Neither one nor the other

I went to the UK, well England, a few weeks ago. I like England well enough but I don't visit that often. I probably go a little more often than once a year but I usually only stay three or four days. My visit in February was my first since May of last year. Both of my last two visits have been prompted by my mum being less well than usual.

It's funny going back. I'm English, I'll always be English and my English is still pretty good - a bit old fashioned maybe but good. My language skills and my cultural knowledge make me feel comfortable in England. I usually know how things are organised, how to behave but if things have changed, or start to go a bit awry, I can ask, I can talk to people, find out what's going. Nonetheless I had, at one point, to hold out a handful of coins and ask the person on the other side of the counter to take the appropriate money. I am, of course, aware that simply using physical money makes me a bit odd but, in the heat of the moment, I couldn't decide which coin was which. There were lots of other tiny incidents to highlight that things are not as they were when I left and sometimes, despite being on home turf, I was slightly uncomfortable in some situations.

I lived in Cambridgeshire for about twenty years and I left a bit short of twenty years ago. For several of those years I worked for a charity. At one point I recruited my dad to help out with something, I don't remember exactly what, but it involved him phoning lots of people we worked with. He found that at least half of the people presumed he was me. On the phone it could only be accent. My dad died in 2000 but long before that he was in hospital in Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. I drove up from Cambridgeshire to see him. At one point the nursing staff needed to do something ghastly related to bodily fluids so they pulled a curtain around his bed and chased me away. I sat on the edge of the bed of the bloke next to my dad in the ward. We chatted a bit. "Where are you from?," he asked.  "From here," I replied. "No," he said, "not now, where are you from, where are your roots?" "I was born in this very hospital," I said. "Well you don't sound like you were," he concluded. I realised I was stateless. In Cambridgeshire I was broad Yorkshire. In Huddersfield I was from somewhere South. 

Something similar happens when I go to England. I'm definitely not from here but I'm a bit out of place there. 

I was amazed and unready to eat at British meal times. I mean everyone knows that Spaniards eat later but do Britons really eat so early? I saw people ordering lunch before noon. My sister tells me that she thinks that British people are tending to book an evening meal in a restaurant earlier than they used to. Her feeling was that, until recently a 7.30pm booking would be pretty normal but that now the same booking is a tad on the late side. I wouldn't expect most Spanish restaurants to be open before 8.30pm! I found it very odd even considering eating at 12 noon or 5pm. 

I went shopping in a supermarket and I couldn't find anything - the ordering of goods seemed to follow no obvious logic but I remember having the same difficulty when I moved from the UK to Spain. Oh, and then I was completely flummoxed by the "scan and pay" or "scan and go" options at the self service checkouts. A very pleasant woman helped me, in a slightly condescending way, with the multiple operations required to pay for a single lemon!

On the bus, even though there is a maximum fare of £2 people were still asking for their stop by name. When you get on a Spanish bus you just want tickets. The fare is the same for two stops or twelve. Mind you the community spirit on the British buses was great. All that clearing the way so someone in a wheelchair can get on or everyone thanking the driver as they get off is something I've never seen on Spanish buses

You can be more specific if you want to get a beer in Spain but really all you have to do is ask for a beer. There are sometimes supplementary questions from the servers in more upmarket bars but that's something fancy and new. In the UK it's always been, a pint of Ghost Ship (or Landlord or IPA and so on) please. Essential to specify both product and quantity (and nowadays to have a sizeable credit limit on your card) .

Strange as well that the cars and buses go on the other side of the road. I whirled around in the style of one of those robot vacuum cleaners when I had to cross the road as I was quite unsure where the traffic would be. In a taxi I had a momentary panic attack when the driver was obviously going to go the "wrong way" round a roundabout.

In the Dhaba I was pleased to be able to lean on my sister and brother in law to understand the menu.

Here though, obviously enough, to Spaniards I'm as English as five o' clock tea, pea soupers and fish'n'chips. Lots of people in shops, restaurants and bars will, annoyingly, speak to me in English despite my best efforts and I'm sure if they had a any spare socks they would offer me them to wear with my sandals.

The train in Spain runs mainly on the plain

This is a piece about days out on the train. As usual I got distracted. If you're not interested in the Spanish railway system skip the next four paragraphs

I was told, ages ago, that, where there are twin tracks, Spanish trains "drive" on the left. That is they use the left hand set of rails in relation to the direction they're travelling. The reason, so said my informant, was that the first railways in Spain were built by British engineers and without giving it a second thought the Britons built the system that way around. It turns out that I was lied to. It's partly true in that the first line on the peninsula did use a British Engineer but his line, from Barcelona to Mataró, opened in 1848, ran trains on the right. 

As the railways boomed the first big Spanish railway company - MZA - Compañía de los Ferrocarriles de Madrid a Zaragoza y Alicante - bought the Barcelona to Mataró line. They bought the direction of travel too. MZAs big competitor in the pioneering days of Spanish rail was the Compañía de los Caminos de Hierro del Norte de España and they chose to drive on the left. Nobody nowadays seems to know why, maybe simply to be contrary. To this day the majority of Spanish trains drive on the right though there are parts of the network where that's not the case. Not that it's an ordinary train line but the Madrid underground network goes left for instance. Mind you in Madrid, until 1924, the cars apparently drove on the left too!

It's not quite true but, today, in broad stroke the track, the stations, the signals - the infrastructure - is owned by ADIF and the rolling stock, the trains and coaches and wagons, is owned by RENFE. Recently some low cost operators have moved into Spain and they own trains and rolling stock which runs on the lines owned and operated by ADIF. They only operate on the international gauge lines. Mostly, if you're going to catch a train like train you're going to travel with RENFE.

The width of railway lines, the gauge, can vary from country to country and even from line to line. In Spain there are three types of train gauge - narrow, conventional and high speed. The narrow gauge railways use a metre gauge - for instance the Alicante Tram and the railway from Cartagena to Los Nietos use this gauge. The traditional rail network uses a gauge of 1,668 milímetros and the high speed trains use the gauge which is often called International because it's the most common gauge in the world. It's the one that George Stephenson first used, 1,435 mm, though he thought it was 4' 8½".

The nearest place to catch a train, if you live in Pinoso, is Elda/Petrer near the Elda hospital. At one time, on that same line, there was a station just outside Monóvar which still has the name plaque Monóvar-Pinoso on it. I suppose in much the same way that there is a halt at Sax which was re-opened a few years ago the possibility exists that that station could be reopened but, at the moment, it's just an easy target for graffiti taggers. After Elda/Petrer the next nearest "serious" station, for the traditional network, is in the centre of Villena near the Teatro Chapí. A bit farther afield there are stations at Alicante, Elche, Cieza and Murcia. The nearest High Speed Stations are on the outskirts of Villena and Elche. They are both in quite odd locations. The Elche one is in some village just off the motorway about 12 kms from the town centre but the Villena one is in full countryside down a winding country road. At least it means if you're willing to leave your car on a dirt road you can avoid car park charges travelling from there!

The high speed trains are called AVEs, (it's pronounced a bit like avay) AVANT (high speed trains for mid distance) and ALVIA which are able to use both the high speed lines and the conventional lines. I'm not sure what the speed records are for the AVE trains but I've been on plenty that have clicked along at 300k/h and the fastest I've seen personally is 308k/h.

From Villena you can catch a high speed train to Elche, Orihuela and Murcia in one direction but it's much more likely that you'd want to go the other way - towards Madrid. There is a mid point stop in Albacete and some trains stop in Cuenca. The ALVIAs may stop in other places. There are low cost trains on the route from Alicante to Madrid. RENFE's low cost service is called AVLO and a French firm called Ouigo runs the same route. If one of the cheap trains stops at Villena it's likely that it will be the same price or more expensive than catching the same train from Alicante to Madrid. The cheap trains are usually timetabled so that it's not feasible to go out and back in a day but it's no longer impossible. Parking costs in Alicante obviously add to the price and the cheap trains have all sorts of extra add on charges, big suitcases and the like, similar to the low cost airlines. You can get there and back from Villena in a day with the usual RENFE trains and with a bit of timetable checking you can often find a good price if you're willing to be flexible. RENFE has a very strange policy about when it releases train schedules and often you can't book things up more than six weeks in advance. The RENFE website is notoriously dodgy to use too but at least it's available in English. One of the nice things is that you always get an allocated seat. The RENFE website is worse than useless if you need to change trains and a good alternative may be to use something like Trainline or seek help from The Man in Seat 61. 

