Just another lesson

A pal, Alice, locked her car keys inside her car yesterday and for one reason or another I became the person to sort this out.

I approached the problem like an Englishman used to using the phone and computers.

No she wasn't a member of a car club so the "AA or RAC" option was out the window.

I checked the online Yellow Pages for a locksmith (cerrajero), none listed. I rang directory enquiries who weren't quite sure where Pinoso was and the technology didn't seem to help them so I had to suggest which towns to check for locksmiths. I got 3 numbers. One chap was out of the area till Monday, one said it was his dad's phone and he didn't know where his dad was and the third number was actually a private house.

Change of tack, I looked on the Pinoso Town Hall website for the number for the local police. Only the emergency number was listed. There was a number for the Guardia Civil but they must have been out for lunch. The call to them obviously transferred from their fixed line to a mobile number but nobody answered before the time limit on the phone system cut me off.

Now I'm getting cross. So we get in my car and drive to the local police station. The chap is dead helpful. "You don't want a locksmith, you want a metal worker/blacksmith for locks - there's one just across the road there."

We went to the blacksmith. He was nice too "We only deal with houses, garages, that sort of lock - you want a chapista." A chapista is a car bodywork place. He told us where there was one.

On the way to the bodywork shop we passed the local Fiat dealer where both Alice and I are customers (her car is a Fiat). It seemed sensible to ask the Fiat man if they had master keys or something. "Nothing like that I'm afraid but what you need is a chapista, there's one around the corner."

The chap at the chapista (Sorry, I couldn't help it) was very pleasant. No problem he said, we can get you in the car in a few minutes. And he did. And it only cost 15€.

Different place, different systems.

Esta lloviendo a cántaros

Or, it's raining cats and dogs.

It's been pouring down all over Spain for the last few days. There was a severe weather warning for our bit of the World yesterday; they reckoned we would get up to 50 litres of rain per square metre in one hour and a total of 120 litres in 12 hours. That's a lot of water. It has been very moist and quite depressing. My washing has been on the line for days and even the stuff inside the house takes ages to dry.

The good thing is that the reservoirs have increased their reserves by 1.8% since the beginning of November but, even then, our local reserves are still at only 9.5% of capacity.

I suppose I should be pleased that we're getting some rain at last. We could always buy a tumble dryer.

Pinoso Half Marathon

It looks as though about 500 people turned out to run the half marathon organised in Pinoso today. The weather was cool and damp and although, thankfully, I don't know anything about running it seemed to me that it would be a good day for it.

On seeing, and not seeing, Jonathan Richman

On the Murcian Tourist Information website it said "Murcia se prepara para acoger el regreso del gran Jonathan Richman, uno de los creadores más excéntricos y divertidos del pop de los últimos 30 años * Garaje de la Tia María, Avda. Miguel de Cervantes s/n - Murcia * 04/11/2006" or, in English, Murcia gets ready to welcome the return of the great JR one of the most excentric and amusing pop artists of the last 30 years at Aunt Mary's Garage, Miguel de Cervantes Avenue, no street number, Murcia.

So despite not having tickets (see previous post) we decided to drive down and see if we could get in. In the dark, in the wet, in quite heavy traffic we found the street and we found the club. It was still an hour and a half to the advertised kick off so we weren't surprised to find the doors shut fast. We went to get a meal and we paid nearly 40€ for it.

The club was open when we got back, there were lots of youngsters in an assortment of hooded tops, baggy jeans and short skirts. Not quite the crowd we'd been expecting. The advertised ticket price was 15€ per person and that's what we paid. 70€ so far.

The air was heavy (and I mean thick) with dope smoke. A lad just behind us passed out through a mix of booze and drugs. We felt a bit old, a bit out of place. Maggie read her ticket which was for a band called La Excepcion (see photo). But on the walls were posters advertising Jonathan Richman! The address was right, the club name was right, time was right, the price was right but the music was wrong. La Excepcion were awful (and I mean dire). We left; we asked the man on the door "Oh, that's our other place", he said, "about 100 metres up the road in the Sala de la Tia Maria. (Aunt Mary's room - spot the subtle difference)" We strolled around in the rain a bit but we couldn't find it. We got back in the car and drove home. Disappoined, foolish and worse off.

Aaarghhhh!!

Do you remember Jonathan Richman? At one time it was him and the Modern Lovers - Roadrunner was a hit I think and something like Egyptian Reggae too.

I saw a piece in the paper to say he was doing a tour in Spain: in fact he is on at a place called El Garaje de la Tia Maria next Saturday in Murcia which is only about an hour away. That much I got from the paper.

Today I did a quick Internet search to find the phone number for the club so I could get a couple of tickets. Plenty of listings information but no phone number. So I rang directory enquiries - no such place listed (mind you directories have still failed to give me a single number in the two years I've lived here so that was no big surprise). I tried again on the Internet. Nothing. I tried contacting Jonathan's record company for help but the email bounced back. I tried to send an email to the Murcian Tourist Offie but their website appears to be down.

