Let sound be unbound

I don't know if you've noticed but Spain can get quite noisy. 

There is a sort of noise that is common in social situations. There are a lot of people, everyone is talking, so to be heard above the general din, one needs to talk more loudly. By degrees the noise level increases so that shouting becomes necessary. It happens in places like restaurants all the time. It is often made worse because, especially around here, the buildings are made of materials that have no sound deadening effect whatsoever and buildings tend to be very echoey.

Then there is the sort of noise where people are not competing with the general hubbub, they are competing with each other. Even in a general conversation, Spaniards do not follow the British custom of waiting until one person has finished before they wade in with their point of view, anecdote, or counter-argument. Britons do push a little, conversationally speaking, especially when the debate warms up but, basically, we do our best to take it in turn. Spaniards don't work like that. Before the speaker has finished, the listener has anticipated the end of the phrase and responded. I was listening to an interview on the radio and the interviewee never drew breath while the interviewer moved from one question to the next. It wasn't that the interviewee didn't respond to each and every question it was simply that it was an unending conversational stream. I reckon it must be taught from birth, like the ¡Viva! response or how to use a fan.

There has been a bit of disquiet in the village about certain events and particularly the organisation of the annual fiesta. When a new village "mayoress" was appointed, she organised a meeting to discuss the fiesta. Lots of people, us included, went to the meeting. Nearly everyone there had a view about something fiesta-related and wished to share it with everyone else. Often, two or three people would start their interjection at the same time - extra volume was the chief tool in making sure that their views got the first look in. Meanwhile, little knots of people were having off piste conversation arising from what had already been said in the general forum. The result? At any one time, there might be three or four, high volume statements being addressed to the room and maybe four or five private conversations going on at the same time. 

Given a following wind, a room with good acoustics, and generally favourable conditions, I can, just about, hang on to a full-tilt conversation in Castilian Spanish. When there is a lot of extraneous noise, and especially if, in the heat of the moment, someone resorts to their Valencian mother tongue then the street version of sodomized comes to mind as the appropriate adjective to describe my chances of comprehension.

Spaniards also talk to each other when they are bored with what's going on around them. We go on quite a lot of guided visits and I find that oftentimes the guides are less than inspiring. In a castle – instead of interesting stuff like the link between the architecture and defence and attack tactics, or about the comforts and discomforts of castle life, it's dates, facts, and figures. At the Bronze Age site there is nothing about the sort of food people might have prepared in the ceramic pots you're seeing or how the village social hierarchy was possibly organised. Instead it's the chemical composition of the clay that made the pots and a series of dates related to the burial plots. The sort of guide who repeats facts, who is repeating a well worn script, is on autopilot. They are the sort of guide who doesn't have time for those who dawdle over an information board or want to take a picture. Very soon, the guide stops waiting for the people who don't move briskly enough and will begin their next list of facts before the tardy visitors catch up. The knock on effect is that the audience members who arrive half way through an explanation lose interest and start their own conversation. It's my theory that the higher the volume of the crowd on any guided visit, the more boring the guide. 

An interesting afterthought. Someone once told me that Spaniards don't dress up for funerals because, during the dictatorship, they had no choice. Not dressing up nowadays is an almost unnoticed demonstration of basic freedoms. In the book I'm currently reading Almudena Grandes describes how people, in the 1950s, chose tables distant from other tables in cafes and talked in low mumbles in case what they said were overheard. It wasn't that they were plotting but it was always possible that something they said may be overheard and used against them by some potential snitch looking to curry favour. Nowadays no such threat exists so it's possible for the sound to be unbound.

6: The Routine I Forgot

I only remembered this routine because the date to do it popped up in my diary last Sunday. "Six weeks since I sprayed the palm," it said. We didn't have a palm tree in Huntingdon so I think I can safely say it has a Spanish flavour.

The single palm tree we have in Culebrón has grown a couple of metres since we moved in. Our garden is a bit like a concentration camp for plants—it houses mainly the dead and the dying—but the palm tree seems relatively well. Of course, it's menaced, like all palm trees, by the picudo rojo, the palm weevil. The picudo lays eggs in palm trees, and the larvae bore into the palms, eventually killing them.

When the town hall first warned of this weevil they also offered programmes to remove infested trees (burning them can spread the weevil), they also recommended a person to check the health, or otherwise, of anyone's trees (I keep calling it a tree but I understand that palms aren't technically trees but some sort of grass-like plant). The bloke who came along, Javier, is still the man I ring up every 18 months or so to shimmy up the tree and hack off the excess branches. He said the palm was healthy and told me about Crispulo, who would spray the tree to keep it clear of the picudo. I used Crispulo a couple of times, but by then, my internet research suggested the chemicals and biological treatments that could be used to keep the palm healthy.

At the time, anyone could buy those chemicals and spray the palms, so I set myself up with long wands and spray packs because the treatment needed to be applied every six weeks. At first, the advice said there was no need to spray in the winter, but that changed soon after I started. As did the availability of the chemicals. At first, you could spray if you did a short course on how to spray safely. Then the amount of chemical you could buy at any one time was restricted, and finally, the chemicals were not exactly outlawed but limited to specialist use and users.

I've read lots about this weevil and how to keep it down. The internet, as always, provides whatever answer you want—people will sell you all sorts of things that they say will keep the tree safe. I've been very tempted a couple of times to go for one of the easier solutions but the two professionals, Javier the tree man and a bloke who looks after the palmeral attached to the palm museum in Elche, have both told me that the biological treatments are usable but nowhere near as effective as the old-style chemicals. Advice that I've read from regional governments and other reliable sources also basically opts for the chemicals, maybe with the biological treatments as useful for the cooler months. I was shocked when I checked the price of the biological controls - both the larvae eating worms and the fungus. Trouble is coming, though, because although we have only one tree and I only spray every six weeks, my stash of out-of-date chemicals is about to run out. I suppose after that I'll see if Crispulo is still in business. If not, maybe I just have to hope that the tree is now tall enough and that the picudo can't fly that high. Apparently, the stumpy Canary palms are much more liable to be infested than the tall Washingtonia palms and as ours is midway between - well, maybe.

5: Routines - the odds and ends

This is the fifth, and hopefully the last, in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly. As usual I've attempted to add in the Spanish angle.

If there is a culture of car washing on Sunday in Spain, I've never noticed it. Most Spanish towns have by-laws to stop people washing their cars in the street. Most Spaniards live in flats anyway, so their access to the water to wash the car is a bit restricted. Instead they take their motors to a car wash. Even though we have space and water I do too.

There are tunnel washes in Spain, the ones with the brushes that tear off aerials and wing mirrors from time to time. We have one in Pinoso and it seems popular. The most common type though are the pressure washers available on the majority of filling station forecourts. Box is the word used by Spaniards for pits in motor racing, and for the bays in the emergency area of a hospital. It also seems to be the most popular word to describe the places that you pressure wash a car. 

I try, when possible, to do all my shopping errands on one day. The most time consuming, by far, is the weekly supermarket shop. We have four chain supermarkets in Pinoso and a couple of smaller grocery shops. None of them has one of those self service auto checkouts, so we still wander around the shelves, with a basket or trolley, and then go to a manual checkout where we unload to the belt, wait for the items to be scanned and then reload the trolley or pack everything into bags. Although most people take bags with them you can still buy plastic bags at the checkout in Spain. You may see it as an advantage or a disadvantage that being served at a till in a small town means that there are a lot of check out conversations - it's nice if you're the one having the conversation and not so good if the person in front has a long medical history or family trauma to relate.

If any of the supermarkets have an internet service up and running for Pinoso, I'm not aware of it. The supermarkets are only big enough to be food shops plus a few other household items. The nearest superstore, the sort of place that sells underwear, car tyres and muesli would be the Carrefour in Petrer, some 25km away. Most of the supermarkets have some sort of loyalty card/application, but not all.