For a bit of a day jaunt my favourites would be out of Villena or Elda/Petrer (just different stops on the same line) on the conventional services. I usually use Petrer because you can park outside the station for free and it's closer to Pinoso but there's free parking to find in Villena too. You can go downhill towards Alicante and from Alicante you can go on to Elche, Murcia and Cartagena. After Alicante it's not a quick journey. 

There are, currently, three trains a day that go the full distance from Elda/Petrer or Villena up to Barcelona but there are lots of other trains that use parts of the same line and they're good for a day out. The journey up to Xativa or to Valencia is dead easy. It also used to be dead cheap but I've been a bit shocked by the prices I've noticed as I checked details for this post. Sometimes, to get the best prices, you need to book the tickets as singles because on a return ticket the outward and inward journey need to be on the same class of train. An easier option might be using trainline to make the booking though it will cost a few Euros more. If you go out of Petrer in the other direction, which means you'll go through Villena, you can go to Alcazar de San Juan which is a really interesting day excursion or to Campo de Criptana which is a very dull town except that it does have a lot of Don Quijote type windmills. The same train continues on to Ciudad Real - pleasant enough but hardly breathtaking - though the journey is so long that you'll need a thick book.

I was going to finish off with an old British Rail advertising slogan from the 1970s but then I remembered who did those ads so, not a word. My next thought was that there might be a Michael Portillo quote that would work. Then I realised that my ideas were leading me towards madness. So no clever signing off line.

Cieza in bloom

I didn't understand much of what she said. Well, maybe half. This drives me bonkers. Nearly 20 years, and I still have trouble understanding a tour guide. Maggie said that it was because of her Murciano accent and the residual noise all around us, maybe, but if the guide had been speaking English, I would have understood everything. Well, more than half anyway.

We were doing a coach tour of the floración, the flowering, the blossom on the fruit trees in Cieza. Like lots of places with almonds, cherries, peaches, etc., Cieza makes a bit of a thing about it. They have a big programme from country breakfasts and bike rides to photographic exhibitions, music competitions and visits to lots of local places of interest all tied in to the blossom.

I have to be honest and say I usually forget until it's too late. For some reason, Cieza, which is only 45 minutes from Culebrón, isn't one of those places I think of as a likely destination. What I should do, as soon as I see some sort of fruit tree with blossom, is check what Cieza has on offer and get us booked in.

The first time we ever heard of la Floración was when I worked in Cieza. I'd seen the posters but never taken much notice and, when I did, in 2018, it turned out to be the last weekend of the event. We got a map and traipsed around a route but we didn't feel to have done it justice. Then, last year, or it may have been in 2022, we remembered, too late again. The official event was actually over, but we thought there would still be something to see. There wasn't. We ended up driving aimlessly around back roads near Cieza, not quite knowing what we were trying to find.

This year I remembered. I booked up a tour on a bus which was nice enough without being roller coaster exciting. I understood enough of what the guide said to have enough information to be excruciatingly boring the next time we're driving visitors past trees in bloom.

I'll be able to talk about the different ways to prune the trees to make the harvesting easier. I can drone on about how spraying the trees with water, when frost is predicted, can protect the blossom by enclosing it in ice. I can talk about how a lot of the blossom has to be removed from the trees with big fans and by hand, to ensure that the fruit has room to grow and won't damage the tree. I can escape specific answers as to which tree is which by saying how the colours and size of the blossom are a general guide to whether the tree is plum, peach, nectarine or apricot but that there are so many varieties that the only real way to know what's what is to be someone who knows what was planted.

We also found out that the future of the floración is in danger. One of the reasons is why farmers, all over Europe, are currently invading cities with huge John Deere and Massey Ferguson tractors. The price paid to them for their crops bears no relation to the prices for the product in the supermarkets. The farmers feel they are being diddled. More prosaically though the problem with the floración might be that there will be no pretty coloured blossom to see.

Hail is one of the big threats to a successful harvest. Hailstorms are not infrequent in this part of Spain and often they come at just the wrong time and destroy the harvest. In order to protect the trees and their fruit the growers have started to put marquee-type plastic meshing above the trees. Effective they may be but nobody is going to be keen to look at hectares and hectares of off-white plastic anti-hail meshing.

Hither and thither

I like to do things, to go places, to get out to Spain. To concerts, to parades, to fairs and fiestas, to restaurants and landmarks, to open days, exhibitions and guided walks. There always seems to be lots going on all over the place. I've never been quite able to decide whether this is because there are a lot of things on offer or because I've got into the habit of hunting them out. It may be a combination of both. It may also be because of where we happen to be based. Pinoso is surrounded by other towns and, as everywhere does things, the cumulative effect is impressive.

When we first got here there were a whole load of new cultural experiences to tap into. A lot of the information came from posters. It was both comical and frustrating that the posters often failed to give basic information - when or where - for instance. That's because the posters were a gentle reminder to a local audience. As the event hadn't changed in years, everyone who mattered, the locals, knew when, where, what, why and how. The posters weren't for bewildered foreigners. This was in the days when I used a bit of paper and a pen to remember the forthcoming events. Now I'm much more likely to take a photo of the poster. More usually though the information bypasses the poster and comes in a different way. Everywhere has a website, an Instagram account, a Facebook page or a WhatsApp channel. I've signed up to lots. Some of them are so prolific that I feel overwhelmed with the amount of information they pump out - Alicantelivemusic, for instance, sent me 12 Telegram messages yesterday. I do read them, well, not always, but generally. The alternative inertia might be an even more alarming alcoholic obesity achieved by never leaving my armchair in front of the telly.

Each week, well most weeks, I do a bit of a search. I have a long list of webpages, and especially Facebook pages, to check. I'm not particularly rigorous about the list; I skip some, I double up on others and there are reams of emails to check from concert promoters, festival organisers and any number of town hall tourist offices. The truth is it's deadly boring. It's painstaking and it's dull. I enter the events on my online Google calendar so they travel with me from laptop to mobile phone. I know, even as I one-fingeredly type the entries into my calendar, that I will never go to the Haydn concert, because it costs 35€ and it's on in Moraira, nor will I go to the new and up-and-coming band because they're on at eleven at night in a noisy club full of people fifty years younger than me. But, despite moaning, constantly, about what a pain it all is, every time I look through my photo albums and see some mad fiesta, the reminder of some guided tour we did, the incredible costumes, the photos of hundreds of people escorting or carrying on their shoulders a sumptuously dressed wooden doll kilometre after kilometre to some hillside chapel then I know that the search is a small price to pay for the experiences.

Just to give you some idea, this is the basic weekly checklist I start with: 

Pinoso, Alicante Telegram, El Buen Vigía Alicante, Trips in Murcia, Fundación Mediterránea, Fundación Paurides, Los secretos de la fachada, La Llotja, Paranimf Alicante, Eventos Murcia, Museo de la Universidad de Alicante, Turismo Región de Murcia, Bancatix Murcia, Teatro Romea, Gran Teatro, Teatro Chapi, Teatro Principal,Teatro Concha Segura, La Romana, Villena, ADDA, Yecla, Cigarreras, Agenda Cultural Alicante, Petrer, Elda, Monóvar, Jumilla, Teatro Vico, Elche, Aspe, Novelda, Alcoy, Sax, L'Escorxador, Facebook in general, and Instant ticket.

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If you don't know what I'm talking about, or you don't believe me, my photo albums are accessible at the top of the page. On PCs and laptops underneath the subheading about an old, fat man. On my Android mobile phone, the albums seem to be listed in a drop-down menu called home. Either way, they are clickable links named for the month and year.

