No staying power

There has been lots of press speculation about the King recently. A while ago he had some surgery. The doctors said they had removed a benign tumour but the cancer rumours persisted. The Palace said he was fine except that his hip and knee were a bit dodgy. Not unusual for a 73 year old, otherwise it was just the ailments of old age - "los achaques."  I thought that was an excellent word. It was a word I understood exactly.


Working on the principle that you're never too old to rock we went to see four bands last night. The event was called Ciclo Pop. One of Maggie's ex colleagues is the lead singer for a band called Aardvark Asteroid and the rest of the line up included Fuzzy White Casters, Arizona Baby and Sexy Sadie. Obviously we were keen to support James and his band but I'd wanted to see Arizona Baby for quite a while as well. Two birds with one stone. Even better the venue was only an hour or so from home.

It was a good venue, right in the middle of San Vicente del Raspeig, and the 11€ price tag was excellent for four bands. Nonetheless the crowd was pretty thin - two or three hundred people  maybe. The gig was late starting but we were perfectly fit as we watched James and the other Aardvarks and we were still well in the game for Arizona Baby. By then though the achaques were catching up. We older people have to empty our bladders reasonably frequently. We don't like those little cabin toilets. After 12 hours or so our contact lens had become unbearable. In my case too my mouth is a bit sore and I've had a mild if persistent stomach ache for the last three or four weeks too. The numbness that I get in my hands and feet was exacerbated by the chilly evening. Basically by 1.30am I was knackered and we still had to get home. So we bailed out and came home around 2am. We never saw Sexy Sadie.

Don Juan Carlos had his knee operation a couple of days ago. I'm sure if he'd been at Ciclo Pop he would have stayed the course.

Global trends

In Orihuela today, Palm Sunday, there were lots of people in town strolling about, chatting, having a bite to eat, listening to the brass band. There were fewer people at Burger King

Labels

One of my shorter pals had relatives who were horny handed sons of toil. Generation upon generation of farmers. They lived, as I recall, on the edge of the English Lake District. When the Ordnance Survey began to mark scenic viewpoints on their one inch maps (my long term memory is still fine) suddenly lots of cars began to pull up at the top of the farm lane to have a look see. The family turned this to their benefit by setting up a stall selling fresh eggs.

We were in Madrid for the weekend. We went on the AVE, the high speed train which, as usual, was on time both there and back. I only saw the indicated speed on the carriage displays once during the journey, a disappointing 296 kph. We stayed in some really nice hotel close to Alonso Martínez underground station. For some reason they gave us a junior suite with two washbasins, two tellies, a sofa and a king sized bed.

Straight off the train we dumped the bags and walked across the road to the Reina Sofia Museum - well museo in Spanish though it's a gallery not a museum for us. Four floors of culture. Although I've been to the gallery a couple of times, at least, in the past, it's years since I've actually been inside. We spent a couple of hours padding around the top two floors along with plenty of other people. There was no hustle and bustle. Lots of space and time to stop and stare. I was enjoying myself but my old feet and legs began to ache. We went for a sit down and a snack but, taken aback by the prices, we settled on a couple of overpriced drinks. We were generally overwhelmed by Madrid prices because of our hill-billy incomes but we got by anyway. The break though was fatal. We realised we were done for so we decided to have a look at Guernica (one must, mustn't one?) and then call it a day. There were a lot more people milling around that floor but there was no element of elbows or jostling; just maybe twenty people gazing in awe at Picasso's famous painting.

Next day and we did more wandering. Maggie was keen to see the Bosco exhibition, that's the bloke we call Hieronymus Bosch. He's a bit of a star in Spain partly because the Prado and Escorial have quite a lot of his work and partly because the paintings are bizarre. So we got in the shortish queue and waited for maybe twenty minutes to get some tickets for later in the day. It was about noon now and later in the day turned out to be quarter to seven. So we touristed away until the given hour and then joined the throng. This time it was a throng. People standing, apparently in raptures, ten centimetres from the surface of a painting and scrutinising the detail, lots of people laughing at the strange elements of the paintings, lots of barging, lots of gentle, art crowd, pushing. Museum staff were milling around to keep an eye on the punters and they were kept busy.

The strange thing is the last time we were at the Prado we went to have a look at the Boscos. That time there was nobody much around. There were a few of us but then it was similar, crowd wise, to having a look at the W. Eugene Smith photos in the Reina Sofia the day before. Not a lot of foot traffic, not a lot of scrutiny by the gallery staff and plenty of time to stand and stare.

My mind wandered to OS maps.

Smoke signals

There's quite a lot of stuff that I'm aware of because I'm English. Stuff like knowing that Belgravia and Chelsea are rich parts of London, that Trafalgar Square is the (English) place to be for New Year, that Land of Hope and Glory will get a lung bashing the Last Night of the Proms and that haddock is not the usual fish in fish and chips but it was where I grew up. One of the pleasures and pitfalls of living in a place you were not born is that the common knowledge in the new place will be different. I've mentioned this in blogs lots of times before. I find it interesting, otherwise why would I be in the least interested in the story of Suavina lip balm and why would I keep going on about how strange Spaniards find it that we drink hot drinks with food or think that cheese and onion sandwiches are normal?

Last month we stayed over in Alcoy during the weekend of their Modernista Fair. Modernista, modernism is something else that I'd never really heard of till I got here. I thought you might not know either so I went in search of the two-line definition so necessary for the TikTok or Instagram generation we've become. In fact, there wasn't an obvious one. Most of the descriptions were quite long so this is a cobbled-together attempt: Modernism is an international style of art, often referred to by its French name of Art Nouveau. It was popular from the 1890s through to the first decade or so of the 20th Century. Modernism embraced architecture and applied art, especially the decorative arts. It frequently incorporates natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and flowers. The style is often asymmetrical and although wood was widely used there was a tendency towards modern, industrial materials like cast iron, glass, ceramics and concrete. If you know any Gaudí stuff he was very Modernista.

So there we are, in Alcoy, amidst a slew of people dressed in "Edwardian" costume demanding the vote for women and dancing very lively dances wearing bowler hats and tailcoats. As we strolled we came across a stall promoting PAY-PAY (pronounced like the pie in pork pie - so it's pie pie) cigarette papers. To be honest I haven't really thought of cigarette papers since my student days when I used to carry around Rizla King Size just in case anyone asked and then felt that sharing was appropriate. I noticed the stall though and wondered if this was another example of "every day is a school day". True enough there's a bit of history.

It says, on the PAY-PAY website that PAY-PAY is the oldest cigarette paper in the world. The papers were first manufactured in 1764 in Alcoy from where they were exported to many countries, especially to Latin America, often in exchange for tobacco. That's why the stand at the Modernista fair in Alcoy. 