Our home cooking too has a Spanish bent. Maggie cooks the lunch for Mondays but I generally cook the lunch the rest of the week. Our rural power supply was 2.2kW when we first bought the house. That should mean that if the 2kW kettle were on when the fridge kicked in, then the main circuit breaker should pop. Luckily, there is a lot of elasticity in the supply, so we had very little trouble. We later increased the supply to the maximum permitted without getting all the wiring rechecked, at 3.45kW. Nonetheless, we knew that the electricity was limited, so we chose a gas water heater and gas hob to reduce the load on the system. The gas comes in bottles or cylinders. Even today, piped gas is not particularly common in Spain. It's much more available than it used to be, but in the seven houses and flats I've lived in, none of them has had piped gas. It's easy enough to get cylinders delivered, but we've never bothered. We just take the empty cylinders back to any of the several places where you can exchange depleted cylinders, and money, for full ones. The blokes (I've not see a woman doing it yet) who deliver the gas are called butaneros and the jokes and witticisms around them are exactly analogous to the milkman stories of the UK.

Tuesday is usually cinema day for two reasons. It's the day when we pensioners get a special price at the cinema, just 2€, and when our closest cinema in Petrer shows films that are subtitled rather than dubbed. If there's an English-language film worth the trouble, then Tuesday is a good day to go. Even if there is only stuff in Spanish, it's a good day to take advantage of the low prices. There are other cinemas and other times to go, but Tuesday is a favourite. Mind you our nearest cinema, next door to the underwear selling Carrefour, so the same 25km away, is showing a more and more restricted range of films. Hollywood pap amd nothing much else which means we often go to the cinema in Elche - a round trip of 8okm.

And that's it. Now I have to think of something else to write about.

4: Routines around Spanish

This is the fourth in the series about the very ordinary things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to write in the Spanish angle. This one doesn't quite fit into the "job" bracket but, well self imposed rules are easy to break.

If you've ever read any of my blogs, or talked to me, you'll know that I jabber on about my hand to hand combat with Castilian Spanish all the time. My joints may ache, my breathing may suggest that the end is nigh but I'm not giving up indeed I'm working on the principle, so clearly outlined in that old Anglican hymn, Christian answer boldly. While I breathe, I pray. 

The impetus to learn Spanish came from the difficulty I had in buying a beer the very first time I visited this country. For years, I didn't really put much formal time into that learning - going to a one hour a week evening class in Spanish at the local tech doesn't really add up to much over the year. The real point of those early years is that it's when I put in the hours and hours of sheer drudgery that is learning a language as an adult; grinding through unending vocabulary lists, memorising hideously boring verb tables and trying to understand bookfuls of arcane grammar rules. 

As a part of this language struggle one of my regular jobs, that isn't really a job, is that I meet someone in a bar in Pinoso every week. We've been doing it for years now. The original idea was that it would be a language exchange. The truth is that my chum speaks hardly any English and he probably never will. He's never applied himself to it. That should be to my advantage, as we spend most of the time in Spanish, but he isn't really interested in how I speak Spanish. He's much more interested in pursuing whatever we're talking about. I always come away from the sessions cursing my gaffes and errors

As well as the meetings in the bar I pay for a Spanish lesson using the italki platform – one of several networks of online language teachers. I know lots of people are loathe to use online teaching but I see nothing but advantages. It's cheap, it's flexible, you don't have to go out in the cold and rain, you don't have to sign up for anything and you can abandon tutors with complete impunity.

I've never really expected a lesson from the italki people I've talked to. Most of their teachers do offer proper structured courses but I've only ever wanted a bit of conversation. The woman I'm talking to, each week at present, and I don't have the same world view. That does guarantee that we have a pretty realistic conversation that jumps from topic to topic. I'm never happy with the quality of the conversation and I never feel there's an improvement in my level but, at least, it maintains a routine. 

Actually I also speak to someone else online. This time it's an exchange - half an hour of English for half an hour of Spanish. I found this chap through either the conversation exchange or the my language exchange website. I think we click pretty well and I enjoy the sessions. As well as general chit chat he often has particular questions about words and phrases. We never have the least difficulty filling the time. Again I'm often disappointed with my Spanish but it's ameliorated somewhat by the whole thing being more bilingual than the italki session.

3: Routines around water

This is the third in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to write in a Spanish angle.

We, well the house, has a cesspit. Nothing sophisticated, just a brick-lined hole in the ground. If we were to try and sell the house we'd have to do something about that. Legislation has changed in the years we've lived here. Now we'd either have to put in a decent septic tank or, more likely, dig a big trench to connect our house to the village drain that stops 200 metres from our front door. All the run-off from the washbasins, sink, showers and toilets goes into that cesspit, the black hole, and microorganisms do the rest. 

Lots of the toilets in Spanish bars, museums and the like have signs asking you to throw soiled toilet paper into a wastebasket. But, good Lord, we're British - we couldn't do that. What about the stench, what about the flies? No, we whizz the paper down the toilet and flush. On one occasion, that caused a problem. Basically, all the drains in, say, a bathroom or kitchen go to a central point beneath the floor of the room, the arqueta, and then join a single pipe which goes to the cesspit. In one of the en-suites, that arqueta trapped lots of unspeakable stuff. We found out because we'd had to break through the tiled floor to get to a leaking water inflow tube. With Marigolds, a bit of stretching and a lot of cursing I cleaned that out but, in order to stop the same thing happening again, I took to hurling a couple of bucketfuls of water down each of the toilets each week. 

We also have trouble with the hard water. The scale that builds up does a lot of damage. It blocks the flow reducing filters on the taps, the scale clogs up the inside of shower hoses and shower heads and it coats the heating elements of electrical water heaters with stone. One new kettle furred up so much within a month that it started to leak. I've now incorporated so many small tasks within the routine that what was once simply tipping a couple of bucketfuls now takes me around 40 minutes each week. 

Another water-related job is that I check our water meter every week to make sure that the use is more or less as expected. We've heard far too many stories of a leak on the consumer's side of the water meter that have run undetected for long periods, with resultant big bills. 

At the main stop valve, where the water comes into the house, we have a simple filter to catch at least some of the sediment. I check that every three months and change it as necessary. From that inlet point the water passes through a tube that ran, exposed, along the side of a North facing wall. The water used to freeze up several times over the winter, leaving us less fragrant for the day. When we realised why that was happening I wrapped the tube with insulation and I now check that insulation on a monthly basis, replacing jaded gaffer tape and adding bubble wrap as necessary. We didn't have a single day without water, because of frozen pipes, last winter though I suppose Global Warming may have loaned a helping hand there.

One last thing is that the our clean water supply, on the council owned side of the meter, comes in pipes that are varying depths below ground level. Every now and again a passing tractor or lorry damages the pipe and we lose our supply. There's 24 hour call out service provided by the town hall so it's not such a big deal but it can take a while to get sorted sometimes.

2: Routines around rubbish

This is the second in the series about the boring things I do each week, or at least regularly, with my attempt to find a Spanish angle.

This is a very small job. Wherever you live there will be a local variation on how you dispose of rubbish. In most Spanish towns and cities people take their rubbish down to containers that are placed strategically around the streets. The hope is that people will separate out the stuff that can be recycled so as not to fill up the generalist bins. 

The yellow ones get containers like cans and cartons. the blue ones get paper and card and the green ones get glass. The generalist bins are also green. In some places there are brown bins that get organic waste and around here there are a couple of places that have community compost bins though they have not spread as was once promised.

The stuff that isn't organic, or container or paper or glass, goes into the ordinary bin. Theses bins are, usually, emptied late at night in the cities and towns. Pinoso has chosen a different approach. Rather than have big lorries go around in the wee small hours here there is a small truck that takes the bags that people leave outside their homes every evening. The reasoning behind not using the standard, big, neighbourhood containers is that people abuse them. They dump building rubble, worn out mattresses, old kitchen units etc either in, or more likely, alongside the bins. This causes the town halls all sorts of problems in collecting the rubbish and paying for its disposal.

In our particular case we have three of the large rubber buckets, capazos, just outside the front door where we collect the stuff for recycling. I take the containers, glass and paper type stuff to the nearest communal recycling bins when the journey ties in with another. We also have a compost bin, supplied by the town hall, in the garden. Our kitchen bin gets very little use with most stuff going for recycling or to compost.

Almost all the municipalities have systems for collecting the larger items that are "legitimate" household waste but which won't go in the community bins. Mattresses, the old dining room chairs, the calor gas heater etc. The difficulty is that people are impatient and they often want that settee out of their house now, this instant, and they find some way to dump it next to the bins. Hence the Pinoso approach. It's  difficult to put your old deckchairs in a bag hanging from your door handle. The people who can't be bothered to take their stuff to one of the ecoparques, modern style non landfill tips, drive it out to the communal sized bins that are dotted in the country areas around the town. We have one of those communal bins a few metres from our house. Luckily it's not visible from the road or it would soon be overflowing. Fly tipping in open countryside still happens but it's nowhere near as common as it once was.