The house taken by the cold

In my diary I often use the expression sunny and blue to describe the daytime weather in wintertime Spain. Hardly a cloud in the blue, blue sky and a temperature anywhere from the low teens to the low twenties. This year it's been particularly warm. But warm is relative. In the sun, in a pavement bar, in our garden, it's warm, but in the same spot, half an hour later, in the shade it's chilly. Our incoming water pipe passes along a North facing wall and often, during the winter, it would freeze up and leave us waterless till around noon when the day warmed up. Nowadays it has layers and layers of lagging and duct tape and we no longer need to venture out either smelly and tealess.

Our kitchen door opens onto a patio. l leave it open as I'm cooking lunch and I'm fine, temperature wise; not so good chef-wise. Our living room, on the other side of the kitchen though is distinctly chilly and, before Maggie comes home from a hard morning at the office, I put on some heating in there. It's not freezing cold but it is the sort of temperature where, even with a thick pully, the heat slowly seeps out and you suddenly realise that your hands and your nose are numbed by cold.

We know lots of people who are quite well off and have all sorts of ways of keeping their Spanish homes warm; they have modern and innovative heating solutions. We also know of people who tough it out in outdoor clothing inside or who live in igloo type blankets surrounded by the blasted wasteland of their sitting room. We're pretty traditional though and we pay to heat the house without ever having got around to the best way of keeping the house warm, which is to insulate it properly. We have big, thick walls and badly fitting windows and doors. Our living room has a very high ceiling so the air we've paid to warm quickly escapes through the layers of concrete and tiles above - there is no foam or fibreglass to impede its dash to the great outdoors. We'd be that house in the, UK, advert without snow on the roof because it isn't properly insulated. Mind you so would be all the other houses in the area. The winds that whistle under the exterior doors to our living room and kitchen will blow out a candle. When we heat the living room and then open a door into the adjoining bedroom or extension we get a good anabatic (or is it katabatic) wind because of the temperature gradient.

I'm in a back bedroom at the moment, it's nearly 6pm and it's 17ºC. Not that cold but I have a butane gas heater burbling along behind me with one of it's three elements alight. We have similar gas heaters in the living room and kitchen. They are dead useful for providing radiant heat very quickly. Sit close to one in a frozen room and it's like standing by the village bonfire. It may be cold around you but you're immediate space is nice and cosy. They produce a lot of water though and you have to be careful not to die asphyxiated.

In the living room we also have a hot and cold aircon unit. I turn that, and the gas heater, on about half an hour before Maggie gets home for lunch, and the 3pm news, so that the room feels relatively welcoming. When we settle down for the evening we turn on the pellet burner. This was Maggie's idea. She didn't think that the log burner which we had before (and which had replaced the original wood burning fireplace), produced enough heat. She didn't like the filth it produced either. It wasn't exactly cheap to run but, to her credit, she worried most about the serious injuries it caused me from time to time when my log chopping kit of goggles, to avoid early onset blindness, and impact absorbing clothing failed to protect me from the flying splinters. I always worry for, the shirtless, Charlie Bronson as he chops wood in the Magnificent Seven. So the log burner went and a pellet burner replaced it. The pellets are, I think, produced from wood and other biomass, and they are the fuel fed into a small crucible to burn in a controlled environment. It produces lots of heat, ours is rated at about 11kw. It also produces a decibel level similar to the noise the old class 55 Deltics made passing through York station at speed. It can turn the living room into an oven but, although it's supposed to have a few burn speeds it's basically binary - on or off. We control the temperature by opening the doors to the unheated spaces!

Other than that there are a couple of, strategically placed, fan heaters or fan and convector heaters which we use to heat small spaces for short periods. Every now and then I think back to the comfort we enjoyed in the carpeted, curtained, insulated and centrally heated house we last lived in in the UK.

Saturday night, or Tuesday afternoon, at the movies

I've always liked going to the pictures, to the cinema. It's not just the film but the experience. It's true you can see the pictures and hear the words on Netflix or Apple TV, or even on the broadcast telly, but it's hardly the same. The cinema is total immersion, a darkened room with one focus of attention, and a screen that dwarfs even the largest television screen. I also like that it involves popping out of British territory and into Spain.

I used to go to the pictures in the UK too. A huge advantage that we Britons have, in relation to film viewing, is that we speak English. This means that the films produced by the US film makers aren't seen as being foreign, even though they are. Italian and French and Iranian films, those that come with subtitles are foreign. I don't think I ever saw a dubbed film in a cinema in the UK, foreign films always came with subs. Not so in Spain. Here nearly all foreign language films (which obviously embraces Hollywood product) are dubbed. Historically films in Spain were dubbed because of high illiteracy rates, because of the work it provided and because it allowed what was said on screen to be controlled and censored. Now it's just a sort of tradition or expectation. 

Dubbing and subtitling still change the words in foreign films (and TV series). It's no longer a political or church censorship but words are sometimes changed to reflect a Spanish worldview - a BLT becomes a cheese sandwich for example. Hearing Colin O'Farrell or Margot Robbie speak with a Spanish accent is unnerving: even more so when the voice is a particularly recognisable one like Samuel L. Jackson or Morgan Freeman. The same dubbing artist usually sticks with the same star for the whole of their career and some dubbing artists are quite famous. The same voice artist may do more than one actor. The Spanish voice of Cillian Murphy, Ethan Hawke and Leonardo di Caprio is David Robles for instance. One of the strangest things is when a Spanish actor makes an English language film because, when the film is shown in Spain, their Spanish voices will be dubbed back into Spanish by a voice actor. It is quite surreal to hear well known actors, like Antonio Banderas, Javier Bardem or Penelope Cruz, speaking Spanish but with someone else's voice.

My film count in 2023 was 59 films in cinemas: 31 of them in English and 28 in Spanish. Seven so far this year. For me the films dubbed into Spanish, from say English or Norwegian, tend to be easier to understand than a film shot originally in Spanish. Equally some sorts of Spanish language films are easier to understand than others - anything with low life criminals is going to be, for me, much harder than a family comedy. Films with Latin American roots, particularly from the deep South, like Uruguay and Argentina, I find particularly difficult.

There is no cinema to speak of in Pinoso. In summer there are a couple of outdoor films and on most of the first Fridays of the month the Pinoso Platform Against Gender Violence shows a film in the Local Associations' building, the old Casa de Cultura, but if you want to see a film that is doing the rounds then you are going to have to travel.

The closest cinema is probably the Cine PYA in Yecla but the PYA, interesting cinema though it is, isn't really what you'd call a modern cinema experience. For that the nearest cinema is the ten screen Yelmo Vinalopó, next door to the Carrefour supermarket. There was another cinema in Petrer but the pandemic did for it. The Vinalopó seems to have stopped getting anything but the potentially most profitable films and recently it hasn't even been getting the mid range Spanish films. Prices vary a lot from day to day and depend on whether you can get any form of discount. I usually pay around 6.50€ but I get pensioner rates. Even at its most expensive I don't think the Vinalopó gets over 9€ for a ticket. On Tuesdays the Vinalopó, like all cinemas in the Yelmo chain, shows films in Versión Original Subtitulado en Español (VOSE) - original language with Spanish subtitles. Usually that means English with subs but not always. Bear in mind that the Italians and Koreans make films too and they usually make them in their home language. One of the, often unexpected, difficulties with VOSE films is that if even if it's basically an English language film there may be sections in, say, German or Arapaho, and the subtitles for that will be in Spanish for a Spanish audience. 

There's another Yelmo on the outskirts of Alicante, on the Pinoso side, at the very "white elephant" Puerta de Alicante shopping centre. That Yelmo does get most of the Spanish films that are doing the rounds but it gets almost none of the even vaguely arty Spanish films. To be honest though if I'm going to go a bit further to see a film I'd go to the ABC, in the L'Aljub shopping Centre in Elche, simply because it has a better selection of films. Prices at the ABC are a bit higher than at the Yelmo, partly because they are in a successful shopping centre, but there are offers. Their "day of the viewer" tickets, on Wednesday, are just over 6€ but their regular price is nearly 9€. The ABC has it's VOSE films on Thursday. All of the cinema chains have websites where you can buy online so you can check prices. Sometimes, often, web prices are better than the box office prices. 

