Life in Culebrón

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 incomprehensibl...

Here they are called Borrascas, I'm not sure what they are in English but something like storms or maybe Atlantic Lows. The storms that come in from the Atlantic and nowadays, just like hurricanes, have alternating and alphabetically arranged female and male names - Ana and Bertie, Charlotte and Derek. A little over a week ago Filomena, brought lots of snow which caused problems all over central Spain, particularly in Madrid, and low temperatures everywhere. When it gets cold, and more so when it gets hot, Spain uses more electric. This is not a great surprise. The nuclear power stations never go offline but all the other forms of electricity generation have ups and downs. You can't pull so much from wind turbines if there is no wind, the solar panels don't work so well at night and even the hydroelectric stations are affected by droughts and rainstorms. When all else fails the gas and oil fired power stations are brought on line. The power generated from these fossil fuel...

I was in town this morning, on Bulevar, drinking coffee and reading a really interesting book about doors. A car stopped, the driver jumped out and went into the paper shop to get a newspaper. While he was parked, in the middle of the one way street, a van came up behind and had to wait. When the paper purchaser came out of the shop the van driver shouted to him "You couldn't do that in Madrid".  And it's true Nobody would describe Pinoso, or even Culebrón, as "Deep Spain", la España profunda. That's the Spain that's empty, without services, left behind by the modern world. No mobile network, no health services locally, no Internet access, no shops. But lots of Spain is like that; nearly empty. There are hundreds of villages that only have a few inhabitants, usually older people, and there are even villages that are totally abandoned apart from, maybe, occasional weekend and summer occupants. There's a whole movement about la España vaciada, empt...

When I put the clocks back later tonight I'm going to retune the telly. The way the frequencies are divided up between mobile phone services and TV networks is being changed so it's either a laborious retune (splendid design Samsung people!) or lose channels. TV is one of the few things we generally get as well here as anywhere in Spain. My phone provider sent me one of those super offers the other day. For just two euros more per month I could have 40 new TV channels, increase the ADSL speed to a maximum of 100 Mb and get double the number of download gigs on my mobile phone. I tried to sign up. None of the advantages were available here in Culebrón - no 4G, no fibre, not even the TV channels. That's what you get for living in the countryside. ADSL at 3 Mb maximum and a dodgy mobile signal. When I worked at the furniture shop my boss had a go at house selling. I used to take the pictures and write the blurb for the sales sheets. Lots of people who lived up some unm...

One of my first ever brushes with Spanish rules and regulations was when I decided that we needed a second butane bottle for the heater in the flat we were renting in Santa Pola. What now seems eminently sensible - that before you can start using bottled gas in your home somebody needs to check that the installation is safe - seemed very Orwellian back then. A future with a boot stamping on a human face - forever. All I wanted was to buy a gas bottle and they wanted to see ID, they wanted me to prove where I lived, they wanted me to sign a contract and they wanted a technician to visit to make sure it was all safe. Having lived here a long time now and having seen the news stories of blocks of flats destroyed with dodgy gas installations and having heard how insurance companies love to avoid paying out if you can't show proof of a current five year check or even if the rubber pipes are past their sell by date, then I am very happy to do as I should. Anyway, there was a bit of a loo...

There are a lot of people in Spain who have difficulty in paying their energy bills. A nice warm house, when it's cold outside, is one of those symbols of well being and comfort. Just think of any of the filmed versions of A Christmas Carol. Being cold is miserable I've lived in six different flats in my time in Spain. None of them have had gas, just electricity. Whilst there are plenty of people who have piped gas and many more who use bottled gas when Spaniards talk about energy they are really talking about electric. That's not our case; in Culebrón we have a gas hob, gas water heater and we generally use gas fires to heat the house. We have a pellet burner too, a device that burns reconstituted wood pellets, but it has been giving us a bit of trouble recently and we have fallen back on the gas fires over Christmas. Because we have been in the house for longer periods and, because we are rich enough and determined enough not to be cold we have bought five gas bottl...

I've forgotten exactly what Ohm's Law says but I know that it gives you the relationship between current and volts and something else electrical. When I did know what it was I worked out that a 13 amp UK plug was getting stretched with a 3 kilowatt device, like a big electric fire or a fast kettle plugged into it. Down in Cartagena our electric supply is 5.5kw, so two fully loaded 13 amp plugs worth. It's pretty typical for a newish Spanish house. If we're not careful with the cooker, kettle, heater combinations it's easy to pop the circuit breakers. It's been horrid weather in Cartagena for the past few days and, when we got back to Culebrón it was cold, wet and windy here too. Because of the rain we haven't been able to hang out any laundry in Cartagena. In Culebrón we have a tumble dryer so we brought all the laundry back with us. I set the washer going as we were still unpacking. A little later we turned on the tap to make the welcome home cup of t...