I think Spain still has a fair way to go on this Information Society thing!

Voting

When we first came to Pinoso we put our names down on the "padron" - nearly everyone does. The padron is a sort of local authority register, it's an essential piece of paper for sorting out lots and lots of things like healthcare, vehicle registration etc.

At the same time I made sure that we registerd to vote. UK citizens can vote in local but not National or European elections here. I maintain the right to both a National and European vote in the UK.

I knew that the two processes of padron and voter registration were separate but the woman at the Town Hall who dealt with me didn't seem certain about the process for registering voters even though she found a form from somewhere for me to fill in.

Local elections here are coming up in May so I thought it was about time to check that my right to vote was secure. If I weren't on the list then there should still be time to sort it out.

When I got to the Town Hall the woman was a bit brusque. "None of you English are registered to vote" she said, "I have a stack of forms here but none of you ever bothers. You just live in your own little World - blah, blah". I made it pretty clear that I had filled in a form and I wasn't that keen on hearing her diatribe about Brits and their habits. What I needed was her to check if I was registered.

She checked; I was registered.

We both calmed down a bit and I was happy to agree with her that it's a dreadful thing that most Brits seem so apathetic about their right to vote - after all I had the moral high ground here.

None the less she does have a point. It's not a tricky process to register to vote and it is an obvious way to participate in a community. And, of course, a minority that votes has much more sway with local politicians than a minority that spends money in bars and restaurants.

Chewing on a mountain

The area where we live is famous for a white marble. The quarries work 24 hours a day all year round to cut the stuff. Articulated lorries loaded with one or two big"square" blocks trundle around the roads heading for this or that factory.

This is the quarry in Alguena; as you can see it isn't pretty.

Giving blood

I like living in Spain and I ofen find myself defending its institutions and methods against other Britons as they moan about this or that. But I am a bit fed up with the Blood Service.

I've been turned down twice by the blood people in Alicante province because they don't trust British blood. The first nurse who turned me down put it so succinctly; "Mad Cows".

Nonetheless, I heard an appeal to the immigrant population in Murcia to give blood. Now Pinoso is oly 3kms from the "County" border with Murcia so I thought I may as well ask them if they wanted my blood. I sent them an email about 10 days ago. I expected the answer to be no but I also expected a reply. So far nothing. So my second email was a little less formal. It started "Are you having breakfast, or is it siesta time?"

Actually I sent a snotty email to the tourist people in the local town of Petrer too.

It said "I have a bit of a problem with the "What's On" calendar on your website. It's not much like a calendar is it? If it were there would be some dates in it.

I'm English and because of that my family hasn't been attending these events since time immemorial. There's a bit of a test of a good advert - who, where what and when. But maybe the idea is to keep it a secret - just for Spaniards."

I appreciate that my Castilian may well be dodgy but I'm also pretty sure the recipients would get the gist of my messages. A "sod off" wouldn't have caused me much grief but being ignored is.

On Azorín and small scale Spanish museums

Maggie and I went to the nearby town of Monóvar yesterday to have a look at an exhibition of photos. They were taken in the town at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries. The exhibition was in the museum and study centre dedicated to the writer Azorín who was born in Monóvar in 1873.

All I knew about Azorín before I went to the museum was that he was a writer and a reviewer who used a pseudonym (his real name was José Augusto Trinidad Martínez Ruiz) and was one of the Generation of 98 which had something to do with the Spanish American war of 1898. By the time I came away from the Museum what I knew about Azorín was that he was a writer and a reviewer who used a pseudonym and was one of the Generation of 98.

It was a nice museum with some interesting furniture, lots of cameras and a fair sized library in the attic. The pictures of Monóvar and its people were cracking, we were made very welcome by the curator and it was free which made it all the better. But, not one of the photos had a caption, there were no info boards about the writer or about any of the exhibits and it is only in doing the internet research afterwards that I realised the link with the Monóvar photos was that Azorín's brother took some of them using some of the cameras on display.

The house is not atypical of the smaller Spanish museums and galleries which seem to regard giving information away as being some sort of sin.

Birth of a river

The river, the Rio Mundo, starts where all the water trickling from a limestone cliff face comes together to form a stream which heads off downhill.

Maggie and I went to have a look. That's Maggie on the bridge. The other photo is the waterfall that marks the beginning of the stream. I thought it looked a bit English but then it's a while since I've been in any English woodland

Just a turn in the road

We drove around today and, at one point, I felt a bit sleepy. So we stopped for a few moments. Us apart there wasn't another human made sound to be heard - no cars, planes, radios or children. Just trees, birds, the breeze in the grass - that sort of thing.

Spain is one of the noisiest countries in the World but it's not full; so it's dead easy to find a bit of peace and quiet. Lovely