There are a couple of single screen cinemas in Alicante city, in the Centre, the most reliable being aAna which tends to the non blockbuster films that are doing well. In Elche there's an arthouse cinema, the Odeon, which is dead cheap.

There are plenty more cinemas which are a bit further from Pinoso and I'm not going to try and list them all but I will mention the ones we occasionally go to. Kinepolis in Plaza Mar 2 is on the wrong side of Alicante for us but it has a pretty full programme and they have English language stuff on several days of the week. Going the other way there are cinemas in the shopping centres outside Murcia - The Thader - next to IKEA - has a Neocine which is a local Murcian chain. Neocine leans towards popular rather than arty films as does the Cinesa in the much more popular Nueva Condomina - the one with Primark - shopping centre. There are a couple more Neocines in Murcia City and there is also an arthouse cinema, the Filmoteca, quite near the Cathedral. 

Plenty to go at even if they are a little way away.

The peasants are revolting

There are plans to build a solar farm pretty close to our house. I've mentioned it before. The main development is going to be run a "field" back from the main road, the CV83, that's the road from Monóvar to Pinoso. The larger part of the development will start just past the Culebrón roundabout, on the left hand side of the road going towards Pinoso, and run up to finish near the track opposite the ecoparque. There's a secondary part of the development a little higher up the hill from our house too. 

Now, to be absolutely honest I'm not that bothered about the panels. Like nearly everyone I think solar energy is much better than coal, gas or nuclear plants. It's not as though the unploughed field alongside the CV83 is particularly picturesque and from our house we already have views of a bunch of falling down buildings, out of place brightly coloured monocapa houses, goat sheds and any number of telegraph poles, posts and cables. I'd much rather have the solar panels than a bunch of those white, box shaped houses that are springing up all over the area and which always remind me of the buildings associated with a sewage works (my apologies to you if you live in one, I'm sure they're lovely inside). I was/am though a bit upset about the underhandedness of the development. Nobody told us about it specifically and the information that announced the project, over three years ago, was written so as to hide its location (poligono blahdy blah, parcela blahdy blah). I'm sure that, while they are being built, the noise and construction traffic will all be very unpleasant with scant regard for us and our neighbours.

One of the main objections to these rural developments is that these projects build on virgin rural land kilometres away from the urban areas where the power is going to be used. Rural dwellers pay the environmental price for providing power to urban dwellers. It's a good argument and one that has been used in places like Teruel and Soria for ages. The slogan usually runs something like "Renewables yes, but not like this!" 

The usual pattern is that some big investment fund buys a bunch of cheap rural land somewhere, slaps windmills or solar panels onto it, cables up all the evacuation lines and does all the donkey work on the planning applications, design and what not. The money people then sell the development on to one of the electricity providers as a going concern at a big profit. The money people are happy, the electricity generators are happy because they can flaunt their green credentials, the Government is happy because the EU, worried about the tension between Algeria and Morocco, blockages in the Suez Canal, Yemeni attacks in the Red Sea or the Russian response to sanctions, is happy. In fact the only people not happy are the tiny percentage of Spaniards who live in the countryside. The modern argument is that the space for the panels should be located where the power is necessary. So panels on urban roofs, on brownfield sites etc.

Some of our neighbours were very upset by the project and, to show solidarity, I sided with them and raised an official complaint against the scheme. Now to be honest I did almost nothing. The neighbour contacted the pressure group that is fighting other developments around the nearby settlements of Monóvar and Salinas and they got a paralegal to write up the official complaint based on failings in the process, its closeness to a protected area and its visual impact. All I had to do was to put my signature on the bottom of the document. It was interesting though how difficult the process was. For a start the paralegal was necessary to draft the sort of language necessary. Apparently you can't just write to someone and say it will look ugly, it's too close to my house, it will destroy the habitat of the midwife toad, it's not in the right place etc. No the document has to be legal, quoting constitutional clauses or relevant laws. It's a legal process from the start and it requires an over complex legal vocabulary.

Actually even with the document written it was still a pain presenting it. I have a digital signature which allows me to prove who I am on on official websites and my Spanish is passable in the sense of being able to read the information. Neither was much help though as the website for presenting the complaints is about as opaque as a web page could be. There was none of that helpful stuff you get on most official forms where there are guidance notes about filling in each section. The way we got around that, because the pressure group in Salinas has come up against this overcomplexity before, was to present the documentation at a town hall. Any old town hall in the Valencian Community will do for a project in the region and, because I couldn't get an appointment at Pinoso Town Hall before the deadline, I went Salinas Town Hall with a seasoned protestor.

My appeal, all our appeals, were initially rejected on the grounds that none of us had a legitimate interest. It's nothing more than a delaying tactic. This second part of the process had to be online and after a couple of frustrating hours I was just about to give up (which is obviously the purpose behind the rejection but shows which side local government is on). I was rescued by someone else involved in the same paper chase mentioning where they'd got to in the process before being stymied. The details are unnecessary but if I tell you that changing the word RECURSO, in Castilian Spanish, to RECURS, in Valencian Spanish, cleared the way it perhaps illustrates the nitpicking and intentional stumbling blocks which littered the route.

I have no doubt that the appeal will be rejected.

Pinoso in 249th place

Now to explain a little. The usual way for anyone to refer to the Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria, AEAT, the Spanish tax collection agency, is to say Hacienda. Each year Hacienda publishes figures, based on tax returns, to say which is the richest municipality in Spain. They give the median (declared) income as their yardstick. The figures are always a couple of years behind because the tax return we will do in Spring of this year will be for 2023 and with the time it takes to finish everything off this latest set of figures are for the tax year 2021. I have no idea why a news article turned up on my phone about these figures this morning, they were published in October 2023, but they did and I thought they were just about interesting enough for a blog especially if I added a few local numbers. 

The richest place in Spain is Pozuelo de Alarcon close to Madrid with a median gross income of 80,244€. In the Valencian Region the richest town is Rocafort, a small town to the North of Valencia city, with an income of 50,214€. The poorest place in the Region is Venta del Moro in Valencia province (16,213€)

At the provincial level the municipality with the highest income in Alicante province is Aigües 46,093€, close to Alicante city, and the lowest income is in Formentera del Segura with 17,817€ which is just a bit worse than Algorfa, with 17,963€. Only a couple of years before Hondón de los Frailes was the poorest town in Alicante province. Frailes' median in these latest figures is 18,242€ which leaves four Alicantino towns with lower incomes.

The median gross income for the Valencian region in general is 32,215€. 

The median gross income for Pinoso in 2021 was 20,798€. which gives Pinoso the 249th place in the Valencian regional table. In the national league Pinoso occupies position 1,849.

Some of the figures for nearby towns in the Valencian Community are Novelda 23,103€, Petrer 21,428€, Sax 20,966€, Monóvar, 20,569€,  Elda 20,409€, Hondón de las Nieves 19,849€, Algueña 19,623, and Salinas 19,394€. For roundness I checked on the municipalities just across the border into Murcia: Yecla 21,689€ Abanilla 20,511€ Jumilla 20,364€ and Fortuna 18,760€

Here's the list of the top ten for Alicante province

1. Aigües, 46,093.
2. Sant Joan d'Alacant, 29,412.
3. El Campello, 29,302.
4. Mutxamel, 29,200.
5. Alicante, 28,086.
6. Xàbia, 26,365.
7. Dénia, 25,744.
8. Cocentaina, 25,629.
9. Banyeres de Mariola, 25,406.
10. Ibi, 25,272. 

La Matxà in Vilanova d'Alcolea

I went to see a fiesta in honour of Saint Anthony in Vilanova d'Alcolea last weekend. I've seen some pretty bonkers fiestas in Spain over the years but, so far, this one takes the biscuit. I seriously thought, for a few moments, that I might burst into flames and die in a ball of fire.

