in my diary.

I don't remember doing anything of a like nature when I lived in the UK. Periodic jobs obviously but a routine to avoid potential problems, no.

Likes, dislikes, Christmas decorations and talking local

When Spanish people ask me what I like most about Spain I say the anarchy. Then I have to backtrack because the word has more history and more significance in Spanish than it does in English. I should say something like the informality, a touch of rebelliousness, the remarkability of some fiestas and the way that after a family meal in a Spanish restaurant the proverbial bomb dropping would make no noticeable difference nor would it stop the kids playing tag around the tables. There are lots of other things I like too but it's a good starter.

When Spanish people ask me what I like least about Spain I say the cold. They think I'm joking. I explain that in the UK it might be cold outside in winter, and dark, but that inside it would be nice and warm. It's not true of most of Spain but here in Alicante, where insulation is practically non existent, where tiles and ornamental stone are everywhere and where central heating is almost unknown then wearing outdoor clothing inside in Winter is common.

Each year, at the beginning of December I drag our Christmas lights out of storage and usually buy a few more to light the front of our house. I like the pagan idea of scaring away the winter's dark with light and Christmas is the time to do it. Inside we have a Belén, a nativity scene (not for any religious reason but because we live in Spain) and a tree. We bought our Christmas tree at Woolworth's in Huntingdon in 1997. It sheds each year. I've always argued that a returning artificial tree gives a certain continuity but I have to admit that it is now, officially, bald and has to be retired, replaced and discarded. 

I was talking to one of my online Spanish chums about the tree and she said they'd had no decorations of any sort for Christmas. No tree, no lights and, given that most British households would now be the same, no cards either. Cards have never been a thing in Spain. Obviously Spanish people put up Christmas decorations. You see them but compare them to those films set in small town United States where everyone wears Santa hats and drinks eggnog as the Christmas tree lights are turned on or, indeed, the majority of British homes, then Spanish Christmas decorations are definitely an optional extra.

I like to go places. There's so much to do, so much to see. My partner isn't quite so convinced. This reticence on her part is not new. I remember she wasn't over enthusiastic about going to the Prickwillow Engine Museum even on a steam day, and that was last century. So, when she went to the UK for a few days, I went to see the Todoli Citrus Fundació groves in Palmera near Gandía. The Foundation has over 400 different varieties of citrus fruit. I thought it would be an interesting visit. The website said the tours were available in Valencian, Castilian and English. The bloke who took us round was a Valencian nationalist (someone who strongly identifies with their own nation and vigorously supports its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations). He used some not so subtle tactics to gerrymander a result to prove that the group wanted the tour conducted in Valencian. I can understand Valencian, to a degree, but after straining to understand for a while I go into Homer Simpson mode and the birds soar freely in the emptied sky of my mind. It rather dampened my enthusiasm for the visit and my Google review was not kind.

I absolutely understand why people in Catalonia, the Balearic islands and the Valencian Community are keen to keep their language alive. That said I have never understood a pride in having been born in a certain place or having any other innate trait; can anyone be proud that they have brown eyes? I'm very happy that I was born British but only in a very selfish way because it means I've had health care and schooling and clean water all my life. I see why people are proud of the things they achieve but not in the product of happenstance. And the line is a very fine one between promoting something, like Valenciano, and purposefully excluding people.

And if it's not too late: Happy New Year

Careful with That Axe, Eugene

Bétera, near Valencia, mid August, years ago. Our friends had taken us to join the crowd in the main street. We didn't quite know why. They weren't explaining and our Spanish wasn't up to asking. When the fireworks, hung from overhead lines, started to go off and shower the crowd with sparks and flame we knew what to do though. We retreated before the wall of fire. The end of the street was sealed, there was nowhere to go; hundreds of us cowered, cheek by jowl, knowing, or at least trusting, that the flames and sparks wouldn't reach us. And sputter out they did. 

The next night we went back to the same place to join in the fiesta. We noticed there were no parked cars and that all the windows were boarded up. As midnight approached our friends herded us back to the car and abandoned the town centre. We didn't know why. We found out though. After midnight gangs of young people wearing overalls and crash helmets, and with at least one fire extinguisher per group, just in case, mount a firefight using Roman candles. In Elche, on the Nit d'Alba, they used to do something similar. First the official firework display but later, much later, the same idea. Firework armed gangs battling it out.

The Day of the Innocents, a reminder of the day when the biblical Herod had all the male babies under two put to the sword to protect his crown from a potential usurper, Spaniards do what we Britons do on April 1st. In Ibi there is a bit of a fight that day. The Ibenses, like the Beterenses and Ilicitanos, use fireworks but first they go to work with flour and eggs. The Spanish word for flour is harina, the word in the local Valencian language is farina. The event is called els (the) Enfarinats (floury ones).There's more to it but, in brief, one group elects a mayor and other officials to run the town and another group takes exception to this coup and stages a counter coup. That's when the flour and eggs fly, the flares go off and the bangers and jumping  jacks bang and jump.

The first time I saw els Enfarinats in 2011 their fight evolved in front of the church in the old part of town. I watched from a safe distance. I thought it was bonkers. The second time, in 2016, I got in much closer at the risk of a camera dusted with flour and garnished with egg. I took a pal there in 2022, a couple of weeks ago. This time the fight wasn't in front of the church because the church square was one big building site. The battlefield had been moved to an ordinary looking street with a PA system blasting out reggaeton as the event got underway. There was a wire fence type enclosure around the battle zone. The clash had two halves, like a Crystal Palace v Brighton and Hove Albion game. For the flour part anyone could get reasonably close but only outside the fence. In the second half, with fireworks, it was Enfarinats and pass holders only. We sat some fifty metres away in tiered seating to watch. It wasn't the nearly participative event I remembered; it was something I viewed as a spectator. I know in Elche that, to take part in the firework battle, you now have to attend a pre-event training course.

People say that health and safety rules are regularly flouted in Spain. It's true and it's not true. Sensible health and safety practices are ignored all the time, everywhere, by people who decide that those ideas are a bit silly, a bit unnecessary or too much faff. Most of us clamber onto a wobbly kitchen chair from time to time to reach the top shelf or sprawl out in the sun without sunscreen but for some people H&S has become so second nature that they'd never go up a ladder without someone at the bottom or fix the wonky toaster by prodding at its insides with a kitchen knife. The smaller, the more domestic, the situation the less likely that safety will be the paramount consideration.

Eleven or twelve years ago I taught some English to the management staff of the Dos Mares Shopping Centre in San Javier. I remember their building officer pacing the room and cursing after a visit from the H&S inspector. "Can you imagine," seethed my pupil, "I've already got two blokes on the cherry picker we use to do maintenance at height on the building. One on the ground holding on to ropes and harnesses that are fastened to the bloke on the platform. Both wearing goggles and hats and gloves and safety boots and this idiot wants a third person in the team. I asked him why - will he be there to catch the falling man if the harnesses and ropes fail? Lunacy". 

I remember someone who worked for the Town Hall in Pinoso sacking a building firm he'd hired in 2007 because the building workers were not using any safety gear whilst they worked on his private house. "I make sure people follow the rules," he said, "how can I possibly have people flouting those same rules when they work on my house?" And yet, in Forcall last year I watched as people ran in and out of a burning bonfire, in Vilanova d'Alcolea for Sant Antoni they have horses running through fire and locally I've run in amongst people dressed as devils as they unleashed fireworks left right and centre. 

Now I understand a bit better how things Spanish work I've often wondered about going back to Betera to run away from those fireworks again but I've had trouble finding the details. Maybe it's because what we did then won't fit behind a fence and so it's just not acceptable anymore.