The thing is though that on the Rizla website, they say their story begins in 1532 when Pierre Lacroix traded some of his rolling paper in return for a bottle of Perigord champagne. They go on to say that over a hundred years later, after Pierre’s rolling paper had been passed down for generations within his family, high volume production began. For years, for ordinary people, pipes were probably the most common way to smoke tobacco and the most common form of tobacco was the powder that we'd now call snuff. Rich people smoked their tobacco leaf wrapped in other tobacco leaves - cigars. If you didn't have a pipe to hand and the craving came over you then smoking the powder in any old scrap of paper was the way to go. Rizla say that, when they introduced a dedicated, rice based rolling paper in the late 1880s it took the market by storm. 

I found another website too about the history of smoking and cigarette papers. There there were lots of photos of people surrounded by clouds of smoke, quite unlike the gentle fug from Golden Virginia or Samson. That website suggests that Rizla, Raw and Smoking were the first important rolling paper brands. There is no mention of PAY-PAY though the site does say that the original cigarette papers were called Spanish papers. Who knows; were the Spanish there first or was it the French Rizla people? Do we really care?

In fact, having read all the PAY-PAY history it turns out that all that remains of the original company is the name; a bit like the Chinese MG cars. It looked for a while as though PAY-PAY were claiming that they invented the cigarette paper booklet, the interleaved papers of an appropriate size for rolling a ciggy, because they talk about the invention as being that of a Dominican friar from Xátiva, which is very close to Alcoy, in 1815. They give the game away though by saying that the PAY-PAY workshop was just one of several in Alcoy making the interleaved papers and that PAY-PAY was a brand name for the Pascual Ivorra workshop. Apparently this bloke's marketing strategy was to print allegorical engravings, to tell a moralistic or Christian story, on the outside of the packets. Over time the packets were to bear a long series on the history of Spain and others on famous people and on customs, costumes and traditional sayings. If you're as old as me you're now thinking of those little cards that used to come with PG Tips and if you're even older maybe cigarette cards.

At the end of this the only thing worth remembering is that if you get sent for some Rizlas down at the local estanco and there aren't any you have a name in reserve - but remember, pie pie not pay pay.

Bring me pine logs hither

Around fifteen years ago, when Maggie and I finally set up home together, we bought a Christmas tree from Woolworths in Huntingdon. We still use the same tree. The lights, the sets of lights that burst into life yet again tonight, came the year after. The first set were very sensitive and gave up the ghost after their debut.

I was adamant about us buying a plastic tree. I wanted something that we would remember each year, something that would grow older and more threadbare along with us. I have fond memories of the tree I grew up with, the tree my dad and I decorated to celebrate the arrival of my new baby brother. I wanted something similar for us.

Whisky, like Nat King Cole, is a part of the ritual of decorating the Huntingdon tree. For years it was a decent malt but times are hard and it was Dewars tonight. Unfortunately driving and scotch don't mix which meant that the tree decorating, the official recognition of Christmas, had to wait until we'd been to see The Pinoso British Choir do their stuff in their annual carol concert in the Pinoso Parish Church.

I mentioned the British Choir a couple of years ago. Since then Spaniards and Brits have sung side by side at Christmas. This year a later date for the carol concert meant that several members of the British Choir would have been missing because of the call of family, turkey and sprouts. It looked as though there would be no British presence in the Parish Christmas celebrations The local priest was having none of that. He suggested a separate British concert. That's what we went to see tonight.

To be honest it wasn't the usual standing room only event in church but, nonetheless. there was a good mix of Spanish and British in the audience. The Priest made a good fist of speaking English and the English chap who spoke for the choir did a splendid job of speaking Spanish. The choir did really well. All through the concert I found myself grinning from ear to ear. It was excellent fun.

As we walked back to the car I asked Maggie if she thought I could use a phrase about the choir on this blog along the lines of "What they lacked in technique they made up for in heart." "Absolutely not," she said," I thought they did really well."

I agreed. So our Christmas has now begun.

A theory what I have

I was asked if I'd ever written a post about learning Spanish. To be honest I wasn't sure. Normally my blogs complain about my inability to construct an error free phrase, which Spanish people understand, rather than anything on the methodology. I had a quick search through the blog and I couldn't find anything specific. So, here it is but, before launching into it, I should say that there are tomes and tomes on the theory of learning languages. People who know how brains work have theories about how to learn languages or language acquisition in general. They know much more than me. They are right and I am wrong. This attempt is going to be, relatively, short. It will contain lots of generalisations and it's a personal and not a researched view. And, of course, you need to bear in mind that my Spanish is rubbish.

Learning a language is easy. The vast majority of children do it. The method is also pretty obvious. The children listen to the words and phrases. They grasp that there is an idea behind the word or phrase. Maybe it explains something, maybe it is to give a command or order or maybe it is to transmit information. They learn the words or phrases and then build on those to express their own questions and views on the world. Later they learn how to read and write.

So, one of my first beliefs about learning a language is that it is just one big memory task. Unless you know some words then you won't be able to speak, read, write or listen. You have to learn lots of words and lots of phrases. This is especially true of idiomatic expressions. I use an example with my English language learners. OK, let's get the lead out, let's get cracking and put this baby to bed. It makes sense to me but it would be a bugger to understand if I were Spanish. The Spaniards do the same. Simple combinations of ordinary words that have completely different meanings to the sense of any of the individual words that they are made up of. They are easy to overcome though, you just have to learn them. You'll know a method that works for you for learning things. It is not a fast process. Learning a language for most people takes thousands of hours.

It's not just knowing the words and phrases - it's saying them adequately enough so that they are understood. It doesn't take much to make a word incomprehensible. For instance a Spaniard, speaking English, once asked me for some un-irons. There was no context to help - the word was onions. We English have plenty of trouble with lots of sounds that are easy for Spaniards. I'm not talking about the ones we know are difficult like the double rr or the y that sounds like a throaty j. Take the letter o and the way that you just voiced it to yourself - like oh. So for our town, Pinoso, we tend to say pin-oh-so when the sound is more like pin-oss-oh. What seem like quite small mistakes to us make words incomprehensible to Spaniards who have been brought up with a language that ties the sound of the letters to the sound of the words. Spaniards have a systematic and almost unbreakable set of rules for speaking Spanish. That's why they have so much difficulty saying would, friends or soap. So that section in your Spanish books that gives you examples of how to say the letters and vowel combinations is really, really important.

There's another little aside to speaking a language that is the rhythm that a language has. Think of the way that Italians sing as they speak or how Australians stress the end of a sentence, the way Swedes sound like the chef from Sesame Street. We have a cadence to English that is confusing for Spaniards. English speakers need to try to mimic the Spanish rhythms and tones. Without doing that you're going to have a lot of trouble, for instance, asking a question. ¿Estás de acuerdo?