Castellón province seems to go to town on Saint Anthony celebrations. The events are pretty obviously pagan at root, with a bit of Christian updating. In 2022 we went to the Santantonà in Forcall where a band of devils take two saints, Anthony and Peter, captive, tie them up and drag them around the streets on the way to be burned in a bonfire. Occasionally the devils are distracted from their primary task of immolation when they spy fair maidens watching the proceedings from their balconies. The devils climb to the balconies intent on another of the three tenets of the classic Viking battle plan: burn, pillage and rape.

This year, as I said I went to Vilanova d'Alcolea, a village with a population a little under 600. All I knew about the event before I went was that horses jumped over fires. The pictures I'd seen showed horses and handlers walking across the embers of a fire. It looked interesting and it looked like it might provide good photos.

When I got to Vilanova early on the Saturday afternoon, the road into the village was blocked off with brushwood. I parked up and walked around the roadblock. Stretching down the street in front of me was more brushwood arranged in neat rows down the centre of the road. As I got towards the centre of the town with the Town Hall, Church and bar there were lots more streets, narrower streets, lined with the same sort of branches.

There was a minor event, a bonfire and firework display at 7pm but the main event wasn't till 10pm so I had to hang around for quite a while. I had plenty of time to study the plans which showed where the horses would run. The detail was in Valenciano, which I don't understand, but I got the idea that there were four minor outings for the horses and then one big, final, race, with cash prizes - and the star prize of a chicken. I guessed that the first races would be along the brushwood lined streets and that later the brushwood would be lit and burned down to embers when the big race would be run. I was completely wrong.

Working on my assumptions about the event I chose a vantage point where I reckoned that with only moving a few metres I'd see the horses pass by twice - more chance of getting a decent photo. When they'd passed I'd be close enough to the official start point, back outside the Church, to see the start of the next race and then go to a different viewing spot. Wrong again.

At 10pm, the official start time, the place was heaving with bodies. I'd seen the horses being prepared and dressed up with fancy embroidered blankets and, as I waited for the horses to arrive at the church, I noticed that nearly everyone was wrapping scarves around their face, pulling on woolly hats, fastening up jackets and putting on gloves. It was obvious they were dressing to minimise possible harm from fire. I was being pushed and jostled by the big crowd so I decided I'd move to my viewing spot. I reckoned that if I didn't do it straight away I wouldn't be able to push through the crowds in time. In fact there were soon so many people at my pre-selected spot that I realised that the chance of taking photos without people in the way were nil. I walked down the street a bit to stand on a quiet bit of pavement. Then, all at once, it started to happen.

A gang of blokes appeared in the street setting fire to the brushwood as they advanced. The horses were going to be running with fire right from the start! The brushwood flared up, suddenly, with big, wild flames. There were sparks and smoke everywhere. It took me a while to register that standing on the pavement was like being about a metre away from a November 5th bonfire on the village green. The difference here was that a never ending stream of young people were fleeing in front of the fire, fleeing from the horse's hooves too in the narrow street. I took a couple of snaps with people barging past me, with my body being toasted by the fire, which was still a few metres away, and that's when I realised that if I didn't run I would be engulfed by flame and burned to death. I have not run so fast or so effortlessly in forty years. I creak getting into bed but I flew up that street heading for the safety of a break in the lines of brushwood. The place I'd originally intended to stand!

It's surprising how quickly you, one, adapts. I began to understand how the event was working. The dozen or so horses, and their handlers, were criss crossing the burning brushwood but so were lots and lots of, predominantly young, people. There were occasional firebreaks in the brushwood where less agile spectators could watch the proceedings in relative safety but still being showered by sparks and choked by thick smoke. I'd been hanging around the village for so long that I knew there were two wider streets sown with brushwood - they would be safer, I'd be able to move along the pavements, close to the action but without being barbecued.  That was my main viewing position for the evening though I did find another place, where three lines of still unlit brushwood met, to have a second stab at taking some snaps. When the horses had passed there I felt I had done it. I didn't stay to see the race for the chicken and I didn't go back next day for the town band or any of the other minor planned events.

I ended up with a couple of hundred pictures. Not a single one of them was in focus and even the best ones were so grainy as to be useless. That didn't stop me uploading them to Facebook and Google photos though! They're towards the end of this album if you want to look

Ritual greetings

I don't know if you're old enough to remember a short lived comedy series on the BBC called Fawlty Towers but, if you are, you will remember the waiter, Manuel, played by Andrew Sachs. Trading on the popularity of the Manuel character the BBC used Sachs as their guinea pig, a typical Spanish learner, for their beginner's series called Get by in Spanish. In one of the first lessons the word "adiós" was highlighted as a way to greet someone when you didn't have time to stop and speak. So, you see someone you know but you have to be somewhere else, you don't have time to exchange even the most desultory of conversations. You can't possibly simply look the other way or pretend to be inspecting the pavement so you use that one single word to greet, acknowledge and dismiss your friend, or acquaintance, as you speed on your way. 

I think "adiós" as a greeting underpins the Spanish attitude to acknowledging other people.

Imagine you have ended up in a Spanish social situation with quite a lot of people in a room. The person you are with will introduce you to everyone - one by one. If you're a man you shake hands with other men and do the two cheek kissing thing with all the women. Women do the two cheek kisses with everyone. For a street meeting with a friend who introduces you to their boyfriend/girlfriend/partner/mother in law and so on you'd do the greetings just the same. If the meeting were brief, a few moments, you might need to follow the same ritual for goodbye.

On entering a public space it's not at all unusual to give a general greeting to everyone. We were on a trip to Italy with a bunch of Spanish people and the majority of people greeted the other coach passengers with a cheery "Buenos días" as they breasted the top of the stairs to get on the bus. The same happens when people walk into the Post Office, a bank or a bar. The majority of Spanish people say hello to everyone by launching their greeting at nobody in particular. Equally as you're about to leave the bar or a restaurant it's not at all unusual to let fly a cheery goodbye, hasta luego or adiós, into the ether. Indeed if you're in a restaurant you can be a bit more specific and direct a “que aproveche”or “buen provecho" at other diners as you pass - it's a Spanish version of bon appetit and though grammatical purists complain about the phrases it's what people say.

I was reminded of this determination to acknowledge other people just before Christmas when I made a terrible mistake and signed up for a walk to the top of el Cid, the flat topped mountain on the border between Petrer and Monforte del Cid. My lungs are scarred from 40 years of smoking cigars and I could hardly breathe from the first steps out of the car park to the moment when we reached our goal - eating our sandwiches on the summit. It's apparently a bit of a Christmas tradition in Petrer to go up the mountain in festive clothing so there were all sorts of runners and walkers sporting Santa hats and reindeer antlers up and down the path as I panted and gasped upwards. I was pretty much centred on keeping breathing to stay alive but I swear that every damned person who passed said hello or good day or some such to me and to the every individual in the group. I did my best to bleat out a response.

I am particularly gormless in almost any social interaction. I much prefer to keep a low profile and I can never bring myself to do this greeting the whole room thing, even when I remember it's what should be done. I'm even more inept at the two cheeks kissing with women. Getting that close to a woman I hardly know is very near to sexual harassment in my old fashioned play book. This causes me a minor problem in Spain when I hesitate to go around, for instance the people from the neighbourhood association, air kissing and hand shaking. They expect it, to them it's normal, I don't do it and so, in their minds, I become a standoffish foreigner. It's difficult to teach an old dog new tricks though and, for years, I have greeted even my closest family members with a little nod, a shrug of the shoulders and a vague (Yorkshire) greeting "a'reet?"

Saleing away

Let's presume you're in Spain and you want a t-shirt or a bikini or a pair of trainers or a new phone. Even with the upheavals in retailing there are still real physical shops where you can go. Most of them will have the majority of their stock on show for you to browse. Occasionally you might have to talk to someone, to get your size in shoes for instance, but most people can do most of their shopping in, Bershka or Carrefour or MediaMarkt and a whole lot more, without speaking. You might need to make some sort of grunting sounds at the till but that's all.