Form and substance

In the run up to Christmas we bought a couple of coca from the women running the Caritas stall outside the Parish Rooms in Pinoso. The coca were cooked as we watched and wrapped in silver paper. For two we paid one Euro. I like coca and I wolfed mine down. My companion was not so keen. Mind, she's the sort of woman who doesn't like digestive biscuits. She likes something a bit fancier. She calls coca fat pies.

Coca has nothing to do with soft drinks or narcotics. Coca is a sort of thickish pancake made with flour, water and olive oil, salted to taste. You make a dough, separate off a small ball shaped lump of it, squash it down with the heel of your hand to make a vague circular shape before frying it up on a plancha which is an oil coated flat hot surface. You couldn't get much simpler. There's another traditional food around here called gachamiga made with just flour, oil, water and garlic. In most of the village fiestas there will be competitions (traditionally for men) to cook gachamiga in a big wok like pan over an open fire. Indeed lots of the traditional regional dishes of Spain are based on what's to hand. Think fabada from Asturias, paella from Valencia, migas in Extremadura, cochinilla in Segovia, calcots in Catalunya or tortilla de patatas everywhere. It's a bit unlikely that Jijona would have become famous for Christmas turrón if they hadn't had access to plentiful supplies of local almonds, honey and eggs.

Peasant food, simple food, cooking with what you have to hand applies equally well in the UK and, probably, all over the world. Think Yorkshire pudding - flour, eggs and milk. Fry instead of bake and the Yorkshires become  pancakes. Shrove Tuesday, Pancake day, is the feast day before the God fearing population plunged into the denials of Lent on Ash Wednesday. The food of the feast being so simple says something of the society in which that tradition was forged. I don't suppose most young English people would have a clue about Pancake day now. Young Spaniards like pizzas and burgers too but they seem happy to eat both the traditional fare and the more recent introductions. I have no idea whether that will last. Everywhere we see example after example of invasive species driving out the local species.

I was reminded of the coca though when we went to the artisan Christmas Market in Murcia city. We bought some little biscuits. There were four or five in a pretty cellophane bag tied off with a ribbon - they cost four or five Euro. The biscuits were multicoloured, they had patterns iced onto them, there were various different fillings; they looked really scrumptious. They were nice enough but they definitely looked better than they tasted.

I understand that substance over form is an accounting term but it does seem that so often nowadays that form is much more important than substance. Double plus good to the women of Caritas and their coca then.

That's entertainment

Over the last few weeks we've been in theatres a little more regularly than usual. We saw Carmina Burana in Alcoy, Totally Tina in the Gran Teatre in Elche, Miguel Poveda down at the ADDA in Alicante and then a classical orchestra at The Chapí in Villena. The last thing I went to here in Pinoso was quite a while ago now though, the Akram Trio, at the tail end of November. While we go to theatres for bands, opera, dance, music, zarzuelas and even magic we usually shy away from plays. Too tricky for our dodgy Spanish. 

As I hope you know Culebrón is a part of Pinoso and Pinoso has a population of about 8,500. In the English countryside Pinoso would be no more than a village but here it's definitely a town - probably because it provides town like services. One of those services is a theatre, the frequently used Auditorio Emilio Martínez Sáez. Settlements even smaller than Pinoso boast a theatre. Nearby Algueña (1300 people) and Salinas (1600) both have theatres and so (obviously) does Abanilla with over 6,000 people. It's something that seems to be almost taken for granted in Spain.

The theatres are all different but I'm optimistically going to see similarities and categories. Pinoso's theatre is a style much like the Teatro Cervantes in Petrer. Reasonably modern with quite a lot of wood panelling and fairly comfy seating. These venues often look as though refurb time is fast approaching. Then there are the theatres that have a bit grander design - stalls, dress circle, boxes and sometimes even gods. Examples here would be the Castelar over in Elda, the Principal in Monóvar or the Wagner down in Aspe. My favourites though are the plush velvet and gold leaf theatres lit with a sumptuous golden light; the ones with ceiling murals, with chandeliers and with the full panoply of stalls, boxes, upper and dress circles. The Chapí in Villena, the Vico in Jumilla, the Concha Segura in Yecla, the Principal in Alicante, the Gran Teatro in Elche and the Romea in Murcia all fall into this class. Strangely the last couple of places we've been to have been new to us and both have been modern. The Calderón in Alcoy was very swish, very modern, very comfy and the ADDA (Auditorio de la Diputación de Alicante) in Alicante was a bit of an eye opener to a country bumpkin like me. Much grander than most of our habitual haunts but all white, all synthetic materials, all wide open spaces. Built in 2011 it reminded me of the Palau de les Arts in the City of Art and Science up in Valencia but, as it wasn't designed by Santiago Calatrava, bits weren't falling off as we sat there!

It's surprisingly easy to book up events in these theatres nowadays. In the past it was often a pain - phone calls, box office pickups and approved agents with tickets. It's still sometimes the case. In the summer I had to go to a book shop in Novelda to buy tickets for a musical in the Cultural Centre in the town and, back in September, we chose to go to Yecla and stand in a queue to get first dibs on the seats for the Jazz Festival. If we'd waited for the Internet sale to open the next day we wouldn't have got the seats we wanted. Generally though the ticket platforms now make it cakelike. For the great majority of the theatres (and other venues around here) Instanticket is the most common platform, though some places use different ticket agencies. Prices vary. In the paraninfo of the University of Alicante (which isn't really a theatre) or in municipal theatres (like Pinoso) the performances are often free or a few Euros. In commercial theatres the  prices reflect the cost of staging the event - opera tickets are more expensive than ones for a string quartet for instance. I expect to pay somewhere in the teens, sometimes in the mid twenties and I baulk at anything over 30 unless I'm dead keen. 

Should you decide to give it a go, and you haven't before, I can't really help with the nomenclature of the bits of a theatre. I thought it was pretty simple, Patio de Butacas for the stalls, the seats lined up on the ground floor facing the stage. Anfiteatro was the first floor circle, again facing the stage but one floor up and with tiered seating. Another floor up, with your head against the ceiling, el Paraiso, the Gods usually called the chicken coop, el gallinero, by we hoi polloi. Along the side walls, so you have to look obliquely to see the stage, are the Palcos, the boxes. There's usually no problem with buying just a couple of seats in a box. I was also told, at the Concha Segura in Yecla, that the boxes that are at the same level as the stage, a little above the stalls, are called plateas but I've just been looking at the Instanticket diagrams of the theatres and every one seems to use variations of the name. It's all very graphic though, on all of the ticketing sites, so it's easy to work out. Knowing that Escenario is the stage  you just decide whether you want to look up to the stage, down to the stage, straight on to the stage or obliquely to the stage then check the availability and the prices. 

When I did the tour of the Wagner in Aspe we were told that they had never sold all the seats for any performance, that there were always unsold seats dotted here and there even for the most popular events. The ticket selling sites may say the theatre is sold out but it's not, apparently, quite true. This is because there is both national and regional legislation about how tickets should be sold. Here in Valencia 5% of tickets have to be held back to be sold at performance time from the box office. 

And if you don't fancy a performance most of the theatres do guided tours from time to time. The Teatro Chapí, named for a Villena born composer of the very traditionally Spanish opera form called zarzuela, for example does a visit one Sunday each month. As with nearly anything that involves a guided tour, from castles and museums to old air raid shelters the tourist offices are the place to ask.