If you have stuff that's difficult to dump, or potentially toxic, there are systems. Battery collection points are all over the place, there are lots of clothes recycling and used cooking oil bins and nearly everything else from the redundant hi-fi to garden cuttings can be taken to the ecoparques. For small items like printer cartridges, fluorescent tubes, small electrical items and what not there is also a mobile ecoparque that sets up shop most Wednesdays in the town centre.

1: Routines around post

I suppose, wherever you live, life is full of routine. Depending on your luck those routines might be simple and safe or be hard and even life threatening. Mine are the soft routines of a relatively well off Western European. It's stretching a point to say that these routines are conditioned by living in Spain but that's the premise I'm starting from. I'm sure I'd never have noticed if I hadn't been racking my brains for something to blog about. So, this is the first, with more to come, about the most mundane of some of my weekly tasks.

Usually, when I make my weekly trip to the post office there is nothing in our PO box. When we first got here, things we knew had been posted to us used to go astray. The delivery to our rural address was haphazard at best and non existent in reality. That's why we rented a post office box, un apartado de correos. Renting the box for a year in 2005 cost less than 50€; the last time I renewed it the price was 85€.

We get almost no mail. If junk mail is a thing in Spain, it's the stuff that gets delivered in armfuls directly to the blocks of flats by repartidores, hand delivery. I've heard lots of explanations about why postal services never became as important here as they were in the UK, from high illiteracy rates and rural isolation through to the way that families tended to stay in the same place from birth to death. Also, and this is my theory, the post offices never got that extra push that the British ones have because they are a sort of outpost of government -  a place to renew car tax, pick up your pension or apply for a passport. That sort of role, to a much lesser degree, was taken here by the estancos, the tobacconists. 

To most Briton's minds the fact that Spanish post offices do not have a posting box verges on the bizarre. In our local office they removed the posting box from the wall and now there is a cardboard box on the floor if you want to post a letter when the office is open. The post office people seem to want you to go in. Getting to the counter in our local post office requires plenty of time and a lot of patience. For reasons too labyrinthine to go in to they are loathe to sell you multiple stamps or even stamps. In order to avoid the queue I go to an estanco, a tobacconist, and buy stamps there. I always try to overstamp the letters and cards I do send, just to be sure, and, if the post office is closed I post them in one of the two (I think) remaining pillar boxes in the town. There are others in the outlying villages but, the last time I used one, the letter took eight weeks to arrive.

Right of way

John, from Encebras, stopped me in the street the other day and, very kindly, said he enjoyed my blog. He also said I should write about why Spaniards walk in the street and not on the pavement. The only problem with this idea is that I don't know why. Mind you I've never let not having the facts at my fingertips stop me writing a blog, so here goes.

I don't really think Spaniards do walk in the roadway in preference to on the footpath. At least not the majority. That's because most Spaniards, over 80%, live in Madrid or in towns and cities especially along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. If they tried walking in the road their life expectancy would plummet. I've never particularly noticed that Spaniards in Murcia or Alicante dice with traffic any more than Londoners or the good people of Workington. They certainly don't dice with traffic in the same way that Egyptians in Cairo and Giza do.

My guess, though, is that John was thinking about Pinoso sized places. If that's the case, then the simple answer might be that people walk in the road because they can. At least they can without almost certainly getting to see the insides of an emergency and accident unit. There may be a second possibility too. Most rural areas have been abandoned by the young, they are filled with older people. Past a certain age people tend to have problems with dodgy knees, restless leg syndrome, weak ankles, and so on. They may have agility problems long before they need scooters or even before the walking sticks, frames and pushers stage. The problems of clambering up and down kerbs, or of manoeuvring wheels or frames from one pavement to another, especially given the continual ups and downs occasioned by roadways and entrances, may mean that sticking to the tarmac makes the whole thing easier. As possibility two and a half, those knobbly slopes that lead to the pedestrian crossings are also a devil to cross with anything wheeled. Easier to stay in the roadway.

Possibility number three is the width of the pavements. Lots of small Spanish towns have narrow streets. Someone told me that it was to ensure more shade in the hotter months, though I'm dubious about that explanation. Nonetheless, the streets in small towns are often narrow, so, if you're going to leave room for an Audi Q7 to get by, the pavements can't be wide. So, people carrying shopping bags, pushing a pram or holding their child's hand will require the same skill level as the Great Blondin crossing the Niagara Falls to stay on the pavement. The roadway is easier. 

Possibility number four is that it's a ruse to make passing cars stop. It's likely that the car will hold someone you went to school with, your cousin, the local priest or your next door neighbour. This provides a natural opportunity for one of Spaniards' favourite pastimes: talking. Think about it, we Brits like a notice, something written, that tells us when the shop is open or, in the hospital, signs that direct us to the Ear, Nose, and Throat Department. Spaniards much prefer to interact with someone, to have a conversation. 

Lastly, these people may be natural warriors and they see a human rights issue at stake here. Cars date from 1885, and streets were still pretty car-free until the late 1950s in the UK and maybe 20 years later in Spain. Consequently it's a relatively recent phenomenon that people on foot have to play second fiddle to people in cars. Pedestrianised areas are still relatively uncommon in Spain and the legislators seem, still, to be very pro car. Maybe it's just that natural Spanish rebelliousness.

One last thing I've never heard a motorist honk at a pedestrian other than in a gentle, informative way, in Pinoso. Walking in the street is unlikely to result in violence. Alternatively, I well remember a car driver, in a Tesco car park in Huntingdon, holding their hand on the horn because they considered that the trolley pushing pedestrian was taking to long to cross the zebra crossing. I'd been in Spain for a few years then and I was truly startled by the violence of that reaction.

Does anyone else have any better suggestions for John?

Moors and Christians: the fiesta event

This is the second part of a blog about Moors and Christians or Moros y Cristianos. The first part is called Moors and Christians: the real thing and it gives the history behind this event. This blog is about putting on funny costumes and parading through the streets.

The Moors and Christians festivals in all the towns have their own peculiarities. The costumes can be of varying styles, the individual events that make up the whole can be different, there can be different names for something more or less the same, the scale can vary enormously, the duration can also vary, the historical setting for the events may be different and even the type of music the accompanying bands play can have a local dimension. Nonetheless, most have essentially the same principal events. That said please bear in mind that this account has to be generalised and so is not always strictly accurate.

The event is, in essence the re-enactment of a fight between two ideologies, Muslim and Christian, so the starting point is that there are two factions and the final victory always goes to the Christians. Each of the two sides is made up of groups which are usually called comparsas though filae or fila is also relatively common. Often families will identify with a particular comparsa, generation after generation, joining the same group. 

In any town that celebrates Moors and Christians you'll see buildings of all shapes and sizes identified as the headquarters for these groups. The ones with crescent moons, crossed scimitars and Arabic script are Moors and the ones with coats of arms and crosses are Christians. The groups have names like Almogávares, Moros Beberes, Ballesteros, Zingaros, Realistas, Piratas, Mudéjares, Flamencos, Abencerrajes and so on. Each of these differently named comparsas is a sort of social club with their ultimate goal being to get their comparsa out onto the street during the fiesta with the best uniforms and best accessories and the best everything else. Along the way the participants won't forget to have a bit of fun and to move quite a lot of alcohol.

It's usually pretty easy to tell whether you're watching Moors or Christians – beards, curved swords, harem pants, veils and the like for Muslims and chain mail, big broadswords and silk dresses for the Christians. Within the Christian ranks there are often spoon, or pencil carrying, students. I have no idea why they carry spoons nor do I know why students are Christian when the Moors were famous for their scholarship. There are, commonly, pirates, contrabandistas (smugglers) and sometimes sailors too. Given the one time fame of Barbary pirates I always expect these ship going types to be Muslims but I've seen them on both sides of the divide.