It was not always so. Not that long ago shopping in Spain required a conversation. There was a counter and behind it there was someone to ask for whatever you wanted. They showed you things that you may or may not want and may or may not like - it could all become quite complicated. Also shops were pretty specialised. When we first needed electric bulbs for our new house I went to an electrical shop but it turned out I needed an ironmonger. And where could I buy inner soles or shoelaces? Sometimes the answer was obvious, bread from a bread shop and drill bits from an ironmonger, but it wasn't always so simple. 

Nowadays if you don't know where to buy something you just go to a Chinese shop - they stock everything but, in the dim distant past the answer, if you were in a big town, was the department store Corte Inglés. That's where I bought those inner soles and that was where you could browse pullovers or swimming trunks without needing an extensive Spanish vocabulary. Corte Inglés was nearly magical. It had things that you needed and things you wanted. It welcomed the well off and the ordinary person and it was swish with smart and helpful salespeople. It was a Spanish institution. I'm not sure what sort of financial shape it's in now but a few years ago Corte Inglés closed lots of stores, axed lots of jobs and tried to catch up with Internet retailing and the modern world. Britons might see parallels with John Lewis.

In that same antediluvian period the sales, the time that shops sold off old stock at reduced prices, were a big event in Spain. The Winter sales started on 7 January, just after the King's holiday (think Boxing Day) and the Summer sales started at the end of June. There were always scenes on the telly of people camping outside the door of big shops, and by that I mean Corte Inglés, and making a mad dash for the washing machine being sold at the price of a transistor radio or the Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada frock at a knockdown price. There were sometimes squabbles over goods, there was always pushing and shoving and a race to be won to get that special bargain.

Even in our time here the sales were still something special. There was no Black Friday, Amazon didn't do Flash Offers, there weren't year round discounts and Outlet Shops were few and far between but there were the sales. I've spent many a frustrating hour in Corte Inglés sorting through the brand names like Gucci, Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein,Tommy Hilfiger looking through the jeans or shirts for something that wasn't only left in sizes for someone with a tiny waist or a barrel chest. Every now and then I'd find something, a real bargain, and it all became worthwhile.

This year the January started last Sunday. Shops in most of Spain are still, generally, closed on a Sunday but last Sunday they were allowed to be open. Maggie had been doing her online homework and she wanted something from Corte Inglés so we went down to Elche where our nearest store is. As we passed L'Aljub shopping centre cars were queuing back down the surrounding dual carriageways presumably full of people setting out to find that sale time bargain. Corte Inglés was busy too. I had to go a car park level down to find a space. But the sales don't have that sense and purpose they once had. Instead of the jumble sale like racks of mixed clothing with bargains to be found for the persistent and determined it's now whole ranges marked down with a 40% off price tag. Sometimes they don't even give the sale price, there is a sign to say that the 30%, 40% or 70% will be knocked off at the checkout. Nobody has gone through items marking them down. Someone has given the stock control software a nudge and, when the sales are over, that change can be un-nudged. At least it gave one young lad the opportunity to impress his father with his mental arithmetic skills as he worked out the final prices. 

Corte Inglés has never been a cheap shop. 40% off a Calvin Klein pullover originally priced at 119€ isn't a bad discount but that 71.40€ price tag is still more than four and a bit times the cost of a similar cotton pullover at Primark. For me at least there's no adventure in that sort of pricing. I can probably do an Internet trawl to find something as cheap. The fun was in the hunt.

I really am beginning to sound like my Uncle Harry and his stories of fish and chips for a tanner or taking a girl out for a night on the town for half a crown. I suppose it comes to us all.

Pinoso Water and Rubbish charges

I was chatting to my neighbours the other day. We were talking about the plans for the solar farm which will run along the Southern side of the CV83 (that's on the right as you drive from Pinoso to Monóvar). In the way that these things do the conversation drifted and we ended up talking about our water bills. My Spanish neighbours, whose main home is in Petrer, were blissfully unaware of the system for billing in Pinoso and they didn't know about this years price increases either. I reckoned that if they didn't know then neither would other people. An easy blog beckoned.

I posted this same information in an entry on the Pinoso Community Facebook page back in September 2023. If you read that post you can save yourself effort and stop now.

Here in Culebrón, and I presume throughout Pinoso, households are charged for drinking water on metered use. The bills are raised by Pinoso Town Hall, because they maintain the water system, but the money is collected by an organisation called SUMA. The bills for the third and fourth quarters of the water year are sent out in April and the bills for the first and second quarters of the water year in September. The bill for the drainage charges are also sent in April.

For quite a few years, in the recent past, Pinoso was a very wealthy town because the Town Hall charged an extraction fee on the marble dug out of the Monte Coto quarry. The quarry is inside the Pinoso municipal boundary but it overlooks the nearby village of Algueña. According to Levantina Stone (The biggest producer in the quarry) it's the largest marble quarry in the world. I seem to remember that, at the height of production, the quarry was adding 9 million euros to the town coffers though I know that the Town Hall usually quotes the maximum income as 6 million. Either way for a town with a population just over 8,000 people the income was quite a bonus. It kept local taxes and fees low and provided funds for all sorts of projects. As the building bubble collapsed so did the income from the quarry. The pandemic didn't help business much either. Nonetheless the income from the quarry seems to have levelled off at about two million euros per year. In the meanwhile Pinoso has noticeably cut back on lots of things to save money and increased charges in a number of ways to boost income. At a town meeting we were told that Pinoso's current annual budget is around 10 million, which, they said, is pretty average for a town of the size of Pinoso, but, unlike most towns Pinoso still has this extra, bonus, income stream. I noticed that the actual income for 2023 was nearly twelve and a half million and the expenditure eleven and a half million.

The Town Hall argues that the couple of millions of marble money has largely been propping up the price of drinking water and the collection and processing of waste. There are a whole bunch of factors at work adding complications (and cost) to these two basic services: changes in legislation about waste management, the way that some people misuse the general (green) rubbish bins, the reluctance of people to use the recycling bins, the amount of water available because of climatic conditions, the amount of water allotted to Pinoso, the huge increase in the price of electricity (for pumping water), the age of the water distribution system etc. Between them the two services are costing about a million over the amount of money that the Town Hall collects from local charges. The Town Hall's argument is that if people paid something much more akin to the real cost of the water and waste processing then the marble money would be freed up to provide more and better services. 

As always with these things there are multiple interpretations of the current situation but the Town Hall went ahead and increased the charges. Not that anyone has said this, so this is purely speculation on my part, but I think some of the thinking behind the water increases is that the current distribution system (the pipework) is crumbling and the investment needed to fix the system is beyond the means of the Town Hall. If the system is made profitable that makes the privatisation of the supply a much more tempting offer to private concerns. At some time in the future they may be willing to take on infrastructure improvements in return for a long term contract.

The changes were published as being applicable form 2024 so I suppose that we are now under the new regime. ADDITION It turns out that this wasn't true. There was one appeal against the water rate increase which was dismissed by the Pinoso Town Council at its January 2024 meeting. The Council said at that meeting that the new rates would be published in the Boletín Official and, as soon as they'd been published they would become current.

The rubbish collection charge will double from the current 60€ to 120€ per household

Household water is charged on a sliding scale. In the table below you can see that the first 10 cubic metres will be charged at 48 cents per cubic metre, the next 10 cubic metres at 78 cents and so on. There are different rates for businesses. The agricultural water supplied through the SAT network is not a part of this system.

Block of 0 to 10 m³/quarter 0.4800 €/m³ (Old charge was 0.18 €/m3)
Block of 10.01 to 20 m³/quarter 0.7800 €/m³ (Old charge was 0,28 €/m3)
Block of 20.01 to 40 m³/quarter 1.1500 €/m³ (Old charge was 0,35 €/m3)
Block of 40.01 to 80 m³/quarter 1.9500 €/m³ (Old charge was 0.5625 €/m3)
Block of 80 m³/quarter and any further use at 3.2500 €/m³ (Old charge was 1.3750 €/m3)

There are all sorts of little add ons to the bill for water meter rental, water filtration charges etc. but, as an example, last quarter in our house we used 22 cubic metres of water and the bill was around 22€. My dodgy arithmetic suggests that with the new regime that will rise to about 50€ or maybe a bit more.