Maintaining stereotypes

Everyone knows that Germans don't have a sense of humour. Everyone knows that people from the United States are fat, that Jamaicans have dreads and smoke ganja all the time or that we English are very formal and reserved. And everyone knows that those generalisations are all totally untrue. Jada Pinkett Smith is American, Usain Bolt is Jamaican and all those people vomiting on the payments in Magaluf are British. Bear that idea in mind as you read.

Here are some things that Spaniards do or don't do. The converse is that somebody else typically does do, or doesn't do, these things.

1. Spanish men don't wear shorts once summer is over and until the summer weather comes back. A warm day in February doesn't count.
2. Spaniards don't put butter on the bread - not on sandwiches and not on the plate to go with the bread roll at table. It is true that, in some parts of Spain, Spaniards put butter on toast, with jam.
3. Spaniards do not drink warm drinks - tea, coffee type drinks - with food except with toast or the pastries at breakfast.
4. Spaniards don't put milk in tea. This means getting a standard type British tea is a bit of a struggle - té clásico con una pizca de leche fría.
5. Spaniards do not put pepper on the table to go with the salt, oil and vinegar.
6. Spaniards do say hello as they enter a bar, a bank, a post office or the like. They greet everyone.
7. Spaniards say goodbye as they leave a bar etc.
8. Spaniards tend to speak quite loudly!
9. Spaniards won't have a hissy fit if a stranger comments favourably on a baby, musses up the hair of a four year old or speaks to their child.
10. Spaniards never sing along with their National Anthem. That's a bit of a trick really because the current Spanish National Anthem doesn't have any words. I can't remember what it is but there is some accepted version of tum tey tum, or hmm hmm hmm if a football crowd feels it needs to make a statement.
11. Spaniards never eat paella in the evening; it's just for lunch.
12. Spaniards do not put carpets in bathrooms and they think it's a disgustingly unhygienic thing to do so.
13. Spaniards hardly ever drink anything alcoholic, until late at night, without eating a little of something alongside - nuts, crisps, olives etc.
14. Spanish washbasins, baths and sinks hardly ever have two taps.
15. Spanish queues don't usually involve a line of people. A person joining the virtual queue has to ask who is the last person there so they can take their turn accordingly.
16. Spaniards take a start time as a rough indication of when to be at an appointed place. Punctuality has improved incredibly in the last few years but if the theatre performance is billed to start at 8pm then 8.15/8.20pm would be good going.
17. Spaniards eat to quite a fixed timetable. 2pm to 3.30pm to start the main meal of the day and around 9pm to 10pm for the much less important evening meal.
18. Spaniards would not consider going to a (normal) restaurant before 9pm in the evening. 
19. Spaniards do not care for spicy food.
20. Spaniards do not consider tipping to be any sort of duty. The idea of a fixed percentage is very foreign to them. Spaniards do not tip when service is bad.
21. Spaniards don't wait to be noticed by bar staff at the bar. They make their presence known.
22. Spaniards, in this part of the world at least, do not heat their homes, offices or workplaces adequately. This is becoming less true.
23. Spaniards let their children stay up very late and Spanish parents and carers include their children in lots of late night activities.
24. Spaniards don't eat in the street - that is they don't eat a sandwich or other snack type food as they walk.
25. Spaniards don't (generally) binge drink.
26. Spaniards have power points in bathrooms.
27. Spaniards talk to their families, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents etc. very, very regularly.
28. Spaniards do not drink tepid beer or soft drinks.
29. Spaniards don't, readily, invite people into their homes.
30. Spaniards, when driving, do not, in my experience, acknowledge friendly gestures from other motorists. Let someone into a lane of near stationary traffic and there will be no upraised palm to say "thank you".
31. Spaniards, most Spaniards, don't particularly like flamenco

There are tens more but that will do for now

The Bar Avenida

I've been chided many, many times, by friends and acquaintances, for choosing to go into "old men's bars". If you live in Spain you know the sort of place. It's not a particularly lavishly decorated spot. In fact, normally it's a bit dowdy, poorly lit, a bit grubby. It has a tiled floor that has seen better times, the tables and chairs are a bit worse for wear too. Probably there are piles of abandoned kit in plain view - beer crates, extra tables, mop buckets and over there, by the toilets, an old fashioned chest freezer, emblazoned with a company name, now used just for ice and as a resting place for flotsam and jetsam. The bar of the bar is probably quite long and it's not particularly decorative  - stainless steel or some polished stone maybe. In the old days there used to be heaps of used serviettes on the floor by the bar. The telly will be on, though usually the sound is muted. That's not the case with the rest of the place. If what your eyes see is something a bit worn, a bit past its best then what your ears hear is a medley of very loud intertwined sounds. The coffee machine hissing loudly, the coffee grinder grinding, the clattering of washing up or something being chopped behind the bar. And, over the top of these ambient sounds there will be the people. Unlike the servants in the dining room at Downton Abbey the staff will not be going about their tasks silently. They will be communicating in a loud voice or simply shouting. The clients happily join in. As someone enters the first thing they do is to greet the bar - not anyone in particular but the throng. Metres from the bar they will be making their order whether they are heading for the bar or for their usual table. If they are of a more restrained nature they may wait until their chair has been dragged, squealing, from its parking place underneath their table to shout their order to the Pedro or Santi or Concha.

I just heard that an estimated 85,000 bars in Spain succumbed to  Covid. That's out of an estimated total of 250,000. The bars, the sort described above, are nearly always family run businesses. They open at some hideous time in the morning, for the regulars on their way to work or, in rural areas at the weekends, for the hunters. They close late at night. The money they make isn't sufficient to refit the place nor to provide a decent wage to the family who run it. But they keep going because nobody in the family draws a real wage. It's more like spending money or housekeeping money from a common pot. They are almost certainly the type of bars that went to the wall during the pandemic.

It's not as though these bars are an endangered species but they are definitely on the vulnerable list. They were a product of a poorer Spain, a Spain that went to the bar to watch the football, a Spain where the bar had regulars who formed a community and never considered going to another bar, the sort of bar which sold the same Christmas lottery ticket to the whole neighbourhood. In most cases regulars didn't really need to order anything because the people behind the bar knew that Manolo wanted a brandy with his morning coffee, a Mahou when he came in at 11am, the menú (which was almost certainly basic and cheap) at lunchtime and so on. In villages the bars were the social centre, they were the club, the meeting place, the place where post was delivered, the place where advice was sought. Nowadays it's quite common to see depopulated villages offering the village bar for free to anyone willing to see if they can make a living from it because, without the bar, the village is just some houses. 

These posher bars are usually owned by venture capital groups, by a pension fund or maybe they're a franchise operation with a carefully designed image. Naturally there are still individual bars but it's a bit unlikely that the new, enthusiastic and optimistic entrepreneur will set out to produce a bar with formica tables and plastic chairs. The difference of course is that the styled bars are there to make money, to sell you things, whilst the traditional bar might have had that same end aim but it did it with more care, with more sense of belonging, with more feeling for a neighbourhood. So, probably the days of the "old men's bars", a Spanish institution, are numbered. I feel it's our duty to use them as often as we can before time does away with them.

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Just before I go. How many Spanish bars have you ever been in that you might describe as comfy? A handful at most. Until very recently, around here at least, when it got cold, most of them never put on their heating and they'd leave the front door open. The chairs are never comfortable. Even with their considered design the trendy bars will still make you perch on high stools inside while outside, on their terraces, they are perfectly happy to use those plastic chairs, supplied by the brewery, that seem custom made to dig into the soft spot in your back.