How the two sides are organised varies from town to town and event to event. There is always one one overall boss for the Christian side and another for the Moors. These chiefs are usually chosen by some sort of votation or there may be some sort of rotation within the various comparsas. This overall commander is sometimes called captain, sometimes a general and sometimes king or queen. The individual comparsas usually have some sort of figurehead too and any number of sub officials such as squadron chiefs and flag bearers. There are often events that are to do with this hierarchy - presentation of flags, naming of chiefs etc.

I think all the Moors and Christians festivals have a Catholic procession somewhere among the events. Usually the whole festival will be to the glory of some saint or other and said saint will get moved to the parish church escorted by the various comparsas.

So these religious and protocol are a part of the Moros y Cristianos fiesta but the big thing, the popular thing, the crowd pleasers are the desfiles, the parades. If you're trying to decipher a programme in Spanish be careful of the difference between procesión, which is a religious parade, and words like entrada, desfile and cabalgata which are the spectacular and secular parades. Typically the most spectacular events are the Moorish and Christian entradas, the entrances. Normally the entradas are two separate events though in some smaller festivals Christians and Moors may parade together. The costumes are often spectacular, especially the Muslim ones, and there may be all sorts of extras like war chariots, horses and fire breathing dragons. 

Within the entrada each each comparsa will divide its ranks into groups of 10-14 people called an escuadra. These people will wear matching outfits and be led by a squadron chief. As they pass by you the squadron chief will be inciting the crowd to cheer. Each comparsa will have at least one musical band and often several bands helping it to march along. The music for Moors and Christians often includes a style of music typical to the town or region.

The other big event, apart from the entrada, is the embassy, la embajada. An embassy is deputation or mission sent by one ruler or state to another. It usually takes place either by a mockup castle or, if the town happens to have a real castle, there. It's a play in two parts and it has a prologue which is sometimes called the estafeta, a sort of preamble to the embassy, the first delegation before the embassy. Only a few characters are involved in the embajada, the chiefs of the Christians and Muslims, the ambassador and a few sentries from either side - again there are lots of variations so sometimes there are armed infantry squads or maybe riders on horseback. The Muslims request the surrender of the town, the Christians say not on your life, and so the battle begins.  

The resultant battle is often the chance to use some incredibly loud and old fashioned looking guns called arquebuses, I think that these sort of events are often referred to as alardos. In some places, where the guns include canons, the event is called a guerrillera. If you go to see a battle take ear plugs. The Muslims win the first battle and take the castle. Later there is a second embassy, this time the roles are reversed and this time it's the Christians who win, for ever and ever. 

As well as the entradas of the Moors and Christians there are other events which may or may not happen in every town. One, which is a little confusingly named, is the Entrada de la Bandas. This is a sort of introduction to all of the groups often without their full regalia. I think in some places this sort of event is called a retreta.

These parades only happen once a year in each town. When they happen depends on local tradition so there are parades all year around. I've noticed that the mid year celebrations are becoming more common. Six months after the date of the main event there will be some sort of celebration and some low key events.

And now, I think, that's Moors and Christians done to death!

Moors and Christians: the real thing

A friend asked me a very simple question about Moors and Christians, the Moros y Cristianos festivals. What I thought would be a quick and easy blog now stretches over two parts. My usual disclaimer. This is not an academic piece so it is not 100% accurate.

Moor is a slightly derogatory term for someone from North Africa. The term Moor doesn't really include Arabs, who come from the Arabian Peninsula, but most Spaniards don't let a little technicality like that get in the way and Moor gets used indiscriminately to include Arabs and, sometimes, with the wider significance of Muslim. Christians means Roman Catholics. It's relatively common for Spaniards to think that Methodists Episcopalians, Calvinists etc. aren't Christian. 

Moors and Christians are parades and events that take part in several Spanish regions, Murcia, Castilla la Mancha, Andalucia and Extremadura, but they are particularly associated with the Valencian Community and the area in which we live. They are a stylised re-enactment of the struggle between Muslims and Christians to control most of what is, today, Spain. 

The basic plot is this. By April 711 the Romans had left “Spain” and the Christian Visigoths were in charge. There was a bit of a squabble in the Visigothic royal family about who would be the next king and one of the potential rulers invited some Moorish troops over from North Africa to give him a hand against other pretenders. The Moors weren't that keen but when they did finally cross the straits of Gibraltar (which name comes from one of the invaders) they routed all the local Visigoths in double quick time. The invitation had been based on the premise that, loaded with booty, the Moors would use the return part of their ticket to North Africa but they must have liked the beaches, or something, and decided to stay. That was bad news for the ruling Visigoths.

The Moorish army, of about 10,000 swept on to capture the Goth capital, Toledo. The bloke in charge was called Tariq, (well he wasn't really but that's he nearest we get with our alphabet) and the next season another Moorish army crossed the Straits commanded by Tariq's boss, Musa. The two men and their armies met up in Toledo and then pushed on up North. The locals didn't put up much resistance and, within ten years, and never with more than 40,000 troops, the Moors had taken nearly the whole of Spain.

Now comes the "We shall fight on the beaches ..... we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender" bit. It's not true but it's a good story and it's a story that most Spaniards like.  It's 722 and the Moors are mopping up the remnants of the Visigothic army that has fallen in with some local resistance fighters led by a minor warlord called Pelayo. Pelayo gives the Moors a sound thrashing at a battle in Covadonga in Asturias. The Reconquest has begun. It's finally time for a Christian comeback.

The truth of it is that, if Pelayo ever existed, this was just a minor skirmish at best. The Moors were, in reality, stopped by Christians at the Battle at Tours in France (just 490 miles from London). There, in 732, Charles Martel, who was King of the Franks, stopped the Moors dead in their tracks and sent them scurrying back to the Iberian Peninsula and the land they called al Andalus.

From then on in it all gets really complicated. The children's history book version has the Christians slowly pushing the Muslims out - a bit like that line in the Harry Ford film Air Force One  where he kicks the nasty terrorist off  the plane to the immortal line "Get off my plane!". Actually it was hundreds of years of local rulers and warlords struggling for more land, more taxes and the booty of battle. Warriors and politicians on all sides making, and breaking, deals to suit their own purposes. You've probably heard of the 11th Century el Cid, even if you don't know who Charlton Heston is, he's a big Spanish hero though the truth of it is that he changed sides over and over again. The two cultures, Christian and Muslim, or three if you count the sizeable Jewish contingent, lived and worked side by side. That only fell apart when the Christians finally took control. At that point the Moors were given the alternative of converting to Christianity or getting out. The Jews were kicked out and the inquisition was set up to make sure that Christians toed the line (and ceded their wealth to the Church).  

The other complication was that there were, for most of the time of the Moorish occupation, two big power blocks in Spain. The crowns of Aragon and Castile. Aragon is sort of top right on the Iberian Peninsula (Catalonia, Aragon, Valencia and the Balearics) and Castile was most of the rest that wasn't Portugal. Any current day echoes there?

So, we've got two big blocks of Christians, that don't always get on, and a lot of Muslim held land. The frontiers are a bit elastic. Around our part of the world we have lots of castles. These frontier fortresses changed hands over and over. At any one  time they may just as well have been Castilians versus Aragonese as Christians versus Muslims. It was a product of both time and geography. It's one of the reasons why some towns around here are principally Castilian speaking and others are Valencian speaking. The Aragonese held towns speak Valencian and the Castilian towns don't. Of course in the end Ferdinand (of Aragon) married Isabella (of Castile), or the other way, to become the Catholic Monarchs thus uniting the two kingdoms. Together they were powerful enough to take the last Moorish stronghold of Granada, in 1492, and finally claim the Christian victory. That's the same year that they paid for Cristóbal Colón's (Christopher Columbus to you and me) adventure to find a new route to the spice rich Indies. 

Herding cats

We share our house with four cats. Three of them started as squatters.

Our current four are the latest in a long line. Mary emigrated from the UK with us. Eduardo was our first Spanish cat. His mum wandered into a friend's house to give birth. Beatriz and Teodoro we got from a woman who rescues mistreated and abandoned animals. We got another kitten from her later, Samuel, but I killed him when reversing the car in our yard. The rest have been squatters, okupas. Some have style and manners and settle inside the house - they are given proper names and taken to the vet for jabs and potions and inspections. The ones that never get further than stealing food from us are identified by other sorts of names - Bad Cat, Mr Big Balls, Hissy Missy, Mr Stripy Pants etc.