I'm not a big fan of grammar. The rules for most languages, other than Esperanto, came after the language existed. Google tells me that the first English dictionary was published in 1604, the year that the Hampton Court conference laid down the rules for the King James Bible. That means the language was pretty well established by then. The first decent English dictionary was Samuel Johnson's in 1755. That's the one that Baldrick mentions in Blackadder, the one without sausages in it. The grammar that gets reproduced in grammar books is a description of the way the language is used rather than the rules from which a language is constructed. A bit like the difference between Common Law, based on societal customs recognised and reinforced by the judicial system, and modern laws which are drafted in intricate detail. I can't deny that grammar is useful. I teach grammatical rules in English and you have to learn the basic rules of Spanish grammar if you are going to speak Spanish. You need to know how verb tenses work how genders agree and hundreds of other things but there is a point when the exceptions to grammar rules, in my opinion, make them almost useless. So, again in my opinion, there is good grammar, useful grammar, and almost useless grammar. In an English context think about Tesco and Sainsbury's who speak good English. Nonetheless, they used, in the past, to have ten items or less tills (countable nouns should use fewer) and McDonald's who also speak good English, say I'm loving it despite knowing that stative verbs aren't generally used in the continuous form. On the other hand the difference between the use of you're (you are) and your (belonging to you) is big grammar. Big grammar is something that Tesco or McDonalds can't play with. 

One of the areas of Spanish grammar that confounds most English speakers is the subjunctive. Old people, like me, still use the subjunctive in English from time to time - it is important that he learn the rules or I wish it were sunny - but the form is definitely on the way out. On the other hand it is very much alive and well in Spanish. The rule says something like the subjunctive is used when the meaning of the main clause makes the events described in the subordinate clause "unreal" i.e. not known to be a reality at the time of the sentence. So, for instance if you see a T shirt with a picture of Kurt Cobain on it in a shop window and go into the shop and say that you want the T shirt with the picture of Kurt on it you use the indicative but if you're not sure that the shop has a T shirt with said picture then you have to use the subjunctive - busco la camiseta que lleva una foto de Kurt (you're sure such a shirt exists, indicative) and busco una camiseta que lleve una foto de Kurt (the shirt may or may not exist so you use the subjunctive). Now you tell me that any ordinary person learning Spanish is going to be able to work that out from first principles in the heat of the confusion of trying to construct a sentence and buy a shirt and I'll be happy to call you a liar. On the other hand most subjunctives come after little set phrases - es posible que - for instance, is followed by a subjunctive as are hundreds of others. If you're willing to slog it out and learn all those little introductory phrases then you will get the subjunctive right as often as most Spaniards. We're back to memorising the language.

So, my advice on grammar is to learn the stuff that you use in nearly every sentence you would ever use. Learn how to use articles, adjectives, adverbs, how to decline verbs and, indeed, learn as much grammar as you like and as you possibly can but, as soon as it seems to be becoming too esoteric, fall back on how children learn language and learn some phrases as the basis for other similar phrases.

Something else I would recommend is that you read things in Spanish and listen to things in Spanish. Spaniards and Britons do not use the same language to express the same idea. What the language learner is after is how to express what they want to say. Most Britons can say "good morning" in Spanish but if they were to overthink it then they're actually saying goods days - "buenos días". I sometimes despair when a fellow Briton is complaining about a Spanish waiter asking "¿Qué te pongo?" because, the Briton says, that the phrase means "What I put you?" Alright, the first definition of poner in the Spanish-English dictionary may be put but it's not the only one and, for heaven's sake, the question is obvious enough. Consider that the idea is "what do you want?" or "what can I get you?" even though there aren't a lot of directly translatable words in the phrase.

Just to finish off here are some disconnected jottings in no particular order and mainly for people living in Spain. I like classes because, once you've signed up, you feel you have to go. The people who employ me in Pinoso at Academia 10 would be very happy to sell you a class. Text books, learn Spanish type text books, vary in quality but most of the modern ones I've seen are pretty good. In Pinoso there is an intercambio session - half an hour of Spanish in return for half an hour of English every Monday evening from 8.30 at the Coliseum in Constitución. Talking to yourself is good because you realise the words you can't pronounce and you can often hear yourself making mistakes. Describing things as you walk around might help. Reading things like signs and number plates as you do the shopping is simple and easy. Five words or phrases at a time rather than the first two pages of your new vocabulary book. Start by watching TV ads rather than feature films. If you like reading Mills and Boone better the Spanish equivalent than starting with Episodios nacionales. Maybe set your phone or Tom Tom to Spanish rather than English. And a long etcetera.

With no added preservatives

I went to have a quick look at the tanganilla competition in Culebrón this morning as part of the weekend long fiesta. Tanganilla, I think, also goes by the name of caliche, hito, bolinche and chito and there seem to be variations of it all over Spain.

Tanganilla isn't a difficult game to organise. A line in the dirt, a 10cm high (or thereabouts) wooden rod and some 7cm across (or thereabouts) metal discs plus some players - maybe a referee. The rod is set up about 20 metres from the line - I understand that one of the variations, and there are lots, says that the distance is 22 strides. Isn't that the length of a cricket pitch? The basic idea is to knock over the rod but from watching there seemed to be other rules about how close the thrown discs were to the fallen rod. Amongst the many regional variations a common one seems to involve placing a coin on top of the rod and then measuring the distance of the discs from the coin once it has been knocked off the rod. Dead easy and complicated at the same time - like pétanque or crown green bowling. I thought that the game was one of the innovations of last year's fiesta but a reader of the blog put me right - apparently it was a feature of fiestas in the past. The reader reckons it disappeared in 2008 or 2009. Obviously as my gut expands my memory shrinks because I don't remember having seen the game in the village before. If innovation isn't correct then revival is and I thought it was a good thing. A traditional game, no cost a bit of fun plus an easy opportunity to drink beer.

The other day in my English class, where I nearly always start off with any sort of Q&A session, to get everybody warmed up, I asked about fast food. Do you prefer burgers, pizza or kebabs? What's your favourite fast food? blah, blah. It's not the first time I've asked similar questions. When someone answers hamburgers I then ask whether they prefer McDonald's, Burger King, Fosters Hollywood, TGB and so on. Then I ask what they order?, what side order?, what drink?, diet or standard? But it didn't go that way with my Pinoso students. They liked burgers OK but they liked the ones from the local butchers or the ones that their Gran makes. It's the first time that I've asked the series of questions outside of a reasonably big town. The Pinoseros were re-assuringly dismissive of the floppy, semi warm burgers that the chains have a tendency to serve up. It was particularly re-assuring because Maggie and I have been shocked recently to see the queues of traffic waiting in the Drive Thru lane at the McDonald's in Petrer as we leave the cinema. Spaniards tend to like and enjoy food and it seems strange that they would queue for burgers.

I suppose the difference is that Petrer, or the side by side towns of Elda and Petrer, have a population of about 90,000 - somewhat larger than the fewer than 8,000 of Pinoso. Tanganilla and home made burgers - symbols of a rural idyll?

Zilch, nada

I was trying to think of what to write. I wondered about something on having to wear masks in public. I thought about the slight loosening of restrictions - being able to get a beer outside a bar or go into a shop. Neither smacked of Herodotus nor even of Stephen King. And the message has all been a bit mixed up too; freer movement promised to people living in small towns, announced last weekend, still hasn't been enacted.

Next I considered the political argy bargy. I have been thoroughly appalled at the way that the opposition parties have been trying to make political capital out of the continuance, or not, of the state of alarm, the constitutional state which allows for a "unified command". Then it turned out that our President had done a secret deal with a political party that has a dodgy, terrorist, background, and kept it from his colleagues. Bang went the moral high ground.