Staying neutral

Last Friday, November 25, there were demonstrations and events all over Spain for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. As you enter the majority of Spanish towns and cities you will see a purple sign telling you that this town is against gender violence - that's one of Pinoso's on the left. When women in Spain are murdered by their partners or ex partners the murder is always given prominence in the news. There is a well publicised, 016, national helpline against gender violence. In Pinoso every first Friday of the month at 8pm, there are a few minutes of silence to remember the victims of gender violence. Spain was the fourth country in the world to introduce same sex marriage. The Yes is Yes Law that has just come into force, and which is having a stormy introduction for some dodgy legal drafting, is legislation which makes prosecution of rapists and abusers much less difficult and less traumatic for women. A new bit of legislation came into force today that stops gender stereotyping in the promotion of toys. The Trans Law allows for people to elect which sex, if any, they wish to be with almost no administrative or legal fuss and there are laws in the pipeline in respect of human trafficking and prostitution. There are other procedures, like women getting paid time off work for serious period pain or men getting paternity leave, that have been in place for a while. The point is that Spain is pretty go ahead on gender legislation.

Now if you're old and British, like me, you may remember a time when there was a lot of guff in the UK about things like saying milkman, chairman of the board, housewife. Was it ladies or women? Were women strong enough to drive buses? I worked for a charity at the time and we spent ages arguing about whether I could use Chair in the minutes instead of chairwoman or chairman for the person who chaired a meeting. How many times did someone painstakingly explain to me that a chair was a piece of furniture not a person? Language is a powerful tool on the road to equality and, so far as I know, that's a battle that has long been won in the UK. Firefighters, police officers, cabin crew, actor, headteacher and scores of similar words just get used naturally, without a second thought. Even the most reactionary manages policewoman and the like.

Spanish, like lots of other languages, has gender for words. Some words are masculine and some words are feminine. The word for a woman, la mujer, is feminine. The word for a man, el hombre, is masculine. The, the word the, is a marker for the gender of the word - la or el. All words have gender even when it isn't obvious. La silla, the chair, is feminine but el sofá, the sofa, is masculine. Sometimes the choice of gender for the word seems a bit perverse - a couple of slang words for a penis are polla and verga and both are feminine whilst one of the slangy words for a vagina, coño, is masculine.

People tend to adaptability. Take councillor; the Spanish is concejal or maybe concejala. It was something on Facebook from a local councillor that was the spark for this post. The official dictionary says that it's the same word, concejal, for a man or a woman - just change the article - articles are a/an and the in English. So, for a woman you'd say la concejal and for a man you'd say el concejal. But nowadays lots of people want to stress that women have status within local councils. So, the activist line is to use la concejala for a woman and el concejal for a man. Personally I'm all for this. Sometimes the feminised word already has a different meaning but when the woman postie buzzes on the door phone and says cartera I don't wonder why a wallet or a portfolio is talking to me on the intercom. I can work out that cartera might have two distinct meanings and I know it's the postwoman/postal operative/mail carrier, at the door. Lots of Spaniards apparently don't. The line they take is that the official dictionary says such and such and that's good enough for them. 

The official dictionary in Spanish is an odd fish. It's like most dictionaries in that it usually describes a word and maybe gives an example of its use. Another of its purposes is to maintain the language spoken in over 20 different countries unified. For that reason the dictionary is sometimes more like a long vocabulary list. Not that it does, but it might, say that to shampoo is the action of applying shampoo. If you don't know what shampoo is then you have to look up a second word. The official dictionary is slow to include new words, it often takes years and years. The people behind the dictionary don't care for anglicisms. People in the street might say cyberattack (ciberataque) or hashtag (hashtag) but you won't find them in the dictionary. I've had discussions, verging on arguments, with Spaniards about the dictionary being controlled by old white men in grey suits but let's just say the dictionary tends to the conservative.

The biggest problem though comes with plurals. Generally, in Spanish grammar masculine gender takes precedence over feminine gender. Instead of saying brothers and sisters you "should" use the equivalent of brothers in Spanish to describe, well, brothers and sisters. One way around this is to mention both genders - hermanas (sisters, feminine) and hermanos (brothers, masculine) which can get unwieldy. Sometimes there is no dictionary accepted masculine or feminine form. That's when the politically progressive invent a word and when the traditionalists scurry for their official grammar and dictionary. They have a point to prove.

It's become even more dodgy recently now that there are people who define themselves as either male or female. There are occasional examples of people in the news trying to include a third, gender neutral, word. For instance to say "Hello everyone," the traditional Spanish phrase is "Hola a todos" but that's masculine. So to be inclusive it became "Hola a todos and todas," (masculine and feminine). Include the gender neutral form and you get "Hola a todos, todas and todes." In the written form the @ symbol (an o and an a combined) is still common but sometimes you'll see an x instead - todxs.

It often surprises me how reactionary lots of Spaniards are about this. I'd still be arguing about furniture if I worked here!

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That official dictionary is El Diccionario de la lengua española, the Dictionary of the Spanish Language produced by La Real Academia Española, The Spanish Royal Academy.

But no popcorn

Going to the pictures in Spain is a bit sad at the moment. The cinemas are just so quiet. The reports say 35% down on pre pandemic figures. I suppose that when everyone was locked in their homes they subscribed to Apple TV or Netflix or Filmin. At that time the film makers and distributors thought, well, if anyone is going to see my film then I have to put it on HBO or Amazon Prime or the Disney Channel and the rest. So film making is healthy enough, lots of product, but with many releases going direct to platforms or having very short cinema runs.

Although I go to the flicks a lot, I go at unpopular times. Not for me the crush of Saturday evening but, more usually, the peace of Tuesdays. Even then the fall off in numbers is noticeable. I've been in cinemas where, so far as I can tell, there are no other customers in the whole building. Tuesday is favourite because the nearest cinema to Culebrón, the Yelmo in Petrer, does its original language films then. It's become a habit so when there's nothing any good in English but something worthwhile in Spanish then Tuesday is still favourite. The exception is when the Yelmo has nothing worth watching. The ABC down in Elche often has a better range and their cheap day is Wednesday so that's when I go. Given the choice I go for the early showings, the ones at 4.30 or 5pm, which isn't a popular time for anything outside the home in Spain. This week we went to the Yelmo in Alicante for the 7.30pm show and the place was quieter - much quieter - than your average Spanish funeral parlour. Bear in mind that lots of the larger tanatorios, the funeral parlours, have 24 hour bar service.

I spent a lot of my early years in a town in West Yorkshire called Elland. There was a chip shop called Kado. I forget the detail but I remember that it was foundering. As it failed the price went down, then up, then there were the strange menu combinations - pineapple fritters with curry sauce - and all sorts of buy one get two free type offers. It's been a bit like that at the Yelmo cinema recently. I've paid as little as 4.50€ and as much as 6.20€ on the same day of the week and with the same pensioner discount. There's always some sort of offer on - this week it was the Black Friday effect. Full price, at the Yelmo, on a Saturday is still only 8.20€ or 8.80€ at the Elche ABC.

I don't really mind the price. I'm pleased to say that a couple of euros isn't a deal breaker and going to the cinema always seems like a cheap night out. Well unless you eat popcorn and drink fizzy pop. Do that and look out for those arms and legs. The Yelmo's "menu" offer, for what I think is the medium sized salty popcorn (sweet costs 50c more) and a 50cl pop, is 9.45€.

Most of the cinemas are part of a shopping centre. I often feel for the cinemas that chose the wrong shopping centre. The Thader Centre in Murcia is a bit of a White Elephant so the Neocine there is a lot less popular than the Cinesa place across the road in the very successful Nueva Condomina. In fact the Regional Murcian chain of Neocines has chosen two other failed shopping centres in Murcia city and Cartagena. The Cinesmax in the Bassa El Moro, now Dynamia, shopping centre in Petrer died along with the centre and the Puertas de Alicante shopping centre in Alicante, where there's a yelmo cinema, is another Mary Celeste type operation. 