Britons often say that Spaniards are cruel to animals. I suspect that's as true as saying that cars are red. Some are. I've seen figures from the RSPCA that suggest Britons are no strangers to animal cruelty either. It seems to me that most Spanish people who have animals, as pets, behave in much the same way as their British counterparts. The people who use animals as the means to an end, sheepdogs, hunting dogs, farm animals etc. see that utilitarian side first and are often complacent about the state of the animals. That laxness is, possibly, more marked in Spaniards.

Although some Spaniards keep cats as pets the majority of Spanish people don't see them as house pets. They may feed cats on their property but generally there's a Spanish belief that cats can take care of themselves and only need minimal help from humans. 

There is also a widespread opinion that sterilising or castrating a cat is on the wrong side of civilised. Newish legislation doesn't agree. It says that all pet cats, well those that can mix with other cats, have to be sterilized before they reach six months old. Obviously there are exceptions but the general idea is to avoid herds of cats scrounging from bins, taking up space in the animal shelters and messing up the bodywork of passing cars. There are, supposedly, initiatives to sterilise the cat colonies in cemeteries, around the bins etc. but lack of funding seems to be the hallmark of such schemes.

The whole of this legislation is posited on the responsible care of pets. It involves control of the actions of an animal's keeper - microchips to identify keepers and animals, passports to demonstrate that the animals have received certain treatments and medication etc. The legislation came into force in September 2023. Like so many laws that are introduced to great fanfare, there were as many detractors as supporters. The shortcomings of the rules, the difficulties of policing the law and the like were the stuff of hundreds of articles, news reports and bar room conversations. The exclusion of hunting dogs smelled of vested interest. I suppose it's like so much legislation that has gone before it. The rules about wearing crash helmets were flouted for years. The procedures to counter dodgy black money were seen as basically flawed. Nowadays it's difficult to spend wodges of cash and nearly everyone on a bike has a helmet. The legislation is slowly but surely implemented, amended and policed. People forget that it was ever controversial or innovative.

So our cats are legal. They have names that are bilingual, after a fashion - Federico, Fred, Teodoro, Teo and Isabel, Issy. The last cat to cross our threshold, and settle on our sofa, Jesse, is the exception. It's all to do with Postman Pat having a black and white cat. When I first took him to the vet I suggested the name Yésica, the Spanish version of Jessica, as his official passport name. Rocio, the vet, laughed and suggested it may do him psychological harm. So Jesse, as in Jesse James, it is.

Teo, as mentioned above, came from a local charity. Issy just insinuated her way in somehow and then gave birth in our garden. Fred was one of Issy's kittens. Jesse just turned up and refused to go away. The cats, however they got here, are a constant presence in the house. We have sofas and tables protected from their claws, their secretions and their their dusty bodies. We have cat furniture clogging up our house and it's not unusual to find a couple of them shoulder charging the bedroom door at daybreak if they consider that we are a bit tardy with their morning feed.

Jesse hasn't been too well lately. He has a urinary tract problem. The first time it was sorted out by rummaging around in his urethra, the second time he required an operation to remove a stone in his bladder. The operation was relatively expensive, the veterinary diet he's on now will be more expensive. As the four cats are confirmed food browsers we could think of no way to feed them all other than to allow them all access to the same food.

Maybe we should have taken out that anti squatter insurance.

IMSERSO

I'm not sure why but I have trouble remembering the word IMSERSO - it doesn't flow off the tongue somehow. The word is a name, it's the initials, plus some vowels, of the Instituto de Mayores y Servicios Sociales or The Institute for the Elderly and Social Services. It's a Spanish Government Agency that manages the extras behind the headline services of the Seguridad Social or Social Security System, namely free healthcare, disability care, unemployment payments and retirement pensions. Mention IMSERSO to a Spaniard and they will instantly think cheap holidays for old people.

The idea is simple enough. IMSERSO negotiates rates with the tourist industry and then offers low-price package holidays to pensioners living in Spain. It has the twin advantages of keeping us oldies more active and less isolated while providing low-season business for the tourist industry. Our eight days in Cambrils in Cataluña, with coach travel from Alicante to Cambrils and back and with full board in the four-star hotel cost 228.93€ per person. 

Each year, sometime early in June, IMSERSO tells the press its schedule for the year; how many places there will be and when the successful applicants will be able to start booking their holidays. In order to have a chance of getting one of the spots on the programme, you have to be a resident in Spain and then to fulfill one or more of a series of conditions. Typically that means you're over 65 and in receipt of a Spanish State Pension. There are other things that make you eligible like being over 55 and having a widow's/widower's pension or being over 60 and in receipt of other state benefits. There are other groups that also fit the criteria like returning emigrants. To know whether you're eligible, you'd need to check the website or even apply and see whether they accept you or not. Oh, and partners get to go with successful applicants even if the partners don't meet the criteria - space for Trophy Wives and Toy Boys and whatever the non binary equivalents are.

The holidays are, obviously enough, only in Spain and not everyone can book up all of types of destination when they first apply. Most people get access to the 8 or 10-day stays on the coast in Andalucía, Murcia, Valencia, and Cataluña and there are also 4, 5, and 6-day holidays grouped together as cultural circuits, rural tourism, trips to Provincial Capitals and to the North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. There are also 8 and 10-day holidays in the Balearic or Canary Islands and those are the ones that are initially limited. It's possible to book up multiple holidays with IMSERSO provided that you meet the criteria and that there is availability.

What you get is full board in a double room (there's a single room supplement) in hotels selected by IMSERSO. In Provincial capitals, it's half board and, for most holidays, the package includes transport there and back, even if that's a plane or boat. Travel and medical insurance is included in the package.

The prices are standard for each type of holiday so ours of 228€ was the coach, full board and insurance trip to the coast. If we'd gone to the Balearics it would have been 267€ and to the Canaries 355€ while a four-day city break would be 124€.

You can apply online if you have a digital signature, or you can download the form and fill it in with a biro and either take it to specific offices or send it by post. Once you've made your application someone at IMSERSO determines whether you're eligible or not and where you are in the pecking order. You'll get told in October by email or letter and you'll be given a time from when you can start booking. There's a system of grading that gives you preferential status, or not, and which includes a bias for where you live - people living in some areas get preference over others and, as I said above, not everyone gets the right to all the destinations right from the get go.

I understand that in some cases the old hands are sitting at their computers waiting for their time to click over so they can go for what they consider to be the best hotel in the best location on the best dates. It's a bit like the scramble to book Taylor Swift or Beyoncé tickets. Unlike buying concert tickets for those who have trouble with pesky computers lots of travel agents will do the work for anyone who has the letter telling them they can book places on the scheme. A couple of weeks after the start date for bookings the holidays that haven't been sold are thrown open to anyone.

As in all my blogs of this sort don't take what I say as gospel. The devil is always in the detail and what I write is pretty much broad stroke. If the IMSERSO website says one thing and I say something different then, obviously, IMSERSO is right!

A couple of outings in Spain

Interesting week this week. Out and about in Spain much more than usual.

Last Saturday, the Neighbourhood Association of our village, Culebrón, organised a coach trip to a couple of towns over the Murcia/Alicante border. We went to Cehegín and Bullas. As always with the neighbours, the vecinos, it's the human bit that makes it interesting. I'm not a particularly outgoing or effusive person, but that doesn't mean that, as we waited for the coach to arrive and as people drifted into the agreed setting-off point, there wasn't an awful lot of cheek-kissing, hearty handshakes, backslapping, and a general bonhomie that always makes me grin internally. We got to Cehegín and did our bits of wandering around, looking at museums and churches and whatnot, but the real focus of any outing with Spaniards is the meal. The restaurant that the organisers, María Luisa and Inma I think, had chosen in Bullas was absolutely cracking.

There was a busload of us, 50 plus people, and the meal was 30€, so not particularly expensive. I expected dead ordinary. Mass catering is mass catering, and banging out food always diminishes the quality but, to be honest, if I'd turned up as an individual diner and got the same food and the same service, I'd have been well pleased. There is no way that I would have got as much drink as we got as a group though. Ramón, alongside, kept asking me if I was thirsty, and, whatever the answer, he'd order up more beer or more wine. By the time the meal was coming to a close, the noise level had increased markedly, the jokes were more frequent and raucous, and that slight alcoholic haze settled gently over the coffee. Our visit to the wine museum may have lacked a little in formality, and the coach home was noisy.