Sweets

I know I shouldn't, and I have the belly to prove it, but I like to eat those sugary sweets from the pick 'n' mix when I go to the pictures. I'd never really thought about where the sweets came from, so I was a bit surprised when I bumped into an article that told me that the Region of Murcia, which begins where Pinoso ends, is one of the main centres of production of Spanish sweets. In fact, one of every three sweets eaten in Spain comes from Murcia. I find it odd that I didn't know. Somehow you can't help but know the importance of Novelda in spices and, at this time of year, you just bump into something about the production of turrón, in Xijona/Jijona (old blog about turrón here) or toys in Ibi. To hear that firms like Vidal, Fini, Dulceplus, Aunón, Jake, and 59 other sweet brands are Murcian-based was a bit of a surprise. 

The Vidal group, for instance, pumps out 75 million sweets a day, and they sold 200,000,000€ worth in 2022. They don't just sell in Spain; they have subsidiary companies in lots of countries, and they distribute to over 90 countries - exports make up 80% of their sales. It's nearly the same story for Fini - big production, lots of distribution, while another company, Jake, based in Molina de Segura, produces 60 million tonnes of sweets per year which sounds like a lot of cola bottles and crunchy strawberries to me. I was equally surprised when I read that kosher and halal sweets, vegan sweets and sweets for gluten intolerant people are a part of nearly all the companies' ranges. From various descriptions I read, there must be rabbis to check the kosher credentials, and imams ensuring that the cow gelatine in the halal sweets really is from halal cows, wandering almost non stop around Murcia, clip boards in hand.

Apparently, Spanish kids eat, on average, 55 grammes of added sugar a day, twice the World Health Organisation recommendation, which probably helps to explain why 23% of Spanish 7 to 12-year-olds are overweight and 17% obese. Obviously enough, sweets are one of the sources of this extra sugar, and that's not really going to come as a big surprise to anyone. High fat and sugar content tend to get frowned on nowadays, so nearly all of the Murcian sweet producers have ranges with natural colours and sugars, ranges that are low in saturated fats and ranges that don't contain allergens. 

The whole thing reminded me of a, near Christmas, visit to a dentist in Cartagena, the second largest city in Murcia. Like so many Spanish businesses at this time of year, there were cakes and sweets laid out for free. "I suppose they're sugar-free," I said, in that British humour totally lost on the Spanish way I have, to the receptionist. "No," she said, "we like our sweets to taste of something."

Offensive language

English, at least inclusive English, doesn't talk about firemen any more - we say fire fighters. To complain about the driver who has just cut you up the complaint is that "they" don't know how to drive rather than that he or she is an imbecile. I suspect that the word imbecile is also a word to be avoided but that's a whole extra thing. This is going to be a bit tricky to do because my blogs about language are never popular, and because it includes some Spanish words. Not all of what I'm going to write it is absolutely true but it's good enough for a blog of this nature.

I've been told by Spaniards that Spanish grammar can be pretty inflexible when compared to English. In English, for instance, we can turn almost any noun (a noun is the name for a thing), into a verb, (a doing word). Well established examples are to to book with the same meaning as to reserve, or to sky as in to sky a ball. Nowadays we TikTok too. Spanish has just three endings for verbs - ar,er, ir - which, I am told, makes it more difficult to plunder and use words as verbs. The other side of the coin though is that the way that a Spanish verb ends tells you who is doing the the thing. Bailo means I dance and baila means she, he or it dances. So she drives badly is exactly the same as he drives badly. In turn that means you need no strategy whatsoever to avoid sexist overtones in lots of situations.

Unfortunately that's not true for Spanish nouns. Nouns. as I said are things: egg, bottle, cow and so on. Having gender means that somewhere, somehow, somebody decided that each noun is either masculine of feminine. So while in English book, list, and rubbish are neutral in Spanish a book is masculine and a list is feminine. Sometimes this can seem a bit odd. El pene, the penis is, logically enough, masculine but lots of the other words for the same thing, verga and polla for instance are feminine. It's the same with la vagina, feminine, but coño and chocho, with the same meaning, are masculine.

Lots of nouns, these thing words, have a feminine and a masculine form when they are used to describe a person. A very common way to do this is simply to change the article (A/AN and THE are articles) before the name of the thing. So un estudiante is a male student, and una estudiante is a female student. 

Another very common way to differentiate between male and female is to change the letters at the  end of the  word. So, un alumno is a male student, una alumna is a female student. Very often, though far from inevitably, the ending is o for masculine and a for feminine. An example is hermana for sister, and hermano for brother. This is where one of the big problems come in modern usage. I, that's me personally, have one brother and one sister. If someone asks me about my family in English I would say I have a sister and a brother. The traditional Spanish answer to the same question with the same family would be that I have two hermanos. The most direct translation of dos hermanos into English is that I am saying I have two brothers. That's because the Spanish grammar rule is that if you have a mix of male and female words then the male version takes precedence. Grammarians say this has nothing to do with men taking precedence over women - it was just a 50/50 chance decision!!!! Modern Spanish people trying to avoid this would follow the English language style and say that they had one hermana and one hermano to make it clear. Nonetheless, someone trying to give me a bit of a Spanish lesson told me that the poster I'd designed inviting girls and boys to come along to Santa's grotto was poor Spanish - they were adamant that by inviting the boys the girls would have known they were welcome too.  Just like we know that Neil Armstrong meant women too when he took his giant leap for mankind. In writing this can be got around by using the at symbol herman@s. As you may imagine this is not a popular option with lots of people; " For the love of Pete it's a symbol - not a letter!!"

Language can be very emotive. I remember heated debates on British Radio 4 about the use of can as against may or how to pronounce envelope. This male precedence gender rule in Spanish is much deeper. The way round it of inviting male friends and female friends, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen seems, to the traditionalists only just marginally less stupid than inventing new words. And we won't even touch on how to include non binary people. Doubling up on words makes sentences more cumbersome but more modern thinkers go for the importance of equality and inclusiveness and don't worry too much about having to say more words or the technicalities of the word itself. They presume that context will explain slightly odd words. Although cartero means a postman cartera has, traditionally been the word for a wallet. It hasn't stopped the person ringing the entryphone to deliver the mail describing themselves as a cartera. It's still not an easy struggle. The lower house of parliament is called the Congress of the (male) Deputies. I suspect it will be a while before the name gets changed.

And the traditionalist have an ally in something called the REA, the Real Academia Española, which is the august body which tries to control the Spanish language and publishes the "definitive" Spanish dictionary. It's actually quite a useful body in trying to coordinate the language through all the counties where Spanish is spoken - so that Mexicans can talk to Equatorial Guineans and Nicaraguans but it is also entrenched in the past and thinks that messing around with hermanos/as is tantamount to wordslaughter. You'll no doubt be super surprised to learn that of the 46 people who currently make up the RAE 38 are men. Four of those eight women were elected in the last two or three years. My guess is that the RAE is not a hotbed of progressive thinking.

I know what I think about trying to make language more inclusive but in conversations with Spaniards (when we're not talking about food) I've found very few who agree. 

Five in the morning or Mantecados and Polvorones

I often wake up around 5 am. Anyone of a certain age will know why. Usually, I find that I don't go back to sleep properly; I doze, and I turn things over in my mind. Typically, the things are of no importance - I remember a job to do, I wonder why my knee is aching, things like that. This morning it was mantecados and polvorones.