All of the shopping centre cinemas are just like multiplex everywhere. They have multiple screens and thin walls and VERY LOUD sound. Most of their theatres are relatively small but they'll have a couple of decent sized theatres for the more popular films. If you've been to the Odeon in Maidenhead or the Showcase in Springdale, Ohio then you will be at home in the Multicines Al-andalus in Cádiz. There are still a few of the older style, one big screen, cinemas left. There's one in Yecla, the PYA, for instance where the seats are raked back at the front of the theatre and raked forward at the back. They still give you tickets torn in half too rather than something you buy online or on the app on your phone. Cines Ana in Alicante is very similar.

Nearly all the films in Spanish cinemas are in Spanish, either as the original soundtrack or with dubbing. Sometimes, when I come out of a cinema having failed to grasp most of the linguistic nuances, I'm more than a tad cross with myself and a bit disappointed. It's not the same at the start of the film. I've seen thousands of pictures but when the lights go down and the film starts there is always that thrill, that moment of anticipation, something I never get watching a film on telly.

Going thirsty

I have my little ways. When the sun's shining and I'm sitting outside a bar I like to drink cold beer. I tend to ask for tercios, the beer bottles which contain a third of a litre, hence the word tercio, a third. I started with bottles because they hold a definite amount, unlike glasses which can vary quite a bit from bar to bar. Especially when driving is on the cards I like to know how much I am drinking. Nowadays there is also much more variety in beer styles in bottles than on draught. I don't care for those smaller bottles, the botellín or quinto. Logically, with quinto meaning a fifth, they hold a fifth of a litre. Neither fish nor fowl.

The most usual way to ask for a draught beer is to ask for a caña. One of the reasons for drinking cañas, rather than, say, buying and sharing a litre bottle, is that beer warms up quickly in the Mediterranean sun and most Spaniards like their beer cold, cold, cold. Caña is an imprecise and yet detailed way to describe a specific glass; something of the same order as drinking champagne from flutes or sherry from schooners. The first definition of caña in a Spanish dictionary is rod or cane and the occasional, waggish, barman (it's always men) will play around with the potential double meaning. Caña is definitely the most common way to ask for a glass of beer in Spain though -ponme una caña, por favor. The size of a caña is a bit imprecise but it's in the 200 to 300 ml category. Around here the bigger, half litre, nearly a pint, glasses are usually tanques, but they might be jarras and, if you were in Marid it would be a doble.

Anyway back to my sun dappled but shady table. I've asked for the bottled beer and they ask me if I want a glass - un vaso. Lots of people don't because, if you've paid the higher price for a bottle of beer or if you've gone for some fancy craft beer, you probably want to show how discerning you are. So no to the vaso.

But for some reason wine doesn't come in vasos. It could, and in lots of older films it does, but nowadays you would generally ask for a copa, a stemmed glass, when you're asking for wine. So for the wine drinkers it's -ponme una copa de tinto- or some such. I don't drink a lot of wine. I was going to add that those flat bottomed, very small glasses that are sometimes used for wine are call cullín but Google doesn't agree; Google says the most common name for those is a cortito. In some parts of Spain they are called zurito or penalti. I'm pretty sure it's culín around here though. Probably something to do with a culo, a bottom, as in bum. When I was a lad wine glasses were less voluminous than they are now. They weren't for swirling they were for filling to the top and they were made by the French firm that made the school water glasses, Duralex. A Spanish bloke told me they were called chatos and that chato is used to describe someone with a snub nose too.

What made me think of all this was the word chupito. If my summer drink is a nice cold beer then my winter drink is a coffee paired with a shot glass sized brandy, un chupito. We were out with friends the other day and I said I'd have a coffee and a chupito. Then it dawned that I wasn't the designated driver so I left the table and went to the bar to change my order to a café y copa. I got my brandy in one of those balloon shaped brandy glasses. Later my friend, generously, thought he'd order me another brandy - he'd heard my chupito order but not the change to a copa so he asked for a chupito. The brandy, as it should, came in a John Wayne at the bar drinking redeye sized glass.

A topicless week

I really couldn't think of a topic for this week. So, disconnected jottings.

I consider we live in a reasonably rural situation so I was a bit surprised when, this morning, a Guardia Civil car, ablaze with lights and horns, shot past our house. The dirt track peters out another three or four hundred metres up the hill so I went to see where they were going. The car did a left foot/handbrake turn about 200 metres past our gate, sped past the house again, going the other way, and did a sliding turn to the left. Sixty seconds later they were back. They roared off to whatever it was that they didn't know how to find. 

It made me ponder the things that pass our house. A couple of weeks ago we had a small lorry, with a hydraulic platform on the back. The driver assured me he wasn't lost. Too early on Sunday morning a very clunky bucket excavator trundled up the track in the thick mist presumably to root out the de-branched apricot trees. Cars and vans, homeowners and their friends, service providers, farmers and farm workers, tractors, harvesters, grape pickers, pickers in old cars, water mains repairers, bin men, Sapesa van drivers (possibly having a crafty fag), the road grading tractor, Witnesses (but not for ages), melon sellers, burglar alarm vendors, the bread van (only in times of pandemic) and walkers all pass by from time to time. The cyclists always amaze me; what do they still have to talk about after miles and miles and how is it they still have the puff anyway?

We went to see a very Spanish film yesterday called el Agua. It wasn't bad though it wasn't exactly exciting. If you want something similar but better see Alcarràs. El Agua was set in Orihuela, it reeked of Alicante. I noticed that whenever the young people went out after dark (it was set in summer so after dark was lateish) they only ever drank rum and coke type drinks - spirits and mixers. I thought how true it was. Drinking beer late at night isn't very Spanish. It's like having paella in the evening. Not done.

In Calasparra, looking for a place for the earlyish morning coffee. We made a mistake and ended up in one of those slightly seedy bars with lots of bandits and other electronic betting games. A woman came in. She was shouting and shouting. It's not that there was a problem. That was just how she talked. I often wonder why so many Spanish people speak so loudly.

I heard Yolanda Dominguez on the radio. She was talking about totos and narbos (penises and vaginas). Those words are pretty tame. I was reminded of them when a couple of young women, within earshot in a bar, were talking chochos and chichis (vaginas again). I'd had some sort of Q&A with an online tutor about pichas and vergas (penises). She said verga was quite "polite". It says vulg. in the WordReference dictionary. A Vox councillor in Madrid was complaining by ridiculing a text book which was full of similar words. It's a while since I've heard this topic of conversation in English.

We were in Jávea, or Xàbia if you prefer on a Sunday. Eateries seemed to be few and far between but we found a trendy looking tapas place. The individual dishes were sometimes good and sometimes indifferent but it was, at least, interesting. The service was generally fine but as savoury food gave way to puddings the service slowed. It often does. I sometimes wonder why table service disappears when you want/need to pay.

I went for flu and Covid jabs. Last week I forgot that funcionarios, local government employees, get the puentes, the days between bank holidays and the weekend. I collided heavily with the locked door. The next working day the bloke on reception told me that I needed an appointment but, if I timed it right, I could just get the jabs without waiting. He sent me away to come back the next day on the chance. I didn't challenge his dodgy logic. I went back, as instructed, the next day, to make an appointment/get a vaccination. I was told they'd run out of vaccine and I should come back next week. I went in yesterday, next week now being this week, and got an appointment. I went in today at the appointed hour and got served in, around, two minutes. So I have a tale of woeful organisation. If, on the other hand, my first visit had been yesterday, and my jabs today, my tale would have been one of sparkling efficiency. There is only a hair's breadth between one sort of bureaucracy and another.