What about the unrest on the streets, the people banging pots and pans to protest about the perceived government mishandling of the situation? To be honest that's not much of a story really. If you've been locked up in your house for going on three months, if the promised government "temporary dole" hasn't materialised and your mortgage is unpaid and everything you like to do has been scrubbed then it doesn't take much of a social media campaign to get a few hundred or even a few thousand people on the streets to moan and groan.

I wondered if there was something in the uncivic attitude of quite a lot of people. I think anti social would be the translation but uncivic seems so much more descriptive. We've spent all this time locked up to find tons of young people flouting the rules and cramming into bars and having beach parties because they're fed up of not being able to. That's not either interesting or particularly Spain related though is it?

What about working with my sources of outside stimulus? The books I've read or the stuff I'm watching on Netflix and Filmin? What about all the podcasts that I'm still listening to? Maybe there's something about the street Spanish I've been picking up from those sources. Boring - and I've done it before. I will though, thanks to the Netflix series Valeria, be off to Madrid as soon as they let me. The city really just looks so brill and what's that beer they drink all the time?

I considered the, hugely commented, Twitter post where someone, presumably British, said they'd made a Spanish omelette. This is one of those things where the failure of two nations to understand the other is a simple failure of translation. Spaniards think that the thick egg omelette with lots of veg., that Brits call Spanish omelette, is a blasphemous recreation of the Spanish tortilla de patatas. Mistreating the tortilla de patatas is nearly as bad, in Spanish eyes, as overcooked rice with things being described by foreigners as a paella. But I realised that unless you live here the fuss about recipes would almost certainly seem like time wasted.

So, nothing then, none of them would make a decent blog. Bother!

Walking with sheep

UNESCO produces a list of things of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Flamenco is on the list, so are baguettes. 

Dry Stone walling is on the list too - it got there after flamenco but before baguettes. You may think a blog about dry stone walling could be a bit "dry" but if the UN says that dry stone is one of things that makes all our lives richer then I think it's incumbent on us to believe them.

Dry stone involves building things with stones that are not bound together with mortar. The things don't fall down because the stones are naturally interlocked or because of the use of load bearing structures. Dry stone techniques use rough, field, stones. So, for instance, Inca temples built without mortar but with dressed stone are not considered to be dry stone structures. Wherever you come from I'm sure you know dry stone structures. 

Dry stone is most commonly used to build boundary walls but the technique can be used to construct anything from a way marker to a corral or a building. Around here the terraces (bancales in Spanish) are bounded by and held up by dry stone walls called ribazos. It's usually assumed (partly because they were responsible for so many agricultural improvements) that the bancales and ribazos, were built by the descendants of the North Africans, the Moors, who invaded Spain in the 8th Century. The problem is that field terraces use the local earth and field stones so that it's tricky to say whether they were built last year, last century or last millennium. Accurate dating of the terraces requires archaeological excavation. It turns out that the oldest terraces around here are Bronze Age, lots more are Moorish but the majority were actually built in the last three centuries.

The use of the bancales also varies. We logically assume, quite rightly, that terraces make hillsides easier to farm, and reduce the amount of soil carried away during torrential downpours. There are, though, other reasons for levelling the land. For instance, in this province, archaeologists have found that some of the Bronze age terraces were constructed as defensible positions to protect herds and flocks of animals as they were moved from pasture to pasture. This system of moving animals from higher to lower ground, from winter to summer pasture, is called transhumance. 

Transhumance has always been important in Spain, more important in some parts than others. In the 13th Century Alfonso X, the Spanish king, defined a series of tracks and routes and a whole load of rules and regulations to stop conflicts between the nomadic herders and more settled farmers. The rules defined the characteristics of overnight resting places, widths of the tracks etc. It's these ancient rights that still protect these paths as public spaces today. At their height, there were over 125,000 kms of tracks in Spain.

One of the reasons for the importance of transhumance was that, from the 15th to the 19th Century, Spain had a monopoly on merino wool. All that time the wool trade brought enormous wealth to Spain. It's usually the explanation behind huge houses in now almost abandoned villages. The fine merino wool was the best material, at the time, for making high value clothing like underwear and stockings. That monopoly was broken when the Spanish royals gave gifts of herds of sheep to their royal relatives in other countries. Also, around the same time, both the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon recognised the economic potential of the sheep and sent a few home as their armies battled it out in the Spanish Peninsular War. The Australian merino flocks are descended from that looted Spanish stock.

The tracks the animals move along are called vías pecuarias, cañadas and the big wide ones, the ones that have to be 75 metres wide, Cañadas Reales (Royal droves). In this area the big tracks are also called veredas. One of the most important routes that comes through Pinoso is the Vereda de los Serranos which starts up near Cuenca and goes on to Jaen. There are lots of branch tracks (just like our motorways, trunk roads and local roads). Most of the animals passing through Pinoso were headed for the coast around Cartagena.

In this area there is another link between dry stone and transhumance as well as ancient terraces. Field stones were used to build shelters, stone sheds, called cucos. They could be used by farm labourers at busy times to save travelling time and also for shepherds and drovers passing by on those rural rights of way. 

If you're local and you haven't seen them there are lots of cucos to the left of the road that runs from the Yecla Road down to Lel in the area called el Toscar and there are more alongside the road from Lel towards Ubeda - there are others in various places but these are easy to see from the road. Monóvar has the dry stone mapped out on this link and every now and again Pinoso and Jumilla Tourist offices do something about their dry stone.

Spanish stereotypes

In the last post about Albacete I mentioned an exercise I use with my students as a conversation starter. It's not my piece, I took it from a Spanish source and translated it into English.

I disagree with a couple of them, I don't whoeheartedly agree with lots of them and I don't actually know what a couple are getting at. But it's an easy post and I rather suspect that at least one of my readers - that sounds posh doesn't it? - will have a response.

Spain: bulls, guitars and flouncy skirts

This is how tourist guides, written in France, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and Russia describe Spain. The old image of bulls and castanets may have disappeared but are these new generalisations any more accurate?

What do you think?

1 Spain is the European country where the fewest number of newspapers are read and where the most popular newspaper deals only with sport.

2 Spain is a desert for vegetarians and a place where ham is considered to be part of a vegetarian diet.

3 Spain isn't all sun but then again everything is conditioned by the sun.

4 It's the place where breakfast in a bar includes a shot of the hard stuff alongside a coffee.

5 Spain is a country where almost nobody gets drunk in public.

6 Where chocolate is sweet and thick.

7 In Spain body hair on women, particularly underarm or on the legs, is socially unacceptable.

8 Where everything, or almost everything, closes down for the afternoon.

9 Where people parade from bar to bar greeting friends and eating tapas before having dinner.

10 RENFE trains are clean and efficient.

11 Where pedestrians are terrorised by motorists at every junction and every zebra crossing.

12 Where life begins as the rest of Europe dons its pyjamas.

13 Where restaurants still sell a bottle of drinkable plonk for 5€.

14 Where crossing yourself and calling on God is still an everyday part of many transactions.

15 It may be Europe but Spaniards aren't Europeans.

16 Where the toilets are clean but never have toilet paper.

17 A country where it's dangerous to get involved in chit chat.

18 Where everyone is criticised - except for the King.

19 A country whose past is marked by hunger and famine.

20 A country that has no cuisine to speak of.

Starting and finishing

Many years ago, as tourists in Havana, we were shown the Cuban "kilometre zero" - the point from which all distances to and from Havana are measured. I remember being treated as an idiot when I asked how you would know where the other end of the line would be. Maggie added her scorn to that of the guide.