Rubbish collection in Spain is pretty standardised. There are big rubbish bins, of various types, scattered at strategic points in cities, towns, villages and the countryside. The bins are emptied to some organised schedule - usually every night in the cities and towns - less frequently in country areas. Householders take their rubbish to the bin. Pinoso town is a little unusual in that it has a door to door collection most nights. There are big recycling bins all over the place too - the ones in the photo are our nearest in Culebrón village centre - and there are Ecoparques where you can take those hard to get rid of things like engine oil. For bigger things, old sofas and the like, you phone either the town hall, or the company that collects the rubbish on behalf of the municipality, and they, usually, cart it away for free. I'd half wondered about the subject of this blog, with it's not very Spanish content, when I changed the printer ink the other day. I took the old cartri...

This house belongs to a couple of friends of ours. As you can see it's hardly in a built up area. In fact it's so far off the main road that normally, when we visit, they come and collect us in their four wheel drive to save our cars from crashing and bumping up the unmade road. For most of Spain the model is that rural communities lived in villages. There are almost no individual buildings for miles on end in the Spanish countryside. Farm workers travelled from the villages each day to work the fields. Alicante province and some surrounding areas are different in that the houses are scattered around the countryside. I was told, that this is because the irrigation system, built by the Moors back in the first Milennium, made it possible for farmers to locate more or less where they wanted. When things began to change the isolated nature of those country houses made it costly to supply them with mains electric and water. It's one of the reasons why so many rural propertie...

I'm going to tell you some things that I think Spaniards think about the British. You may notice the teensy weensy little flaw here. Actually though, when I say what Spanish people think I should change that to what several Spaniards have said to me, over the years, about Britain and the British. So my Englishness is not, really, a handicap. When I say Britain and the British, I actually mean England and the English. Occasionally the Scots get a mention, because of the supposed similarity to the Catalans and because Mel Gibson, like all Scottish men, wore a skirt. No Spaniard I've met has ever voiced their opinion about the Welsh or the Northern Irish.  Lots of Spaniards think that we are the only country in the world that drives on the other side of the road. This belief is usually mixed with an undertone that suggests we English are a bit full of ourselves. After all, don't we use different measures for length and weight too? I know, as do you, that there are about 70 or ...

I typed the first draft of this when the lights were off - all over Spain. What a strange experience that was. We were fine but it did make us think about the number of things that would be difficult or impossible without power. You know the sort of thing - even if it were possible for the staff to get past the supermarket shutters to open up  they would find the the lights, freezers and cold displays off, the price scanners wouldn't work, the tills wouldn't open and even if the customers had cash there would be no way to compute the bill or store the loot. We imagined abandoned electric cars with depleted batteries, abandoned thermal vehicles with empty tanks (no electric to work the fuel pumps) and traffic chaos as all the traffic lights failed. Perhaps one of the oddest things was that, when we got in the car, the radio started up, as it does so often, and we didn't notice that the programming, which told us about the blackout, was being broadcast on what is normally a c...

I have a morning cat feeding routine. The kettle goes on as I run water to wash the cats' bowls. I fire up the portable gas heater. When the water has boiled I put a little of it into our tea mugs and then put the mugs on top of the heater. It's to warm the cups. If we don't warm the cups we end up with lukewarm tea. The kitchen temperature is such that crockery and cutlery come out of the cupboards icy cold. The minimum temperatures recorded at the Pinoso weather station over the last week are -1.5ºC, -2ºC, -1.1ºC. -2ºC, +1.3ºC, -7.2ºC and -5.3ºC. It's not that they're arctic or anything but neither are they tropical. It has been colder. We had a couple of days last month when there was no morning water because of frozen pipes. Lots of shop and office workers in Pinoso work at their computers wearing coats. Several of our friends wear fleeces inside their houses. We're not for that. We're for banging on the heating. Maggie was so fed up of being co...

It's not a complex idea. When I was a lad braziers were the natural complement to those little striped tents that workmen used to set up over what were then called manhole covers. In Spain they put them under round tables. Braziers or braseros are, at their most basic, simple bowls which fit into a circular support underneath a round table. There are electric ones nowadays of course but the one we were presented with today, when we went for a birthday meal, was more like a wrought iron version of a parrot's cage. Glowing embers are put inside the bowl, the bowl is popped under the table and a heavy tablecloth draped over the table and your knees. The heat captured under the table warms the lower half of your body. A very personal sort of heater. The modern thermostaically controlled electric heaters do the same job and have the advantage over the old fashioned, real fire type. They don't either set fire to their users or poison them with carbon monoxide.

I mentioned that one of the local political parties "employs" a chap to help the Brit community. Today he sent around information about legislation that says we need to fit a limiting device to the electric supply. Apparently this limiting device was supposed to be installed by January 2010 with the power companies having an obligation to send a letter informing us of that responsibility. Obviously we haven't received the letter but I suppose it will be on its way soon. I was vaguely aware of the legislation from some mumblings on the letters pages of the newspapers and from a conversation in a Spanish class but until the information today I hadn't checked the detail. Lots of Spanish houses have really miserable power supplies by UK standards. Our house, for instance has a contracted supply of about 2.2kw which means that the circuit breakers should pop when we plug in the 3kw electric kettle. They don't because when we moved into the place we had it rewired and...