A low fi buyer's guide to the Christmas lottery

A couple of chums were talking about buying their weekly Euromillones (EuroMillions) ticket. I asked after their Christmas lottery purchases. They sort of knew what I meant but they sort of didn't. I saw an opening for a blog.

Just to be even handed O.N.C.E., the organisation for people with a visual impairment, run a Christmas lottery and there's a State lottery, el Niño, to coincide with Three Kings. I'm sure they are all fine and dandy but the one that counts, the big one, is the fat one - el Gordo - drawn on 22 December.

In truth, el Gordo isn't quite so fat. A winning ticket is worth 4 million euros. The thing that most people buy though isn't a ticket, it's a decimo; a tenth of a ticket. If you buy a ticket from one of the State Lottery Administraciones and you pay 20€ for it then you have a decimo. 

If you want to have a go you will see the ticket/decimos (I'm going to stop that now) on sale all over the place. As well as in the lottery administrations they're in shops and bars and petrol stations; in fact if you have contact with any Spanish organisation near Christmas you will, likely, be the target of a high pressure sales pitch. That's because the Friends of the Wine, the Pigeon Fanciers and every other group in Spain buys tickets to sell on. They raise funds by adding a few euros to the ticket's face value. The 20€ decimo from your Badminton Club will probably cost 23€ or 24€. With a decimo, if you win the fat one, you'll only get 400,000€, a tenth of four million euros. Actually it will be less because the tax people will take 72,000€ of your haul.

As I said a full ticket, or series, consists of 10 decimos and an individual decimo costs 20€. This means a full ticket costs 200€. Each decimo from the same ticket carries the same five figure number. In fact, this year, there will be 180 series of each number so there are, potentially, 1,800 decimos with the same number. This is why the Christmas lottery is so popular. Unlike most lotteries, where there is one big winner, el Gordo spreads its largesse through hundreds and thousands of people with a good chance of a decent, if not spectacular, payout.

The lottery tickets come from an official vendor, an administración. Each administración, or lottery shop, buys as many tickets as it thinks it can sell. They always buy a lot of the same number so the numbers tend to be grouped in a geographical area. Imagine that you're the boss of a medium sized firm. You may buy 10 series of decimos, all with the same number, and give one to everyone who works for you. If you're a less altruistic boss you might sell the tickets in the staff room. Even then it's likely that a good percentage of your workforce will end up with the same lottery number. Families often do the thing where senior family members buy and distribute numbers around the family. Imagine what happens if the number comes up. Imagine that the winning number is spread amongst cousins, uncles and grandmas, that all the workers at the engineering works have the same winning number or all the players and season ticket holders of the town football club, the domino playing pensioners club or indeed lots of people living in the same town. The big prize, 400,000€ per decimo, may not be a fortune but it would pay off most mortgages and leave a bit over for a nice holiday and a new BMW. And imagine the effect if, say, 200 people had the winning number in La Romana, Pinoso or Monóvar.

The Christmas lottery numbers are drawn as whole numbers, like raffle tickets. There is an actual ball with the five figure number engraved on it. On 22 December the children from San Ildefonso School pick up the number as it rolls out of a big tombola thing called a bombo. There is another bombo which has balls for all the prizes and they are engraved with cash values. So the first child sings out the number which matches a decimo and a second child sings out a cash amount. Most of the prizes are just 1,000€ but there are five prizes that have a greater value, including el Gordo. As some of the prizes are repeated there are actually 15 "important" numbers as well as lots and lots of other prizes. Bear in mind that there are 1,800 of each number so even if the prize is just 1,000€ there are potentially 1,800 people who will get 100€ back for their 20€ stake. Even if you don't win el Gordo the chances of you getting something back, una pedrea, are much, much higher than in most lotteries

So, all you have to do is go to a lottery administración, to a bar, stop that bloke in the street who has a number in his hat, join a sewing circle or the local Scalextric racers and you'll soon have a decimo. You can even do it online if you want. Once you have your ticket or tickets you just wait till December 22nd. If you want you can watch the draw on the telly or via streaming or listen to it on the radio but most people watch a few minutes and then check their tickets later. As well as the official site all the newspapers and telly channels have online number checkers but if you are digitally challenged just take the number to any lottery shop and they'll tell you if you have a winner or not. 

There is another way you may end up participating in the draw and that is if someone gives you, or sells you, a fraction of a decimo. A very typical example might be that a petrol station gives you a  "participación" for every 50€ worth of petrol you buy. Participaciones/participations vary in value but they are often worth 50c or maybe 1€, though I saw one the other day on sale for 2.40€. What the garage has done is to buy some decimos. They then given away a ticket with the same number. If the garage decimo wins in the lottery then anyone with one of their participaciones can claim their percentage of the winning ticket.

Oh, and if you decide to get your ticket from your favourite bar you could also get involved in another Spanish Christmas tradition; the cesta. Cesta means basket and most bars have a sort of Christmas hamper loaded with food, booze, choccies etc. It's usually just a case of picking a numbered square and writing your name and phone numbers in it. 

There are stacks of older blogs about el gordo and the christmas lottery. Just put the words in the search box at the left top of the page and you'll find several.

Searching for authentic

There are lots of Western Europeans, other than Spaniards, in Pinoso. In fact there seem, without knowing the figures, to be more and more. Belgian and Dutch voices are much more evident now than they were a little while ago and there is a good smattering of German and French in the supermarket too. Obviously enough there are other nationalities hoping to carve out a better life and, recently, there has been an influx of Ukrainians but those people have different stories. The Belgians, Germans and Swedes are here, generally, by choice. They may or may not be resident. Signed up Europeans, not the ones who rant about secure borders, have rights in Spain. They can come and go more or less at will, so determining who is and who isn't resident can be quite tricky. As it used to be with Britons.

A question I have been asked lots of times by Spaniards is why so many Britons choose to live in Pinoso. I've never been able to think of a good response. I can't now. 

Part of it must be the "introduce a friend factor" the sort of thing that attracts immigrant communities to stick together all over the world. That doesn't explain why Pinoso has such a robust population of Britons while other towns close by don't. Pinoso is a pleasant little town, it's well organised, it's clean, there's plenty going on and it offers a good range of services. Those things are solid positives but they are not the sort of thing that really attract people to an area; they are things you discover after you've moved in. The other day, as I was parking my car someone was parking alongside. The driver turned out to be a retired police officer who I've known for a long time. We were hanging in the car doors, nattering, when a man interrupted our conversation. He explained he was a visitor to the town and he wondered what there was to see. "Not much," said my pal.

Lots of Britons probably choose Alicante province because they have fond memories of getting burned to a crisp on a Costa Blanca beach or a night of sangria fuelled passion in a Benidorm hotel. The weather is an obvious draw but why here, why not somewhere else? I suspect one reason for we Brits, and probably the Belgians and Norwegians too, is that we are looking to move to the real Spain. We're the sort of  Britons, Irish and French who don't think that the coast is authentically Spanish. Real Spain should be full of gnarled widows in black weeds stringing garlic on their doorsteps or wrinkled faced, flat hat wearing horny handed sons of toil driving tractors or, better still, riding donkeys as they drink from wineskins. It should be full of independent shops with dusty window displays of sun faded fans. It should be somewhere that takes a siesta. Even better though if you can have those things but still get a bit of help, in your own language, should the need arise.