Mantecados and polvorones are typical Spanish Christmas biscuit-like cakes. They're supposed to taste different to each other, though I can never remember which is which. A website I just consulted tells me that polvorones tend to crumble more than mantecados and that polvorones have ground almonds in them, while mantecados (which get their name from their high content of manteca or lard) don't. The website says the shapes are different too and then goes on to say that both can be round (!) but that polvorones are square and mantecados are rectangular. On other websites I've read that mantecados have various flavourings while polvorones don't or that the almonds in one are toasted and in the other not - oh, and that polvorones are oval. Trust me, whatever the websites say, they're more or less the same.

So, I was thinking about buying some. My partner is not a fan. She says they are dry and tasteless. I remembered what a Spanish language teacher told me years ago when I was saying how tedious they were. She said the problem was that I bought poor-quality industrial polvorones. I always think that the word 'industrial,' to describe mass-produced cakes and biscuits, is such a good word - it brings to mind Jerusalem's Dark Satanic Mills. I need to find some decent, traditionally made ones.

Now, if you want a roscón for Reyes/Kings, you can buy an industrial one from any supermarket for a few euros, or you can take out a bank loan to order one from a cake shop. It's the same for turrón. All the supermarkets have their own brand, they also sell some varieties which bear no relation whatsoever to real turrón. But, if you want tradition and quality, you pay for it. It's a balance between the stress on your credit card and the list of ingredients on the label. The more natural it is, the better it will taste, and the more it will cost. I wondered, for this is the fevered state of my mind at 5 am, where you might get decent mantecados or polvorones. It's like the questions on the Facebook community pages, the ones about where you can buy a hammer or bread, the ones that cause a smirk.

As soon as I was up, I dashed off a WhatsApp message to a Spanish pal. Her response was, "The original polvorones are from Estepa in Seville. If you get them in a supermarket, look where they were made. And take a look at some online reviews because all that glitters is not gold."

So I did, and this is what I got as the creme de la creme: Mantecados de Felipe II from Vitoria in the Basque Country, Estepa from Estepa in Seville, El Toro from Tordesillas in Valladolid, D. Sancho Melero from Antequera in Málaga, Dos Hermanos from Castuera in Badajoz, and San Telesforo from Toledo in Castilla la Mancha.

I know that I'm going to have to go to a traditional grocer's to get any one of those. It's pretty obvious they are not supermarket fodder.

Classics at Christmas

In January 2006, when I started this blog, anything I wrote about things Spanish was new. With the passing years repetition crept in. Nowadays I often repeat things. I have almost no alternative. My only hope is that new readers will think the regurgitated topics are new.

I was playing with the idea of writing, yet another, Christmas piece, then I considered the number of seasonal entries I've written over the years. Thinking economy of effort and suchlike I decided to do a BBC and to trot out the old stuff again as though it were classic. I have to say that even just tagging up the entries bored me after a while. I hope they don't bore you right from the start and whatever number you plough through, before surrendering, you find something informative or amusing or, at least, readable.  

Click on the link to get to the older post. Sorry about all the repetition over the years and please remember that what was true in the past may have changed slightly over time.

Christmas begins The Christmas lottery

They think it's all over This one's about how the dates of Christmas are not the same as in the UK

Eating at Christmas A self explanatory title I think

And some lemons for the prawns This one is about differences between UK and Spanish Christmases

17 million Spaniards or 63% of the population earn less than 1,000€ gross per month and 4,422,359 are out of work. This is one of the blogs that has the largest number of hits. I suspect it's for the title which has almost nothing to do with the content. There's a bit about what a Christmassy day the 5th January is 

Bring me pine logs hither Mention of our venerable Christmas tree. in fact we replaced it for this 2023 Christmas

Seasonal snippets All sorts of Christmas things - for once the title is a good reflection of the content

Losing my grip Mainly about a Christmas lottery advert

Rather reassuring The Christmas run up story of years and years ago

Tales of turrón This one doesn't read badly after all this time - obviously enough it's about turrón

Stamping the Christmas cards Just what it says

Underwear, grapes and bubbly New Year's traditions

The goose is getting fat  Those not quite so obvious Christmas things

Drawing to a close  Christmas ends with the Three Kings in Spain

Not a dry eye in the house Christmas concerts and community

Jingle bells  I think it's a bit of a Christmas comparison in two countries

They think it's all over The things that happen in January as part of Christmas. I've even used the title before!

Pale blue dot Christmas lights

Fat chance The Christmas lottery - again

Fattening of geese Christmas cards and British supermarkets

So this is Christmas It seems to be an all embracing article

The ITV

I don't think that British people taking their car for an MOT  (The UK safety inspection) fret too much about it. It's just another job to be done, like deworming the cat. It's exactly the same in Spain. There's a technical inspection, the ITV, for cars and almost anything else that rolls on the road from trailers and caravans to lorries and tractors. The main difference is that the test in Spain can only be done done at specialist centres. If nothing has changed, in the 20 years since I last took a car for an MOT in the UK,  then any approved garage, service centre or workshop can do the MOT test there.

So the Spanish process is simple enough. I'm going to talk about cars. Different vehicles are treated differently with different test periods and different rules but they all use the same test centres. It can be slightly intimidating to be doing the test on a car while running alongside a four metre high 44 ton artic in the next bay along.

For the first three full years a new car is considered to be good to go. No need for a test. On, or a bit before, the fourth birthday the car needs to be tested. After that the test is every couple of years until the car reaches ten and, from then on, every year. 

The process is simple too. You show the vehicle paperwork in the reception office, pay the appropriate fee. Diesel cars cost more than petrol cars, there are differences between cars with and without catalysers and the least expensive test is for electric cars. I paid 44.53€ for the test on my petrol car. The fee paid, you and the car get sent to a sort of assembly line. The process starts at one end of a big shed and the vehicle processes through the shed with everything getting checked as you go.

The first part is all very hands on. Lights, headlamp alignment, horn, windscreen wipers, squirters, seatbelts - anything that the tester person can check with the car standing still. Sometimes the testers are very thorough, buckling up the rear seat belts, checking the quality of the wiper blades, and other times the checking of the smaller things is pretty cursory. It may be different testers, it may different test stations or it may just be the idea that newer cars need less checking. I tend to the latter because I noticed that the same bloke who guided my car through the test was much more thorough with a battered 19 year old Ford Fiesta, that went through a couple of cars before me, than he was with my four year old Arona. With the car still at the very start of the shed there's the emissions and noise check. Again there are different rules for different ages of vehicles. My 1977 MGB GT went through despite the slight blue haze from the exhaust. With the initial checks done you start to move through the shed. The rolling road comes first, to check the brakes. Then to the pit where there's an under car inspection - brake lines, exhaust, suspension joints, general health, bodywork rot and a steering check which involves riving the steering wheel from side to side and some other stuff that I forget.

None of this is particularly tricky. It's a perfectly sensible process and despite the usual moans from my compatriots that the Spanish test is a joke, in comparison to the, obviously, infinitely superior, British test, it's a straightforward process for checking compliance with European construction and use rules.

The funny thing is that, despite what I said at the beginning, for we foreigners it is actually a bit of an event. I know plenty of people who pay a mechanic to take their cars through for them. I know of one test centre that offers to take the car through for we foreigners. I think that, once again, it's the language. Not always though - it is also simply that it's a process that's a bit alien. My car has automatic lights so, in four years I've hardly ever used the light switch. I had to check the handbook to see how to put on sidelights, how the the rear fog light worked etc. Language wise though I have no real problem with conversational Spanish and my car vocabulary is OK too. Even then, sitting in a car with the tester standing outside and saying - left blinker (or turn signal, or trafficator, or indicator), both, brakes, dip, front fog, rear fog etc. - there is forced to be a moment when you either miss what is said or don't have a clue what they mean. The testers have accents, they mumble, they have shortcuts, they presume you know the drill, they've already done this forty times today and they are not at all emotionally involved in the process. This time for instance the tester bloke was much more interested in talking to me about my 20 year old Tag Heuer watch, and the Omega Seamaster that had preceded it, than he was in commenting on the steering castor angle. He was waving the paperwork around, with or without the all important windscreen sticker, as he talked about the beauty of Bulova Accutron watches to the point that I felt I had to interrupt to ask if the car had passed its ITV.