True enough you can measure to a point form any other point but where do you measure from? The roadsigns say, for instance, 70 miles to London but to where in London? - Westminster Abbey maybe - and if so the door or the altar - or it could be Buckingham Palace or, perhaps, The House of Commons. Apparently, in London, it's to the statue of King Charles I on the South side of Trafalgar Square.

In Madrid it's very obvious. Tourists queue to have their pictures taken standing on or near the Km0 point in the Puerta del Sol. And, yesterday, in Murcia I was shown the point to which all distances to and from Murcia are measured.

So, Cuban tourist guide, I can work out how far it is from London, Murcia or Madrid to Havana but can you tell me how far it is to Culebrón from Havana if you're so smart?

Sent to sleep

There was a time when every Spanish film was about the Spanish Civil War, usually about the aftermath and the rough handling of the losers by the nasty winners. Fortunately that has changed nowadays and we get a good spread plots and genres.

Most Spanish films are made with TV money and with subsidies from film funds. This means that they look a bit like those BBC funded films, quite modest in scale, with production values that betray their small screen destinations. If they have a historical theme (and lots do) they are nearly always shot in a sort of muddy brown colour and use the Spanish equivalent of thou to prove their authenticity. Obviously they are voiced in Spanish or, to be more accurate, Castilian. Actually, unless you're in one of the big cities it's nearly impossible to find a film in its original language - everything gets dubbed into Castilian. Colin Firth, King George VI or el Rey Jorge VI has a nice Madrid accent.

The Goyas are the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars. There were plenty of decent nominations this year in genre as diverse as horror, social drama, black comedy and historical. They were presented the same night as the BAFTAs and, as in the UK, one film swept the board. It was a Catalan film called Pa Negre - Black Bread. The theme was the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. One of the interesting things about it was that it was voiced in Catalan with Castilian subtitles.

We had our doubts; the Civil War- hmm? But nine Goyas; it just had to be good and with the bonus that Castilian subtitles would make it dead easy to understand. It wasn't in Catalan by the time we saw it this afternoon, dubbed just like all the rest of the foreign films. And tedious. Tedious as they come. Obviously the theme had to be grim, the film colouring sombre and everyone had to live in filthy unheated hovels. There had to be Guardia Civil with capes and tricorn hats and if there wasn't a gay character then how could it be true to life? Film making by cliché. Actually I could be wrong, I had great difficulty understanding the dialogue and I couldn't tell one raggedy haired person from the next so I slept through a good part of it. Maybe it was a cinematic milestone after all.

There's nowt on t' telly

I was just on the phone to my mum. She told me her news. And what have you been up to she asked. Nothing much I said, a bit of gardening, a bit of preparation for my classes. Oh, and I've seen four concerts and I've visited the largest quarry in Europe and been on a bodega tour. I could have listed the things that I've missed too.

When I went to see the Excitements at the Yecla Jazz Festival last night I could have gone to a homage to the poet Miguel Hernandez in Pinoso instead, When I went to see Viva Suecia last Friday I could have chosen to  stay in Pinoso and see the Catalan singer songwriter Cesk Freixas. Indeed just thinking about the events that we've been to in the past couple of weeks, not including going to the cinema a couple of times, we've been to a photo exhibition, missed another poetry event because of the torrential downpour, missed the dressage event at the local riding school plus some event featuring folk dancers and traditional Valencian instruments because we were away for the weekend in Altea. Mind you whilst we were away we saw the local Moors and Christians Festival, oh, and on the way back we stopped off to see the display of banners in Monóvar to celebrate the life and works of Azorín. For this weekend I've not got much in my diary - there's a Roman market all weekend in Petrer and another photo exhibition and, of course, the Yecla Jazz Festival is still on. Next week Maldita Nerea, another band that have regular hits in the top 40, are on, for free, in Petrer as part of their fiestas and down in Murcia there's the Big Up music festival. Just to show that it isn't all music in the rest of the month there's a whole series of talks about recent Spanish history, a couple of book launches, two theatre productions, a bit of lyric opera and a couple of events for Halloween including itinerant story tellers in Pinoso. Pinoso has a population of 8,000.

I wasn't writing the list to show off where we've been but more to stress the "cultural" offer that there is in our local towns. The truth is that I tend to be a bit of a collector of events. The Internet brings me news from all the local town halls and I follow up on the titbits of information I hear on the radio or see in the press but I miss more than I get to see. What suddenly struck me about all these things was how available they are.

We went with some chums to see the first of the Yecla Jazz concerts. They are staged in a lovely end of the Nineteenth Century theatre - all red brocade and gilt. The compere is a radio DJ from the national station Radio 3 and the musicians whilst not been exactly superstars are all well above the run of the mill. It can't be a cheap event to mount. Our pals were bowled over by the setting and by the fact that the concert was free. Also in Yecla, but this time as a part of the September Fair, we went to see Fangoria. The lead singer of the band is a woman called Alaska. She is Mexican by birth, I think, but she's been a star in Spain since the mid 1970s. Alaska and Fangoria will not be a cheap band. This isn't like seeing a band who are unknown to anyone who doesn't have wrinkles and grey, or no, hair.  It's more like seeing The Pet Shop Boys or Tom Jones - someone who has been around forever and who may be past their heyday but who are still big. Fangoria were free too. A few days later I went to see Viva Suecia; this lot are an indie band but they are a band tipped for greater success. The sort of band that, in the UK, would have got a lot of airplay on the late evening and nighttime Radio 1 shows when I lived in the UK but may well be on Radio 6 nowadays. Free again. In fact from all the list above the only paying events would be the cinema.

The cultural offer in Spain is wide and varied and, even when it's to be paid for, it is usually pretty inexpensive. The arts market took a bit of a pounding when the ruling PP party jacked up the VAT rate on cultural events but, as a bit of an example, I just looked how much the three day VIP ticket for the Low festival in Benidorm would be and the answer is 40€ though that is a special "you're paying ages in advance without knowing what the bands will be" ticket and last year the Low Festival didn't drag in many big name foreign bands though they did have 75 bands and lots of them were big on the Spanish scene. Down in Cartagena at el Batel if you want to go and see Sleeping Beauty by the Russian National Ballet the cheapest tickets are 18€ and the most expensive 30€. In Murcia, at the Teatro Romea the best seats for the regional orchestra doing Beethoven's 9th are a whopping 20€. It's not so cheap in Madrid; to see the Lion King for instance you'd pay 96€ for the best seats but that's still a bit cheaper than the £129.50 for the same show in London on the same day.