On Wednesday two groups organised by the local town hall, the book club, I'm a member of, el Club de Lectura Maxi Banegas, and the Adult Education service had arranged a coach trip to Valencia for a presentation and question and answer session with a Spanish writer called Laura Ferrero. The greetings at the pickup point were much more "Good morning, how are you?" than back slapping and kisses. Once in Valencia we got a tour of the Library building, where the event was being held. It's an enormous, decommissioned or is that a deconsecrated monastery. Impressive building; not so impressive a tour. One of those tours loaded with dates and details and almost nothing interesting or entertaining even though the place itself had served as monastery, prison, library and conservation centre which must have produced any number of interesting tales. 

The session with the writer was good. Her presentation was brief but interesting and she answered the questions from the audience in a straightforward and succinct fashion. The talk done, it was meal time. This time the food was more what I'd expect of mass catering; it wasn't bad, it wasn't good. It was fine and it only cost 21€. The meal though was a completely different affair to the neighbourhood thing. I suppose the difference was that this was a more sober, educational visit with a specific purpose other than leisure but I suspect that the real difference was that there were far more Northern Europeans. The Adult Education people were generally people learning Spanish and we brought our Northern attitudes with us. It was still good fun though, as was the boat ride on the Albufera, a fresh water lagoon crammed with birdlife, which was how we topped off the day. The coach home was so quiet that I nodded off.

My final, out in Spain, event was a visit to the Camera Club over in Petrer. I'd popped in to their exhibition when we were in Petrer for an event a couple of weekends ago, and the bloke looking after the exhibition had told us that the club meets regularly on Thursday evenings. I mentioned these meetings on the Facebook page of the Pinoso Camera Club, and one of the, I think, founding members of that group said he'd be happy to go along if I did. So Bill and I went along to a meeting of the Grup Fotogràfic de Petrer yesterday evening. 

The activity was that the members of the group had been given "homework" to take a nighttime photo. A photography professor from Madrid then commented on each of the photos in a sort of Zoom-type conference call. People could join the presentation either in the HQ of the club, as we and about maybe fifteen people did, or from their home or office. I'd talked to the organisers beforehand, and they were perfectly welcoming and friendly without being effusive. I was a bit surprised that, as the club members came in to the room, they didn't seem surprised that there were a couple of gúiris in their midst nor did they show much interest in us. I found the session perfectly interesting without being overwhelmingly exciting. I'm considering signing up as the quality of the photos didn't make me feel totally inadequate. I think, for Bill, it was all a bit more difficult as he doesn't have a lot of Spanish. When the critique session was over, I checked a few questions about club membership and activities with the chap who had been most welcoming, and then we cleared off. Maybe it would have got livelier if we'd stayed for the beer and snack we were offered as we were leaving.

I'll name that tune - maybe

I was a bit worried about Spanish music when we first got here. I was worried that I didn't know any. I suspected that "Viva España" didn't count. After all, one grows up with music. It insidiously surrounds you. It comes at you in shops, on adverts, from the telly, and in films. 

I'm bad with music. When the musicians on stage incite the crowd to clap along I'm the only one in the audience out of time. The level of my rhythmic incompetence may be demonstrated by my being barred from using the triangle in my infant school music class; I was relegated to the benches. In secondary school I was beaten when the music teacher, carrying out tests for new members of the school choir, accused me of singing so badly on purpose. I don't remember song lyrics or titles particularly well yet, despite all these failings, I still know hundreds of songs that I never tried to learn. This is perversely opposite to the handful of poems that I've struggled to memorize and repeatedly forgotten over the years. 

It's not that I don't like music. One of my claims to fame is that one of the first bands I saw live was the Beatles. I was so young I remember almost nothing about the event apart from fearing mightily that the underfoot movement of the dress circle at the Odeon meant it was going to collapse. I achieved more appropriate concert-attending age in time for the era of the Stadium bands, usually only in binocular range. I was pleased when the musical fashions changed  and concerts became more intimate even if it did mean I was close enough to Chelsea (the punk band, not the football team) to get spit on by their lead singer. Here in Spain, I've been to at least half a dozen festivals as well as seeing innumerable modern bands. Nowadays I very seldom listen to older music, not that there's anything wrong with it, it's just that there's so much new stuff all the time.

I'm a bit backward in my listening habits. Try as I might, I can't get the TikTok algorithm to do its thing and throw up lots of new bands for me. I still listen to the radio and I still buy music, as mp3s. That last is because I think that the way Spotify pays artists is nothing short of scandalous. It's fine if you're Bad Bunny or Taylor Swift with millions of hits, but absolutely useless if you're some struggling local band. There's also the problem, of selection. The Internet means that if you want to listen to PVA or Axolotes Mexicanos it's easy to find them but the problem remains of knowing what to look for. That was the same problem I faced when I got here. When I'd been in the UK, growing up with music, I'd built up a list of sources I trusted to keep me informed. That might be Whistling Bob (though it wasn't), John Peel, one of the music magazines, a particular radio station, or the fat bloke in the HMV shop who knew absolutely everything about music. In Spain, I had to start from scratch.

The still obvious answer, at the time, was the radio. All I had to do was push some buttons and there were the major broadcasters. Just like in the UK, there is a mix of local and national broadcasters. There are voice broadcasters, some with specializations - sport, news - and there are music channels, again with specialisms from jazz via contemporary to classical. The main broadcasters were easy to work out. For spoken-word radio, the big stations were and are SER, COPE, Onda Cero, and Radio Nacional. The big music stations, the ones that repeat the same weekly playlist over and over, are 40 Principales and Cadena Dial and with the same format, but playing only Spanish language music, there's Cadena Cien.

I don't know if it's simple wilfulness or what, but the least popular of the big broadcasters is Radio Nacional, and that's the one I liked most at the beginning and still do. I spent hours in my first job listening to their news channel, Radio 5, as I worked repairing furniture. Their modern music channel, Radio 3 plays music that isn't exactly mainstream but is nevertheless modern - they now describe their musical style as fighting algorithm-driven radio. At the time, though, their programming strategy was bizarre. They'd have the sort of pop festival, potential up-and-comers and old-time superstar music on one programme, followed by a programme that featured Bulgarian folk music. I mean that literally. For goodness sake they broadcast jazz in a midday slot for five days a week! All I could see in their programming was a lemming like desire for self destruction. That's now changed and I would thoroughly recommend today's Radio 3. Its more mainstream programmes are at popular times and it keeps the niche music for the niche slots. Podcasts, catch-up radio if you prefer, means that whatever style of contemporary music you like, from dance to flamenco, you'll find that Radio 3 will have it covered.

So, in those early days, in Spain, I listened to Radio 3 and 40 Principales, I followed up on the names on festival posters by internet searches to see what the artists sounded like, and I made a determined effort to learn the music scene. If there were modern music programmes on the telly, I watched. I asked my English language learners who I should check out disguising it as a teaching exercise. I got to a sort of level of half-knowing, of being satisfied with what I didn't know. After all, when I heard that Lewis Capaldi had been the best-selling artist in Britain one year I wondered who he was. I'd never heard of him but it didn't seem like the end of the world.

So, when we're eating lunch in front of the telly and waiting for the 3pm news, watching the Spanish version of Wheel of Fortune, and they get to the round where the contestants have to find a song title having been given the artist's name, I don't worry that I never, ever, know the band/group/singer or title. I'm happy to be equally musically half aware in my new, and my old, homes.

Climbing the walls

Ten years ago I saw the Pet Shop Boys at the old SOS 4.8 Festival in Murcia. I expected them to be terrible but they were just the opposite. They really engaged with the audience. At one point Neil was talking to us. He said how much he and Chris had enjoyed sitting in the Plaza Cardenal Beluga, in front of the Cathedral in Murcia, with a drink and a snack. "It's beautiful, isn't it, that Cathedral?" The home crowd roared its approval. He's right though. Whatever you think of its purpose Murcia Cathedral is quite a building.

