International Day Against Noise

I didn't hear about this till it was too late. April 28th was the International Day Against Noise

The organisers of the day were very upset about the noise levels in Spain. They say that Spain is the second noisiest country in the World, after Japan.

I've heard that statistic before, in fact I've quoted it to Spaniards when we've been laughing about the noise levels in some Spanish bar or other. I wonder though how and where you measure noise levels? Is the noise level in a country, say Spain, made up of averaging out the noise levels in the centre of Madrid and atop Mulhacen or do only places with at least so much noise count?

It is absolutely true that Spanish people know how to make plenty of noise. Keeping quiet does not come easily or naturally to them. Their mopeds can be heard for miles. Their discussions about the qualities of this or that recipe carry through the walls of most flats. On the other hand I have often parked up somewhere to take a photo or to simply stare into the haze of a summer's day and been struck by the almost absolute silence of Spain - humming insects or the noises of the countryside toasting maybe but no human activity save my own.

Maybe those International Noise people should get out of town more often.

I declare

I've just done my tax return. It didn't take me long. The tax people, usually referred to as Hacienda, send me a document through the post that says what they think I owe them or what they think they owe me. If I agree all I have to do is go to their webpage and confirm the details and that's it done for another year.

If I hadn't agreed then I could have changed the details online and confirmed those. I presume that, after a change, some tax clerk or maybe a computer programme, checks the changes and, if they seem reasonable, the confirmed but altered details are given the OK and processed.

The first year I had to do this I went to a local accountant who charged me a few euros, 30€ as I remember, to complete the original form and get me into the tax system. Once I existed on the Hacienda database they began to log any salary and tax payments made by my employers or by the state unemployment people so that they could calculate whether I had over or under paid at the end of the tax year. The tax year is the calendar year.

It doesn't have to be done online. Accountants can deal with the paperwork as can the local tax offices and I think that banks can too. It's obviously more difficult for someone with a business or with multiple income streams but for someone with finances as simple as mine it's dead easy.

Maggie got notification that her draft was available online via a text message to her mobile phone which included the reference number to give her access to the online draft.

Best of all they reckoned they owed me a few euros.

Yes, yes, yes, yes - No

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 we call it - it isn't like a certificate of first habitation - after all you have water and electric and stuff - but that's what we call it. You need to bring me a bunch of papers, here's a list, once you've done that I'll pop out to see it and then we'll issue the certificate."

Being Easter the office is closed so we've asked someone to sort it out on our behalf.

Reading this is better than bedtime Horlicks.

Neighbours

My mum has told a joke, on and off, for the past forty years. It concerns a little girl who has been given a watch and a bottle of scent for her birthday. For days the girl pesters friends and strangers alike to look at her watch and smell her perfume. Her parents finally forbid her to mention the gifts. When the Vicar calls for tea she can contain herself no longer "If you hear a little tick and you smell a little smell it'll be me."

That was it.

The goats announce themselves with farting. Honest; you hear the hooves like the rustling of leaves in the breeze and then farts - loud, rasping, incessant farting. These goats are our neighbours, they live just down the road. If you hear a little rustle and hear a little farting it'll be the goats.

For anyone who's interested the breed is Murciana Granadina.

Shelter from the storm

We've been in Spain a while now and we've seen lots of Easter processions. The routine varies from town to town and procession to procession but the basic formula is the same. Individual squads dressed in pointed Klu Klux Klan hats and heavy, floor sweeping robes, escort carved, blood stained Christs and religious banners through the streets to solemn music based on slow, repetive drum beats. It can be impressive stuff but as it happens every night of Holy Week with extra processions to move this or that statue from one spot to another it soon drags as a spectator sport.

My procession count this year has been low so I went, for the first time, to see the midnight procession that marks the start of Good Friday here in Pinoso.

The town was pitch black. The street lights were off. The house shutters were down. The only light came from rogue phone boxes and bank machines. No cars were moving. People walking to the procession trod quietly with none of the normal chatter. Nobody was smoking. I took up my place in a side street and only after a moment did I realise that the procession was already moving past me. The drummer and his muffled, one beat every five seconds, was already gone. The black pointed hoods and black robes rolled silently by.

I had my camera but I was rather relieved when the autofocus, autoflash settings couldn't come to grips with the totally dark streets and black clothes. It seemed wrong to take snaps somehow. Amongst the silent watchers a young man talked too loud, on purpose, maybe to impress a girl. His friends left him high and dry. A mobile phone spurted to life but was silenced mid tone whilst a big, bloody Jesus on a cross lit with subtle blue light, swayed past on the backs of black hooded bearers.

Behind the cross came the silent crowd; hundreds of people of all ages, nearly everyone with a candle, Lots of spectators stepped off the pavement to join the procession. I began to feel uncomfortable for watching. Fifteen or maybe twenty minutes and it was all over.

As I walked back to my car I saw a bloke lighting up, a family walking in my direction were giggling and chatting. The night was crackling back to life in tiny little ways.

Please, I'm thirsty

We've just been out for a drink in Arrondias. Now you'd think getting a drink would be easy peazy for old hands like us but not a bit of it.