Not a bad offer though for anyone who's a bit bored with what's on the telly. New series of The Big Bang Theory on Sunday though.

Singing along

I heard a news item that said that someone had died. The name sounded, on first hearing, to be Mujica but in fact it was Múgica. The first, José Alberto "Pepe" Mujica, is an ex Uruguayan president, who has YouTube video after video overflowing with avuncular socialist wisdom and the other is Enrique Múgica Herzog who was, in Francoist times and during the transition, an important Spanish politician. The Uruguayan I knew in the same way as one knows Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela or Steve Jobs. The Spaniard I didn't know at all.

I've mentioned a pal who lives in el Cantón, a small village just over the border into Murcia, a couple of times in the last few blogs. His village seems to be being pretty "solidario" at the moment and they've made a couple of videos; the together, as a team, we can win sort of videos. One of the clips, the second part of the video, shows people from the village singing along to Resistiré, a song from the 80s which has become a familiar song again, all over Spain, in the past few weeks. It's a Spanish version of the Gloria Gaynor song "I will survive". It was originally done by the Dúo Dinámico (Dynamic Duo) with similar sentiments but completely different lyrics to the original - When I lose every game, when I sleep with loneliness..., I'll stand firm, like the reed that bends but doesn't break. It scans better in Spanish but, even then, it is not something that Lope de la Vega would be proud to have written. Now I know Resistiré, no idea why but I do. My pal in el Cantón didn't so whilst everyone else sang along as they clapped along he was participating from a different starting point.

When we first came to Spain we used to buy an English language newspaper called the Costa Blanca news. There was a small section on the weeks Spanish headlines. I remember carefully writing down the names of the politicians mentioned in that roundup trying to get up to speed with my new home. I still try to keep up to date but I've never been good with remembering people and I seem to be finding it more and more difficult to assimilate Spanish names. For instance there's a power struggle going on within the managing board of Barcelona F.C. at the moment. A new president has to be elected soon and it looks as though the "crown prince" has turned on the present boss and, amidst allegations of corruption, resigned and taken other committee members with him. The first two names are the important ones but look at this lot - Josep Maria Bartomeu, Emili Rousaud, Enrique Tombas, Silvio Elías, Josep Pont, Maria Teixidor and Jordi Calsamiglia. How does someone brought up on names like Jackie Charlton, Margaret Thatcher and George Alagiah deal with remembering names like those?

The cultural stuff. The Resistiré type song is even more difficult. I can have a crack at remembering the names of people in the news because I have a source but think of the of the tunes that make up your own musical knowledge. You can sing along to I Will Survive, Someone You Loved, Wonderwall, The Magnificent Seven, The Long and Winding Road and another zillion songs. You know another how many actors? And writers? And celebs? The learning of a lifetime.

It's a complicated business recognising a name or being able to sing along.

Fighting for a parking spot

Saturday morning in Pinoso – parking at a premium; nothing in Calle Lepanto, Trafalgar or Bailén. Hmm? Now there's a theme. The streets are named for battles. I did a bit of checking. Nearly 400 battles were listed as important in Spanish history with sixteen as absolutely key. With the limited space available my choice has been a little arbitrary.

Skipping chronologically over Guadalete, Covadonga, Navas de Tolosa and Ceriñola we arrive at the Battle of Otumba in 1520. This was the one where Hernán Cortés crushed the Aztec Empire and opened the way to the conquest of what is now Mexico. He did it with the help of lots of locals but let's pretend, as Spaniards often do, that Hernán, his horses and a few lads from Extremadura did it alone.

So we ignore Pavia and San Quintín and move on to Lepanto in 1571. This was a naval battle between the Turkish Ottoman Empire and an alliance of Christian powers sponsored by the Spanish King. Cervantes, the writer of Don Quixote, was there and he was wounded – fortunately in his left hand, not the one he wrote with. Lepanto was fought off the coast of Greece. The Ottomans lost which halted Turkish expansion and established Spain as a naval power.

No space for the Battles of Rocroi or Villaviviciosa but I can't miss out Almansa. After all Almansa is only fifty minutes from home. This was a battle fought in 1707 as part of the Spanish War of Succession between the French backed Bourbons and the Austrian backed Hapsburgs with Spaniards on both sides. In the battle the Duke of Berwick, the illegitimate son of James II of England serving in the French Army, beat the French Henri de Massue, leading British troops. In fact we Britons backed the losing side, the Hapsburgs, but it was a good war for us. The treaty of Utrecht, signed at the end of the war, gave us Gibraltar.

Next up is Trafalgar and unless you were asleep when they did this at school you know about Nelson taking apart a combined fleet of French and Spanish ships but dying in the process. It was fought off the coast of Cádiz in1805 and basically after Nelson's first onslaught the French ran away leaving the Spanish fleet to be smashed to smithereens. It was the end of Spanish naval power and the battle was hugely influential in the future of Europe and Spain's American possessions.

By the time that the Battle of Bailén was fought in 1809 the Spanish had joined the British against Napoleon's French in what we call the Peninsular War. This was the start of Wellington's campaigns all the way to Waterloo. Completely against the grain a Spanish Army, commanded by General Castaños, beat a French Army in direct battle. It was the first time that Napoleon's Grande Armée had been beaten. By the way it was at this time that the Spaniards invented Guerrilla warfare, attack and run. Guerrilla means little war.

No space for the battle of Ayacucho in Peru in 1824 when the Spanish lost control of mainland America or for the 1898 naval battle of Santiago de Cuba when the Spanish fleet was pulverized by the U.S Navy. The Spanish lost Cuba (and the Philippines) their last American possessions as a result.

The last battle on my list, the 1938 Battle of the Ebro was the bloodiest and longest battle of the Spanish Civil war. The Nationalist victory put paid to the Republic and paved the way for the next 37 years of dictatorial government in Spain.

Shops, shopping and clicking

First my habitual opening diversion. Over the years there has been a fair bit of controversy from time to time about the skin colour of the actors who interpret Othello in the Shakespeare play. You probably know that the full title is The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. Moor, from Blackamoor is an outdated and offensive term to describe a Black African or other person with dark skin. In Spain the word moro is the direct equivalent of moor. It's used to describe dark skinned people, usually people from North Africa: Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans and Sahrawis. As with other, similar, words its use can be racist or not. Generally though, for most Spaniards, moro is just a descriptor, like the use of Eastern European, Whilst the media shy away from the word ordinary people don't. I haven't heard many suggestions of a name change for the Moros y Cristianos events though there are plenty of concerns about white people blacking up during those, and other, events.

Over in Petrer there is a shopping centre. Until recently it was called Bassa el Moro; Bassa the Moor. The  reason for such an odd name is that the shopping centre stands on the site where Bassa surrendered Petrer Castle to the Christian King Jaume I in 1265. The shopping centre recently changed name. It's now Dynamia. When I saw the name I immediately imagined some muscled bloke wearing his purple underpants over his tights but I'm sure the idea was to try and give a new image to the shopping centre which has been a white elephant for years. We used to go there quite a lot because it was home to our preferred cinema but then the cinema closed. We popped in the other day just to have a look at the new paintwork. It was sad. The place has almost no open shops. The cafes and restaurants have closed. Good luck to the new owners on revitalising it though it seems to be generally accepted that physical shops are in decline as we increasingly shop from our phones. The obvious problems of the Dynamia shopping centre made me think there may be a blog about the current situation of other local developments.