I became much more aware of where we lived, how anachronistic our Spain is, when Covid struck. I'd presumed we lived in one of the many possible Spains but what I saw on the telly, what the politicians were legislating for, wasn't where I lived. Every evening for weeks and weeks thousands and thousands of Spaniards crowded onto their balconies at 8pm to applaud the health workers. That outpouring of solidarity brought home to me that most of Spain lives in flats. Most of Spain has very little private exterior space. Most of Spain lives cheek by jowl in places with traffic jams, with no parking spaces, with chain brand shops, with Glovo food delivery, with access to taxis, public transport, with a hospital on the doorstep and with occasional street violence. Those of us living in houses, maybe with a garden, with a bit of space, were a fortunate minority who knew that those urban statistics of cases per 100,000 didn't reflect any real emergency in our rural communities.

So maybe if we did come here looking for the Real Spain we were searching in the wrong place. It isn't an individual country villa with a pool where vapid curtains waft in a gentle breeze while the sunlight streams in from the terrace. It's really a third floor flat with communal washing lines on the roof and the blinds closed tight to keep out the searing heat. In fact, without knowing it, Pinoso may offer a much more lyrical version of Spain than that enjoyed by most Spaniards.

Spanish newspapers

Even in the analogue days, when a newspaper was something you held in your hands, it always seemed like a lot of work to read one. Nowadays I have a newsreader application that collects news from the Internet. It's not as though I'm a glutton for punishment or anything, I only have three feeds: one for local news, a second for serious news and a third that's a bit more frivolous with the sort of stuff that happens on Twitter or Instagram. Nonetheless the number of articles that turn up each day is simply overwhelming.

A podcaster I listen to, in English, promises to summarise all the Spanish news for me so that I don't need to bother. That's not really true but the podcast does, at least, unpack stories where the detail has often escaped me. Last week, as an extra, the podcast did a bit of background on some of the major Spanish newspapers and the rest of this blog is my recap of that

El País is still the biggest selling (however that is now counted) newspaper in Spain. It's a progressive, centre left newspaper. It's a paper of reference in Spain a bit like the Guardian in the UK or The Washington Post in the US. El País is aligned with the Socialist party, the PSOE and generally it gives the current Spanish President, Pedro Sanchez, an easy ride. The two journos who were doing this round-up of the newspapers repeatedly mentioned newspaper editors. It's very true that newspaper editors are much more like personalities here in Spain than they are in the UK. They often turn up on those political chatter shows which is something a bit alien to us Brits. El País has gone through a lot of editors in recent years. The changes took the newspaper a bit to the right, then back to its traditional position and now they have an ex radio personality at the helm. The changes perhaps, reflect how difficult it has been for newspapers to find their way in the new digital landscape.

El País has an English edition. That used to be a source for Spanish news in English but it has recently changed editor and it now seems to limit iitself to doing a few international stories.

El Mundo, is the number two newspaper in Spain. Like el País it is a reliable source of information. Its politics are centre right. If el País is for PSOE voters then el Mundo is for the centrist end of the Partido Popular. The newspaper had a charismatic founder and editor, Pedro J Ramirez, well known for always wearing braces. He was ousted in 2014. El Mundo blundered seriously when it persisted in reporting that the 2004 Madrid train bombings were the work of ETA rather than Al Qaeda and that mistake still taints its credibility for lots of Spaniards.

ABC is a well established and reliable newspaper. It's a long way to the right, politically, but recently it has been softening its stance a little. That's probably to maintain its place as the party of the Partido Popular and to distance itself from the extreme hard right party Vox.

Vox has its newspaper though in La Razón. Again this newspaper is identified with its editor, Francisco Marhuenda, who is one of the people who gets very excited on those political talk shows, has very strong opinions about most things and has been involved in a number of scandals.

Nowadays as well as the newspapers that have print and digital editions there are some that are purely digital. The digital world has changed though and lots of news is no longer free. Most of the recognisable digital stuff has to be paid for. The most successful digital newspaper is one set up by the man who was ousted from el Mundo, Pedro J. Ramirez. It's called el Español and it is more or less in the political centre with a bit of a leaning towards the right and a very critical stance on Pedro Sanchez's government

El Confidencial is the online Spanish equivalent of newspapers like the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal. It's apparently pretty reliable in its information but, given its potential readership, it's not surprising that it is right leaning.

The current Spanish government is a socialist led coalition. The junior partner in the government is Unidas Podemos which is a a far left political group which even includes the remnants of the old Communist Party. One of its founders was a bloke called Pablo Iglesias and he is closely aligned to the newspaper Publico. The paper is very left biased and it likes to do those sort of digital stories - what was said on the telly or who is slagging off who on Instagram or Twitter.

El Dario is another progressive, left leaning digital newspaper that has straightforward and usually factually correct reporting. Their pay model is a bit like the Guardian - you can have it for free for a while but expect a deluge of messages asking for money till you give in and pay up.

And last, and least, OK Diario. This is a newspaper that, I am told, never checks its facts and is happy to run with anything that supports the right and badmouths the left. The editor Eduardo Inda is, I am told, loud mouthed and boorish.

Learning Spanish with underwear

I've done Chiruca here before. My advanced years mean that I forget where or when I first heard, or read, the word but someone, on the telly, on the radio, on Twitter, used the word in a phrase. I had no idea what it meant so I asked WordReference and the Diccionario de la Lengua Española and they knew. It turned out to be a brand of walking boots; well, famous as walking boots but nowadays they make all sorts of walking footwear.

So exactly the same idea as when, in the 1980s, I might have said that I had some new Docs or that I was going to get a Barbour or a Burberry (boots, waxed coat or mac(kintosh)). In fact everyone, well I suppose it's everywhere, does this. I watch American films where they say Band Aid and Scotch tape instead of Elastoplast and Sellotape. Unless I'm mistaken Addison Lee is the UK generic for a cars that aren't taxis but are - Cabify here I suppose. Bubble wrap or taser are both trade names too.

The Spanish ones can be useful. One of my favourites is pósit for a post-it but asking for Kleenex, Danone  or Ariel, with Spanish pronunciation, in the supermarket would definitely score points.

I saw another one a while ago, it was on Twitter. The tweet, in Spanish, ran something like "Bella Hadid discovers Abanderado t-shirts". I had to look up both Abanderado, and Bella Hadid, but apparently celebs are wearing underclothes as outerwear on the streets and the Twitter user wasn't overimpressed. Abanderado are a bit like Jockey and Y-fronts - a way of describing a style of underwear. 

The Abanderado firm started in Cataluña in the 1960s and, by showing men in underclothes on Spanish telly, they became very famous here. They were particularly well known for those Marlon Brando style white t-shirts but they didn't forget Bruce Willis style singlets. By the 1980s Abanderado had 37% of the Spanish men's underwear market. When Sara Lee bought the firm out in 1991 they hired Michael Jordan to sport their wares and proclaim their virtues in adverts. Nowadays Abanderado is owned by Hanesbrands who also own other underwear brands like DIM and Playtex.

One for the next time you're having a conversation about Y-fronts in Corte Inglés.

Selling and buying petrol

Pinoso has lots of community websites. The English language one I tend to look at most often is a Facebook page called Pinoso Community. People use it for a whole range of things from lost dogs and questions about where to find services to checking to see if anyone else is having trouble with their Internet provider or power supply.

The other day someone, on that page, commented on the price of fuel in the local filling stations. They weren't really complaining about the high price of petrol but more about the price fluctuations between different garages and even in the same filling station.