A few years ago I used to take photos of houses and write the descriptions for an estate agency here in Spain. Often, if it were a house in the countryside, the sellers would tell me how they had spent loads of money on putting in piped water or connecting the house to the electricity grid. I had to be careful how I told them that all that money was irrecoverable. If they hadn't done it the house would have been worth less – off grid houses or with tanked rather than live water are less popular than the connected ones - but nobody pays extra because a house has electric and water. When you click the switch you expect the current to flow, when you open the tap there should be water. Utilities, like roofs, are things you expect in a house. There was a little piece on the Town Hall website the other day about improving the water supply to some little hamlet and there was a picture of the pipe. It wasn't a very big pipe maybe 6 or 7cms in diameter. It wasn't very high tech ...

The story of the replacement of the roof of our house is a long and soporific one. When we finally had the note from the architect last year to say the work was completed to his satisfaction we took it to the Town Hall. The paperwork was stamped. "Is that it, is it all done?" I asked. The Councillor who stamped the paperwork said it was all done. Our architect had said it was all done. But I didn't trust either of them. On the original notification of planning permission there was a clause to say that we needed a certificate of "First Habitation." Normally that's the certificate you apply for when you build a new house to show it's safe and to code and suchlike so you can get water and electric connected. We've lived in the house for five years so, obviously, it wasn't the first habitation of the house. "Right," said the chief chappie in the planning office, "you need a certificate of first habitation, well that's what ...

I'm sorry but I have to admit to enjoying Joyas sobre ruedas on the Discovery Channel - Wheeler dealers in its original. That interest explains why I asked after the hire car of a couple of friends visiting from the UK. The car had a late letter L registration - well under a year old - but it didn't have one of the emision badges or stickers on the windscreen. I mentioned this and, not surprisingly, our friends were completely in the dark about the badges. I explained. It's basically an emission thing. The idea is that electric cars, hybrids, newer petrol and diesel cars can get stickers whereas older petrol and diesel cars can't. The environmentally cleaner your motor and the fewer restrictions. The older and dirtier your car the sooner it will be forced off the road. I remembered the badges conversation when we were in Altea town centre. "Ah look, there'll be a badge on this car", I said, but there wasn't. I walked down a row of at least 50 parked ca...

Electric prices in Spain have just gone up. The overnight, low tarrif has been abolished. Bad news, but no, good news. Poor people with limited electricity supply no longer have to pay the standing charge. Electricity supply in the countryside in Spain is a bit hit and miss. Pinoso, the town, didn't get electric till 1974 and the supply was very limited. Most houses had supplies of just 1.1kw - enough for the lights but not for much more. Over the years of course the situation improved and the standard now is to have a supply of 5.5kw - still low by UK standards but useable enough. The cable that supplies power to our house isn't thick enough to carry 5.5kw and our contract is for just 2.2kw. The standing charge for the supply is based on the contracted power so we pay less for our 2.2kw than someone who has a contract for more. One of the changes with the new increased charges was that people who contracted less than 3.3kw would no longer have any standing charge at all. It lo...

The majority of the local taxes in Alicante are collected by an agency called SUMA. So the water bills, the rubbish collection, car road tax and the equivalent of the council tax all come from SUMA despite actually being set by the local Town Hall in Pinoso. SUMA, in my experience, is an efficient organisation. I pay most of my bills by "direct debit" and SUMA's notifications always come a couple of weeks before the due date reminding me to check that I have sufficient funds in the bank etc. So unlike the banks, phone company and electric people who just take the money on random dates often without notification (though to be fair the phone and electric people have improved recently) SUMA do it the correct way. So the other week a notification arrives that says that there has been a bit of a cock up on their part and that for some tax period they have either made an error in or forgotten a charge relating to sewerage and sewage charges. The language is the archaic stuf...

Artemio is a heavy set bloke who works for Pinoso Town Hall. Usually he has a big cigar clamped between his teeth. I'd prefer not to commit to giving him an age. He drives a Jeep which, he says, is much better than the Land Rover he used to have but, as you can see from the snap alongside, the Land Rover is still with the team. Artemio's  voice is raspy and, until the second or third sentence, when I tune in, I find him really difficult to understand. Artemio is the bloke you call if there is a water leak out in the street, or in our case, on the track. It's a 24 hour a day service. Should you ever need it the number is 656978410. If the leak is on the domestic side of the water meter then you need a plumber but if the leak is on the other side of the meter you call Artemio. Or rather you call his number. He's in charge of the team and he's not always the person who turns up. Most people expect that when they click the switch on the wall the electric light will co...