Although the current building was started in 1394 the part you notice first, the frontage or facade, is Baroque in style. To my mind Baroque architecture means that it has lots of twiddly bits just like Baroque music is Handel, Monteverdi and Vivaldi. But, I have a duty to my loyal readership (hello Derek!) to be a bit more specific. Wikipedia tells me that Baroque Architecture is a highly decorative and theatrical style. It began in Italy in the early 17th century and gradually spread across Europe. It was originally introduced by the Catholic Church in an attempt to inspire awe in people in the hope of keeping them from falling into the clutches of the Protestant church.

It might be some sort of local allegiance but I think that Murcia Cathedral is my favourite Cathedral in Spain. Burgos is impressive, Cuenca looks nearly British, Jaén looks so solid, Sevilla is just so big and the position of Zaragoza on the side of the Ebro is so imposing but Murcia bears comparison. Santa María, for that's its name, is individualistic, it has a bit of style, a bit of character all its own. I think it's the asymmetry and that huge, solid, immovable tower off to the left that does it.

Back in September 2023 I noticed that scaffolding was going up on the facade and I thought how sad it would be for our house guests during the next few years. Everyone knows that getting a kitchen extension takes ages, and never gets finished on time, so I reckoned the Cathedral would be visually impaired for quite a while. It's true that the modern screens in front of big project scaffolding are usually interesting in themselves but it's clear that Jaime Bort's facade (there were lots of architects involved in reality but Bort is considered the main man) is probably just a mite more impressive. I suspected that the work would take years even though the timetable said a long year. In October one of the photos in my album shows the scaffolding and there's a caption - "The Cathedral in Murcia is having the facade tidied up. They are advertising that there will be visits up the scaffolding. I keep checking their website. I'll be there.".

And indeed I have been. I think it's a clever idea. As well as putting up the scaffolding for the workers to get on with the restoration, the scaffolders put up a second set of scaffolding so that we, the gawping public, can go up and watch the work on the facade. I've done it twice now. To be honest it's not that great a tour, I don't particularly care for the style of the guide, but that doesn't stop it being a worthwhile experience. The guide talks in something close to a monotone and his spiel goes someone like, "On this level we have four saints - he names the saints - he says that one has the face of the man who commissioned the work on the facade, Cardenal Beluga. He names more saints and the archangels. I read somewhere that, sculpture wise, there are twenty saints, three archangels, a guardian angel and the mysteries of the Virgin (heaven knows what they are) on the facade - the guide named them all. The most exciting he gets is when he asks if anyone knows the Patron Saint of Cartagena (Murcia is in the dioceses of Cartagena and the saint in question is San Ginés de la Jara) or, when he points out San Patricio, Saint Patrick, the Patron Saint of Murcia and makes a quip about shamrocks and black beer. There is very little in the way of those titbits of information, or interesting little stories, that are the bits people remember of a visit long after forgetting that both Santa Bárbara Mayor and Menor have their place on the facade. He doesn't say much about the restoration work going on. So far as I could tell the main thing they seem to be doing at the moment is chipping away some mortar that was added in a 19th Century, in a previous smartening up of the building, which was, apparently, a big mistake. 

They're still saying they'll be done in Autumn of this year but, if you fancy having a look yourself before then, you can book it up online on this link. 

P:S. The photo at the top is an old one. The scaffolding is now covered.

Funny ha, ha or funny peculiar?

If Britons, young Britons especially, still drink tea then "Shall I put the kettle on?" must remain a common question in British households. As long as I can remember, in houses where I have lived, one of the potential answers has been "Well, if you think it will suit you". Just in case you are not a native English speaker the English language uses something called phrasal verbs. To put on is one of them and it has several meanings. Two of the common meanings are to cause a device to operate and to wear. This means that "Should I put on the Television?" and "Should I put on a tie?" have the same basic structure, both make perfect sense, yet the meanings are completely different. The answer to the kettle question is a deliberate confusion of two of those meanings. It's not much of a joke though some of us find it weakly humorous.

Strictly Come Dancing is a British TV show. It's a programme where personalities are paired with professional dancers in a dance competition. Two of the names from the show, Anton and Giovanni, a judge and a dancer, have been able to exploit their semi celebrity status to feature in another British TV programme which follows them as they travel around Spain. In one episode they were talking to a Flamenco dancer who we'd been introduced to us as an 80 year old. Anton asked her when she had started dancing. Her answer was since she was 25. Anton countered with - "Ah, about five years ago then?". The woman put him right. "I'm much older than that," she said. The woman didn't pick up on the humour in Anton's comment. He did it again a couple of weeks later "You have six children - really? So that was before you got a telly then?". The person being asked the question didn't see the link about how she filled her leisure time. "No, we had a telly long before."

I can't help it. If a Spanish person tells me, for instance, they have a puncture, I ask them if it hurts. They think I'm daft or that I didn't understand what they said. Sometimes, when there is either the time or inclination to explain or to unpick the exchange we get into a conversation about the peculiarities of British humour. Spaniards know that there is something called British humour, it has a Wikipedia entry.

My partner says that Spanish humour is very slapstick, a bit unrefined. It's absolutely true that several successful Spanish comedy films of the last couple of years feature a lot of things like breakages, excrement and damage to male genitalia. I'm a bit out of touch with British humorists but back in the 20th Century people like Benny Hill, the Only Fools and Horses crew, Mr Bean or Morecambe and Wise were often quite physical and slapstick too. John Cleese hitting Manuel or thrashing his car is hardly subtle. On Spanish telly there was, for a while, a thing called The Comedy Club and, but for the fact that it was in Spanish, the stand-ups there could have been on any British stand-up show. A recent Spanish film was about a Catalan comedian called Eugenio, basically he told jokes in much the same way that I understand Jimmy Carr does and, if that's not right then maybe I could say that Bob Monkhouse or Dave Allen were joke tellers. I don't know much situation comedy on Spanish TV but that said La que se avecina is a popular Spanish sitcom and, for good measure, there's also quite a subtle pun in the title, that's where the subtlety ends.

So, because I quite frequently end up in the aforementioned conversation about British humour I thought there might be meat enough for a blog. The trouble is that when I started to look for differences I had some trouble finding anything that was significantly different, except for maybe a lot more word play. Wikipedia was very little help so I asked one of the artificial intelligence programmes for the difference. This is what it came up with before it started to ramble on about wearing sandals in winter.

"Spanish humour often employs a digressive style, leading listeners through various directions before reaching a conclusion. Physical humour, repetition, hyperbole, and satire resonate well with a Spanish audience while British humour leans toward irony, surprise, and sarcasm. British humour is renowned for its subtlety, wit, dry humour, self-deprecation, clever wordplay and innuendo while humour in Spain reflects the country’s passionate and expressive nature and thrives on absurdity, and exaggerated scenarios".

The first time, and I'm sure not the last, where artificial intelligence provides the words that I can't.

The photo by the way is Gila who used the same gag for years - "Hello, is this the enemy?

Megawatt hours and their smaller offspring

As I shaved I was listening to the radio, to the part they call a tertulia, that's the bit where pundits, usually journalists, talk about the latest news. They were talking about inflation and about electric prices. They had some boffin who knew all about the electric market. One little tidbit he dropped in at the end of his section was that every Spanish electric bill has a QR code which leads to a webpage maintained by some sort of Government quango, the "National Energy Commission". By using that code/website, you get a direct comparison between your last bill and the market in general. 

To explain it all properly would take pages and pages. It's quite complicated stuff, so I've kept this as short as my ponderous writing style will allow.

The Spanish electric market has two sorts of contracts for we household users. One is in the controlled market. The other is in the free market.

The controlled price varies from hour to hour. It's an almost incomprehensible pricing system; I certainly don't understand it. It's to do with supply and demand and with an auction between the big energy providers to decide on the price. There are only eight companies that offer contracts in the controlled Spanish market, they are the "Suppliers of Reference", and they are able to do so because they conform with certain government criteria. If you listen to the Spanish news and they tell you that today was the most expensive/least expensive day ever for electric prices, they are talking about this controlled price. If you buy a contract that uses the controlled price, you can never be sure whether your bill will be higher or lower even if you were to use the same amount of electricity under the same conditions.