I thought it might be an interesting blog - why and how the price varies. As I started to investigate I found the information both complicated and contradictory. In fact I decided that to do it properly would be both boring and long. That didn't stop me though. So, if you continue, expect boring and long. And sometimes, simply because of the complexity, I've oversimplified. There is also a lot of imprecision in my use of petrol stations, garages, petrol and the like. I'm sure you know what I mean - gasolineras and carburantes.

The cost of petrol and diesel at the pumps is based on several factors such as the cost of the crude oil, the refining costs, other on costs including additives, transport, the distribution network, payments to intermediaries, tax and, of course, profit margins. Some of those costs are unpredictable, for instance the cost of the crude is subject to international fluctuations based on big news, things like war, changes in government or how OPEC increase or decrease the flow of oil to suit their own ends. At the Spanish pumps about a half of the cost of a litre of diesel is taxes, for petrol it's about 55%. At the moment, and until the end of the year, there is a 20c discount on each litre of fuel funded, in the main by government, presumably from the tax income, and partly from the petrol companies.

The fuel price varies from day to day because someone, somewhere in the organisation that runs or provides fuel to the filling stations, is keeping an eye on all those factors so they can provide a guide price to "their" petrol stations. The time that each group notifies the new price varies from group to group but most tend to do it once a day in the morning. A few years ago some of the big providers were taken to court, and lost, for price fixing between them. Presumably they no longer do that. Nonetheless the prices in the stations of the major brands, those with similar characteristics at least, are still remarkably similar. Geography and competition are an important part of deciding on the price at the pumps. Pinoso, as an example has two (obvious) petrol stations whereas, in Elda, the entrance to the town has at least six or seven very closely grouped - more competition, lower prices. Fuel nearly always costs more in rural areas than built up ones. There is an exception to that, rural co-ops provide some of the cheapest fuel in Spain but that's because profit is only one of their concerns.

The price of crude oil on the world market is given in dollars. Exchange rates mean that even if the price of oil was steady over several days, or even weeks, the price would still vary because of the currency markets. Anyone with a pension paid in Pounds and turned into Euros will be aware how big those variations can be. The price of refining the crude oil also varies between the different refiners because, just like any other business, they try to decide how to maximise their profits while maintaining an adequate market share. 

The refiners typically turn only 11% of the crude oil into petrol. It takes 2.5 litres of crude to make a litre of petrol. As a barrel contains 159 litres all it takes is a bit of simple arithmetic to get to the cost, to the refiners, of each litre of petrol. That's petrol as petrol but as the most basic product. Stored in tanks, and still a long way from the pumps, it is, nonetheless, the starting point for the retail price in all Spanish petrol stations. The big wholesalers are Repsol, Cepsa and BP.  I think, though the information here was contradictory, that their refineries produce all of the petrol and diesel sold in Spain. There are, though, other firms like DISA and Galp, which are important distributors and it's possible that they import petrol from overseas.

Unless you're very rich you will have noticed that fuel costs more or less at different petrol stations. For years there was a state monopoly on fuel in Spain, the name of the monopoly was Campsa. When the monopoly was dissolved it's various parts went to Repsol, Cepsa and BP.  Repsol now owns the brand name. These traditional brands cost more than less recognisable, often low cost, brands. Cut price petrol, the lo-cost stations, are a reasonably recent phenomenon in Spain. Nowadays they are pretty common in urban areas. 

Lots of Spaniards don't trust cheaper petrol. They think it's an inferior, and possibly harmful, product. One of the biggest talking points in that mistrust is additives. All of the big chains say that they have some magic ingredient which makes the car engine run more efficiently. The idea is that the low cost garages don't add these things and that the additives are responsible for most of the price difference. In fact nearly all the lo-cost providers sell petrol with generic additives with similar characteristics to the premium retailers so the fuels are very similar. What is different is that not all petrol stations are as good as others. Some maintain their filters and tank cleanliness better than others for a range of reasons. It's also broadly true that the majority of the lo-cost petrol stations are pretty basic; they don't have attended service or, if they do, there is only one person, there is no shop and they are in places where site rents and the like are lower so their operating overheads are lower. Probably though the real reason that the cheap stations are cheaper is that they are working on the original thinking behind supermarkets - pile it high and sell it cheap. Reduced profit margin but increased profits.

So, like almost everything in a capitalist economy, the advice is to shop around.

Whining on, again

I'm not such a big fan of wine. It's not that I don't drink it but I'd nearly always go for other sorts of booze first. Maggie, my partner, on the other hand, is a bit of an enthusiast. One of the things she often does is to take our visitors on one of the bodega tours. Indeed, years ago, she used to organise tours for tourists as a business venture so we got to know nearly all of the bodegas in Jumilla and Yecla and a good number of the bodegas close to Pinoso that allow visits.

Jumilla, Yecla and Alicante all produce wines that have Denominación de Origen Protegida (protected designation of origin) as well as wines more suited to drain unblocking or unarmed combat. Lots of the stuff that isn't D.O.P. is shipped to other countries, particularly France, where it is mixed with local wine and then sold as being from that country. The unloved wine is the sort of wine that you would use for things where any old wine will do - preserving fruits, cooking, turning into vinegar etc. Sometimes it tastes OK and sometimes it doesn't.

D.O.P., often shortened to DO, is a sort of quality mark which says that the product comes from a specific place, and that its characteristics are to do with that geography, with the methods by which it is produced and that there is a process for checking that those standards and rules are maintained and followed. Round here for instance the monastrell grapes grown on the wire trellis for machine picking aren't for DO wine. The good stuff comes from the vines arranged in the rows that make "diamond" shapes and are picked by hand. Wines are often D.O. - that's why we can talk about a rioja or a sherry - but cheese, ham, sausage and even tiger nuts and horchata (the drink made from them) can have D.O. 

I don't know about you but I still think of wines as being quite posh. Expensive restaurants have people who select and serve their wines with the same panache as the servers present those fiddly plates of food. It seems wrong, to me, that this classy product starts with grapes hauled by old tractors in even older trailers and, when those grapes have been mashed up to yield juice, the liquid is moved from one steel tank to another using industrial pumps and thick rubber hoses laid across concrete floors.

I also find the whole wine tasting process at the bodegas a bit false. The normal routine is that you are shown around the unloading bays, the fermenting vats, the cellars where the barrels are stored and the bottling plant before the guide takes you to try the wines - anything from three to five different types - with a bit of ham and cheese to accompany the drink. The company line varies from bodega to bodega. If one adds yeast that produces the best wine if another doesn't, but relies on the natural yeast on the grapes, that's the best. One lauds the steel tanks another their concrete ones. When it comes around to tasting they instruct you on the correct way to hold the glass, how to swirl, the sniffing, the looking at the colour against a white background and so on. In one of the bodegas they suggested that you should use all five senses when tasting wines. Listen how it gloops into the glass. Ahem! They always talk about the colour. I understand that the colour may say something about the time and place that a wine has been stored, or the grape it came from, but so would the label, and more accurately. You are asked to smell the wine. What "notes" do you detect? - peach, strawberry, thyme, chocolate? I often wonder which is best. I usually think it smells of alcohol but if it smelt floral would that be good or bad? 

I once had the temerity to ask why one wine was more expensive than another. I can see, for instance, that wines put in barrels to mature will cost more than wines that are bottled more or less straight away because there is no barrel to buy, there is no energy needed to keep the wine at the right temperature and nobody has to be paid to keep an eye on the maturation but when the harvesting is done by hand, when the storage time and method is the same, when all the variables are the same I don't quite understand why one wine is several times more expensive than another. I didn't get a proper answer.

But, as I said, I don''t much care for wine so maybe I'm just biased and if you've never done a bodega tour I'd definitely recommend one.