All over Asturias they drink cider. It's like scrumpy, a bit cloudy and 6% alcohol. It's not like Woodpecker or Strongbow because it doesn't have bubbles. Obviously that won't do. Cider should have a bit of a head.

In the first bar I asked for a beer, Maggie was on the wine. Over in the corner a couple of blokes were using the WiFi Internet and drinking cider. The cider comes in 70cl bottles like wine and on top of the bottle there was a sort of contraption a bit like a soda siphon that made a whirring sound and dispensed the frothed up cider. The web surfers only ever used the machine to dispense a couple of mouthfuls into their glasses at any time.

Bar number two. We ordered cider. The barmaid poured out a decent mouthful into the bottom of a glass by lifting the bottle above her head whilst she held the glass somewhere below her knees. The spillage, if there was any, was minimal. That was how we drank the bottle. When the glaases were empty she'd come back and pour a drop more into each of our glasses. Sometimes we had to wait a while till she wasn't too busy to help us quench our considerable thirst.

Bar number three. I was on the beer and Maggie on the wine.

Double egg, beans and chips please

We're not in Culebrón at the moment. We're in Asturias and it is raining quite a lot. Asturias is on the North coast of Spain just a bit across and down from Cornwall. We came to have a look at the village of Lastres because a TV programme we like, Doctor Mateo, based on the British TV series Doc Martin is filmed there. Lastres was a bit grotty and the few restaurants that there were were remarkably pricy. Instead we had lunch in Colunga just a few kilometres along the coast.

We had Fabada Asturiana which is a bean stew with black pudding, spicy blood sausage and a fatty bacon like substance. We should have drunk cider along with it but I stuck to water as I was driving.

Everywhere in Spain boasts some sort of traditional food and whenever tourists turn up in the region they ask for the local speciality. So, in Valencia you'd order a paella, in Extremadura it would be migas (breadcrumbs and fatty pork), in Galicia you have no choice but to eat either octopus or pimientos de Padrón (small salted fried peppers) and so it goes on all around Spain. Now this is fine if you pop out for lunch to Segovia one day and want suckling pig but if you are wandering around a province it can become wearing to be offered the same food in every restaurant you go into day in day out.

Luckily we've only got another day to go here so we can eat the other speciality - chorizo in cider and then we're off to Soria, or at least we think we're off to Soria where, as I remember, it's another sort of bread and sausage based dish served with fried eggs.

Dead in their beds

We moved into this house on 1 April 2005. Today I put up our very first smoke alarm. It was an advert on British TV the other night that made me think to get one. I'd have got more but they don't seem to be readily available in the shops

Smoke alarms and carbon monoxide monitors aren't exactly conspicuous fittings but I'm not sure that I've ever seen one in a private house here. Certainly there are none of those publicity campaigns to persuade people to buy and maintain them. It's a strange difference.

Perhaps Spanish houses don't burn or maybe because the majority of the windows in the majority of Spanish houses are barred people prefer to die in their beds silently slain by smoke, rather than to die scorched and screaming pinned flat against unyielding iron bars.

Maggie's take

I just told Maggie the story about the King and the hearing aid shop. She wondered if the shop assistant would take the call from her mother and leave the King waiting just like they do every other customer.

It made me giggle

The Zarzuela palace has confirmed that the King wears a hearing aid. Journalists began to suspect that he did when he was seen leaning close to hear someone speak at a public function.

The hoot though was in the last line of the news story. Telecinco (A commercial TV station) had film footage of King Juan Carlos coming out of a hearing aid shop!

Can you imagine the scene in Buckingham Palace? "Philip, I'm a little fatigued, might you go to the hearing aid shop and purchase a few spare batteries on my behalf?

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age.

I was just trying to remember how we met Paul but I can't. He's English though, he lives in Culebrón and we expat Brits just tend to bump into each other. I know scores of people to nod at or to speak to occasionally without knowing anything about them except their first name and one other key fact. "Hi Robert, how's the folk dancing going?"

I know Paul's family name and we know his wife too. She, amongst other things, is Maggie's Avon rep.

Last night Paul had his 50th birthday party at the one remaining bar in Culebrón. It's a British bar called Litani and Tim, who I know relatively well (without knowing his surname), runs the bar there. Tim is a big man, he's got tattoos, he was a butcher and he's returning to the UK to drive lorries. I've always liked Tim.

Last weekend we took my mum to a place called El Cortijo over Paredon way to get Sunday lunch. She said she was surprised that Maggie and I were going to a British run place for Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding. It's maybe the third time we've been there but the food has always been good with keen pricing and we thought that she'd be more at home in a place where we didn't need to translate the menu.

Back at Litani Bill was doing the disco, he played music like The Bachman Turner Overdrive "You ain't seen nothing yet" We had an intelligent conversation with Stuart and Joyce and another with a North American couple. They were very positive about their Spanish experiences. Two people, one an old customer of Rustic Original who I'd prepared furniture for, commented favourably on my blogs and magazine articles. When it came to food time there were bits of pork pie and cocktail sausages as well as empanada and tortilla. All in all a very pleasant evening and no need for a word of Spanish.