Most people have a contract in the free market. "Anyone" can set up to sell electricity on to consumers in the free market. I presume it's more or less like that of any other business. If you're a supermarket, you buy your raw material, tomatoes say, from a producer, or their agent, at one price and sell them on to customers at a higher price. Normal capitalist economy stuff. Most supermarkets have tomatoes, the price varies from supermarket to supermarket and how they attract customers to buy them is up to each supplier. So with electricity, it's just the same. The companies that offer contracts to household users buy their electric off someone who generates it or from some intermediary, and then try to attract customers. How they package it up is how they sell their product. Most of the free market contracts have a fixed price for electric under certain conditions and for certain periods.

Electric bills in Spain have several elements. 

There's the power that you contract, the "potencia" - it's the thing measured in kilowatts. We have 3.54 kW. The more potencia you decide you need, the more you will pay each month. Often the cost of the potencia is lower at night and at weekends and more during the working day. 

Then there's the quantity of power that you use. The more power you use, the more you pay. That's why your partner/parent or children are always nagging you not to leave things on standby, to turn off lights, to raise the temperature on your fridge freezer, to buy a pressure cooker etc. etc. 

On top of this part of the bill, you pay a tiny, miserly, insignificant amount to the electric company to subsidise the bono social, which is the discounted price that is offered to people who might otherwise have problems paying their electric bill. Of course, you could see it as a subsidy to the electric companies, but let's keep clear of politics on subsidies and charity for the moment. 

The first subtotal on your electricity bill is made up of these three elements: power capacity, power used and the contribution to the bono social plus an electricity tax. I think this tax is to pay off a debt when the government subsidised the price of electric. I may be wrong. Maggie tells me I usually am.

The second part of your bill is made up of the "extras," which include renting the meter and things you may decide you need or not. One of the things we had on our free market, Iberdrola, bill was a sort of insurance against faults in the house wiring and for repair or replacement of certain white goods should they go phut. I'm sure that other suppliers have other extras.

Finally the subtotal for the energy/bono social/electricity tax is added to the subtotal for the extras and the whole lot then has IVA/VAT added to give us the total we will have to pay.

There have been lots of changes in the way that electricity is sold in Spain over the years. I don't think we had a choice of suppliers when we bought the house and if there was a choice of contracts I was unaware of that option. The company we contracted with was called Iberdrola and they simply renewed the contract each year. We were on the controlled price by default. When Putin started pounding the Ukraine the electricity price in the controlled market went crackers. Every day seemed to be a record high for the price of electric. We certainly noticed it in our bills. By now we were well aware that we had options and we asked Iberdrola what they could offer. I'd noticed, but not known why, the Iberdrola bill had, seamlessly and silently, transmuted into a Curenergia bill. Iberdrola sells in the free market while Curenergia is one of the Suppliers of Reference, selling in the controlled market. When Putin forced us onto the free market, we had to change suppliers to Iberdrola proper.

All of the free market contracts offer different pluses and minuses. The different contracts might offer electric at a fixed price every minute of the day or expensive electricity during certain hours balanced out by lower prices at other times. They may offer a fixed unit price over several years. Lots of them offer green electric though I wonder how anyone can determine where the electrons moving along the cables came from and as Spain seems to consider nuclear power to be as green as solar panels, wind turbines and hydroelectric there may be different ideas about definitions. There are often side offers; buy electric off Repsol, and they'll give you a discount at their petrol stations buy from someone else and they'll give you money off at the supermarket. 

So, back to where this blog started. Prompted by the radio tertulia I looked at the QR code which referenced lots of providers. From that I looked at some providers online, I talked to a couple of advisors one online and one face to face - both tried to sell me a contract with the same supplier. That supplier was not one of the ones that the National Energy Commission suggested as the best value. Amazingly, as if by magic, my Instagram and Facebook feeds also started to fill with adverts for energy suppliers - they must have some sort of sixth sense. It became obvious that changing from one contract to another was dead easy, and so I did.

Whether the decision was a good one or not, time will tell.

Decline and Fall

Besides perfume and cars there are multiple adverts on Spanish telly for food. Particularly for fast food or franchised food chains - Foster's Hollywood, KFC, Domino's - or for quick to eat food - Casa Tarradellas pizzas, Yatekomo noodles. Now I'm not a discerning diner. I was a big fan of Spam, I like crabsticks and I still buy el Pozo meat products despite seeing the stomach turning documentary on TV. But I have to say that the adverts are putting me off a bit. The food is all so shiny and bathed in red or yellow sauce of dubious parentage. Eating with hands squidged over with sauce appears to be a positive thing.

I have a Spanish pal who is very set in his ways. From what I can tell he eats a lot of very traditional Pinoso food. If it's not local then, whether it's at home in a restaurant, he sticks to the tried and tested - grilled meat, stews, rice dishes and the like. I usually meet this friend around 12.30 so, a long hour later, I'm saying goodbye because I have to get home to finish preparing lunch. He occasionally asks what I'm cooking, Chicken and coconut curry I say, or cassoulet or even turkey fajitas and he looks at me as though I'm talking gobbledygook not just remembering what a cook book tells me.

I was telling this friend that we'd had a bit of a disappointment with a restaurant we'd gone to. We'd had some friends visiting who have a house on the coast. We'd planned to go to a local restaurant that does very traditional Pinoso food. Escalivada, pipirrana, fried cheese with tomato jam, bread with ali-oli and grated tomato, local cold sausages and the like to start. The main dish would usually be rice with rabbit and snails (the local paella), a rabbit stew or the big meatballs in broth. As the meal grinds to its inevitable conclusion, after the pudding, they give you mistela, the sweet wine, and perusas, the air filled cakes. Unfortunately the restaurant had a wedding reception that day, no room for us. We chose another restaurant, one we'd meant to try for ages. It was fine. It did lots of straightforward things like Russian salad, broken eggs, croquettes, prawns in garlic, patatas bravas blah, blah as starters. Mains were lots of varieties of fish, pork and beef served grilled or fried and there were also various rice/paella dishes. Nothing wrong with it. Absolutely fine. Eaten and forgotten.

So, back to my friend. I'm telling him about this. He says but surely the traditional food would be nothing new to your visiting friends if they have a house here in the province. I tell him that, on the coast there is plenty of food but that it's, generally, international. In fact I tell him here in Pinoso most of the restaurants serve food that would be equally at home in Brussels, Milwaukee or Nuneaton. He doesn't agree. He says it's easy to get paella on the coast. I know, from past conversations, that he goes to the same handful of restaurants time after time because that's where he can get what he's looking for. A self fulfilling prophecy. I try to explain what I mean. He's thinking of paella made individually, to order. He's not thinking about the stuff that served up in individual portions, microwaved hot as necessary, sold to tourists as the dish before the pork chop and chips.

Not that long ago the set meals, the menús, started with a choice of something like soup (fish, garlic, onion and seafood were favourites), possibly some pasta, maybe a stew like lentejas or cocido, maybe some boiled or grilled veg. The second dish, main course if you prefer, would be meat or fish, a pork chop, a chicken fillet, sardines, a piece of hake, maybe kidneys. The pudding would be ice cream, flan or fruit of the day. The food was hardly haut cuisine but it was something with identifiable ingredients. You could have coffee instead of pudding of course. The red wine was so rough it came with gaseosa (sugary, fizzy water) to make it palatable. White wine was a rarity and beer was beer - that's fizzy lager. The quality wasn't good but it was honest sort of stuff using cheap but straightforward ingredients cooked by someone who was a cook - it often involved using up yesterday's leftovers.

Nowadays the roots of the set meals are still the same but the choice is different. It's difficult to explain in a way but the style has changed, it's less honest. In the past the menú came with cheap ingredients - the cheap cuts of meat, only veg in season or something produced or hunted locally. Nowadays the ingredients are cheap because they are cheapened versions of what would once have been decent quality food - farmed, steroid fed, fish, chicken bred with oversize breasts and veg grown under artificial lighting in huge plastic greenhouses. The food is still rooted in Spain but it's not really Spanish. It's a bit like getting bangers and mash at the local pub in the UK with the sausages made with mechanically separated meat and potato out of a packet. Here it might be rice served with bits of pepper, chorizo and chicken.

It might be the puddings, the afters, the sweets that most highlight this change. The list of puddings after a Spanish menú del día is, no longer, three or four items. You will be offered any number of possibilities and every single one comes out of a packet that has been in the refrigerated display. More choice, less quality.

It's a real shame that those people chose that day to be married but I'd still like to wish them the happiest of lives together!