In broad stroke I suppose it's fair to say that shopping malls, the shopping centres where lots of individual retailers cluster together in purpose built buildings, are a 20th Century phenomena while department stores, one retailer building a big store with separate areas for separate types of goods, are more 19th Century in origin. I notice that the Burlington Arcade now advertises itself as the original department store so perhaps my homespun definitions aren't correct. Nonetheless it is true that department stores are having a tough time. Here in Spain the near legendary Corte Inglés, a quintessential part of Spanish city life, is struggling, laying people off and closing stores very much like John Lewis and Debenhams in the UK. This ties in with the idea that physical shops are now an outdated concept and that online sales are the way to go. We were in a shopping centre in Elche just a few hours ago though and, given that we are talking about Wednesday afternoon shopping, it looked to me as though lots of people haven't heard that they should be buying online.

Normally we venture into shopping centres because we are going to the cinema but from time to time we do go specifically to buy things. The one I like best, because it's big and because it has a bookshop, is probably Nueva Condomina which is over the border into Murcia. I think that the buildings were originally owned by the supermarket chain Eroski but they got into a lot of trouble with property speculation and sold the centre on a while ago. The last time we were there, over a year ago now because of the travel restrictions, it was still doing well with lots of bag laden shoppers, queues outside the cinema and a wait to get into the fast food cafes and restaurants. 

The other centre we tend to use, for shopping, is the Aljub in Elche; that's where we were this afternoon at the cinema. It's not a particularly big centre and I think that it's main attraction for us is that it's the closest to home and the easiest to get to. Again it was Eroski owned but they hung on in this one by reducing the size of their store so that other shops could open in the freed up space.

If those two seem to be doing OK the shopping centre almost literally across the road from the Nueva Condomina in Murcia, the Thader Centre, is dying on its feet. Every time we pop in there are more and more empty units. Probably it's saving grace is that it's home to one of the successful low price supermarket chains, Alcampo, and on the same site there is IKEA which seems to have some sort of fatal attraction for any number of people. It's the same story at the Puerta de Alicante centre which is, obviously enough, in Alicante. There even the shops opposite the string of tills in the Carrefour hypermarket are unlet but, just across town, the Plaza Mar 2 centre in Alicante seems to be doing OK. It could be because it's more central, it could be because the tram stops there or it could again, be the lure of Alcampo. Whatever it is the last time we were there, at the end of December, the Christmas shoppers were knocking us aside with gleeful abandon in their shopping frenzy. Of course personal perceptions can be wildly misleading. Busy does not, necessarily, mean profitable and it could be that we only ever see the places at their best but it certainly appears that there are big differences between the different developments.

While big shopping centres and online shopping are right enough we've been trying to do that shop local thing recently and I must say that whilst it might be more efficient getting stuff online from Amazon or in the flesh from a series of shops in the same space the service you get from our local shops can be much more uplifting and personal.

Drawing to a close

As I remember it, In England, Christmas gets off the ground just after the schools start back in September. Nothing frantic but there are unmistakable signs. Displays of trees in John Lewis, re-organisation of the display stands in Clinton's cards. It builds to a crescendo as the 25th approaches. Then a couple of family meals, too much drink, some tedious board games, the DFS 9am Boxing Day Sale and, although you may still be off work, Christmas is over.

In Spain it's different. My sister tells me that in Tenerife there was Christmas all over the place in November but, generally, in most places in Spain, you could miss any signs until December is well under way. Here in Pinoso, for instance, the Christmas lights weren't turned on till the 10th of December. Schools break up a couple of days before Christmas Eve. Families get together on the 24th and 25th echoing that yo-yoing between his and her families of Christmas day and Boxing day in the UK on alternate years. I know, by the way, that times have changed and that not all families are his and hers and that not everyone, even in Western Europe, celebrates Christmas but you'll just have to play along with me here. It is my blog after all.

But Christmas isn't over here. New Year's is also very much part of Christmas and people will be wishing you Felices Fiestas or Feliz Navidad until it becomes Feliz Año (Happy New Year). Then it, sort of, goes back to being Christmas. In fact it builds to a crescendo because, if Christmas really is about the children, then today and tomorrow are the big days.

The pages (servant pages, not pieces of paper pages) have been out all over the country collecting the letters from good boys and girls for the The Three Kings or, as we tend to say, the Three Wise Men. The Kings are the gift givers, working overnight on the 5th January, in much the same way as Father Christmas brought me that orange bulldozer. The Kings as present deliverers has a certain biblical logic given that they turned up in Bethlehem with gold, frankincense and myrrh. In about an hour, they will be parading through city streets all over Spain.

I'm racing with the post a bit. We're staying local this time and going to the cabalgata, the cavalcade, on home turf, in Pinoso. We'd wondered about going to Alcoi (the oldest parade in Spain where the Kings ride in the "wrong" order and where the King's helpers carry ladders to scale balconies to leave presents) or to Elche or Murcia, where the parades are a bit grander, but no. Local it is.

On the telly none of the reporters give the game away. The myth is maintained by hard bitten journalists who explain that the reason there are so many Kings in so many places is because of their magic powers. Children with squeaky voices are interviewed about their gift choices - I want a Nancy, I want a hatchimal - or reading out their wishes that none of the children of the world go hungry. Later tonight on the TV news there will be reports of Kings in helicopters, in boats, on elephants. The shops are still open for those last minute gifts and they will be in Madrid, Barcelona and the like till 10 this evening.

You think it's all over. Well not quite yet.

Teatro Chapí

We went to see a Tango show at the Chapí theatre in Villena on Saturday. Tangos, of course, are Argentinian but, because they are sung in Spanish, they seem to have a sort of Honorary Spanish status. Maybe its a bit like the way we Brits don't consider Hollywood films to be foreign.

The theatre is named for a mid 19th century composer called Ruperto Chapí who was born in Villena. He became famous as a writer of Zarzuelas which are a sort of play and light opera mix with a bit of dancing thrown in for good measure.

I thought the theatre looked "Edwardian", though it was finished in 1924 which would make it George the Fifthian if it had been built in the UK. The Spanish King of the time was Alfonso XIIIth.

The Tango show was pretty good and it was a charity do for the local version of Gamblers Anonymous.

Saleing away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saying nothing

Two or three people have expressed surprise that I haven't written anything about Catalonia. There are a couple of reasons. One is that, in general, this blog is about what happens to us, the things we experience, and, apart from a couple of conversations and listening to the radio or watching the telly, I have no direct experience of what's happening in Catalonia. I also have to admit to having had a couple of disagreeable experiences in Catalonia, because I was a foreigner, and I am probably a touch anti Catalan. That's not a good starting point for a post.

To some tiny degree there is a bit of a reflection of Catalonia in the region in which I live, in Valencia. Valenciano, the local language, and Catalan are similar enough that if I use the Catalan version of Google translate on any items written in Valenciano the translation is at least as good as it is from Spanish to English. Lots of the sources of information I use are turning more and more to Valenciano. I've tried, and I continue to try, to learn Spanish to fit in to my adopted home and I sometimes feel that someone is trying to take that possibility away from me. Going into a restaurant in Barcelona the only menu they were willing offer was in Catalan. The restaurant was saying quite clearly that non Catalans were unwelcome. We took the hint and left. My local town hall producing a magazine or an event programme in Valenciano transmits the same message.

Catalonia was a stronghold for the Republic in the Spanish Civil war and Franco made sure that the Catalans paid for that for the rest of his life. Grandparents who were involved, parents who remembered and today's younger generations of Catalans were shaped by that repression. The feeling in Barcelona that Madrid has it in for them was, and is, a constant in daily life.

Politics in Catalonia for the last several years has been a shifting ground of political parties with the same faces but changing party names. There was an earlier referendum in 2014. That process ran into legal problems, a stand off between the central and local government. As a result of that failed referendum regional elections were held with the clear intention of showing that there was popular support for independence. The politicians who had fomented the referendum lost ground. The only way they were able to form a regional government was to form a coalition. One of the demands of a political group, usually described as anti system, to enter into that coalition was that the old president, Artur Mas should go. His successor was Carles Puigedemont. The main election pledge of the coalition was to hold a referendum and that's what they just did.

There was plenty of opposition to holding the referendum within the various political parties in Catalonia. Several normal procedures were set aside or ignored completely to get to the point where the regional parliament approved the legislation to hold the referendum. Basically the coalition bludgeoned the legislation through. Democracy gave way to expediency. However it was going to be done there was going to be a referendum and that was obvious to anybody.

Spain is basically a federal country. Local regions have lots of devolved powers in things like education, health, transport and lots, lots more. The central government has a hand in everything but it's only in areas like defence and foreign policy where the regions don't have a say. Some regions have more devolved powers than others and Catalonia is one of the regions where nearly everything is under local control. That's why, for instance, there is a separate police force in Catalonia - the Mossos d'Esquadra. The boss of the Mossos has been accused of sedition by the National Court.

So, the Catalan government has said that it's going to hold a referendum. The response of the central government is to say "You can't do that." There were some very half hearted attempts at doing what politicians do, which is to talk, but the Catalan elite said they were only willing to talk about the when and how of the referendum. Instead of finding a way to talk all that President Rajoy and his pals did was to sulk in the corner and repeat over and over again that it was illegal, unconstitutional etc., etc. For years as the process dragged along the central government stuck to that line. Basically they did what we in the trade call bugger all. The other major political parties weren't much help either - one day this, the next day that. As the referendum started to take shape the Government response was to ask the courts to decide. The courts said the referendum was illegal because it was unconstitutional. The courts used their powers, to thwart the illegal referendum. Judges don't go out to sort out the problems on the street. They send the police. Anyone with half a brain could see what was going to happen as boat loads of police from all over Spain were shipped in to stop the referendum. Exactly the same as when police are deployed to protect a G8 conference or a World Trade Organisation summit. The protestors push and shove and shout and throw stones or burn cars or whatever and eventually some police officer or some police commander loses it and answers stones with rubber bullets. Policemen are given big sticks and body armour for a reason and wire meshes aren't put onto police vans to make them easier to drive.

Up to a point then we have a conflict between two groups of politicians. But, as the referendum got closer it all became much more personal. Lots of Catalan towns have local administrations that do not support the ruling coalition. The mayors said they would not open up their buildings for the vote. Supporters of the vote harassed the mayors and their families. There was a telephone campaign to persuade people to vote and people who said they were not in favour of the vote were verbally harangued on the phone. It became the usual round of graffiti, slashed tyres, children told about their traitorous parents. All you have to do is to think about the things that people who identify themselves with one tribe or another, from football fans to terrorist organisations, do to other tribes to know what happened, and is happening, in Catalonia. Well except for deaths, I'm not aware of any deaths yet.

The vote itself of course was a complete democratic fiasco. Almost none of the usual controls to ensure that a vote is fair were in place. Votes were not secret and it was unsafe to attempt to vote no. Anyway the "no" voters simply stayed away. For anyone to suggest that over 90% of Catalans support independence is sheer nonsense. Surveys and polls suggest about 45% of Catalans are in favour of independence but something over 70% want a binding referendum. Eventually, of course, the police waded in and afterwards the Catalan government said that hundreds had been injured. We all saw the violence on telly but how many people were injured is moot. If some Guardia Civil whacks you over the head with a big stick that's one thing but if you become exhausted or hurt in the pushing and shoving, the advances and retreats of an angry crowd that's something different. I have read that just four people were hospitalised after the violence. Either way facts and emotions are different things. Police hitting people with sticks is bad. It's bad press too. It suggests a repressed group kept down by bully boys.

But here's the personal bit. In one of the earlier blogs about corruption I suggested that one of the reasons for so much political corruption in Spain is because of the everyday small scale corruption of Spanish society. The bills without VAT, the wages paid cash in hand etc. There is a parallel in the way that you can appeal or complain to the authorities. For instance, we have been overcharged by several hundred euros in our rates bill. I sent in my appeal about seven months ago and nothing has happened. I can't get an answer. I made a suggestion to the local town hall about the junction near our house using the official process. The response? - none whatsoever. Some pals were charged a tax on the profit on the sale of their house despite actually losing money. The tax is illegal but they were told by a solicitor that it was a waste of time taking it to court. Other friends were mis-sold dodgy shares by a bank and had a hell of a job getting anything back. A couple of years after we first arrived here there was a scandal about a pyramid selling scheme based on stamps and that case is, only now, going through the courts. There is a freedom of information act here but when I tried to ask a public radio station for its policy they simply didn't reply and the ombudsman said it was nothing to do with her. When I tried to ask the interior ministry why Guardia Civil don't wear seat belts in their cars I was told that the will of the people was delegated to central government and that it was not my place to ask such a question.

Britons living in Spain often complain about the bureaucracy. One reason is that when you move from one country to another there is an avalanche of things to be done from identity documents to bank accounts. My personal view is that Spanish bureaucracy isn't that different from bureaucracy anywhere. The problem in Spain comes when something doesn't go to plan because there seems to be naff all you can do about it. Not answering is a remarkably effective technique for making a problem go away.

The Catalans want some changes and they didn't get any answers either. In my opinion it's not surprising that they chose a radical approach. When the King spoke on telly the other night he said that there were democratic means open to the Catalans to express their views. I think he's wrong. He seems like a nice enough bloke, for a king, but my guess is that he normally gets answers if he asks a question. Getting redress, getting answers in Spain for ordinary people is often a tortuous process.

As I said at the start of this I'm a little anti Catalan but if I'd been there on Sunday, and the streets had been flooded with booted and suited police, I may well have been angry enough to go out and vote too.