Gearing up for the Fiesta and Fair

This is pure conjecture.

The 10 day long Pinoso Fiesta starts officially tomorrow. The rides and stalls are already setting up in the town. Just from a quick look this morning I'd say there are fewer stalls than last year and last year there were fewer stalls than the year before.

Spain is a rich country nowadays. The IMF may say that the economy faces some serious challenges and the word crisis is still on everyone's lips. Unemployment reached a 13 year peak yesterday with over 20% of the working population idle. Nonetheless, the last time I looked we were still the ninth biggest economy in the World. In 1965 Spain was on the UN list of "Third World" countries. Quite a change in 45 years.

When I used to do Spanish lessons with a chap who lives here in Pinoso he told me that, in 1984, there was only one tarmac road through the town - in from Monóvar and out towards Fortuna - somewhere, I heard that mains electricity didn't arrive in Pinoso till 1974. I have photos of the town in the 60s and 70s. There's a mule in the street, dirt roads, poverty.

Pinoso is still pretty isolated, still a rural farming community. Imagine the annual fair and carnival twenty or thirty years ago. Stalls selling pots and pans, knives and agricultural implements. New clothes for the kids, toys, strangers in town. The fairground rides, the opportunity to eat strange food, to let your hair down.

Nowadays if someone wants a new fridge freezer or a garlic crusher they can get it in town or jump into their motor and zip off to the Aljub or Thader or Nueva Condomina shopping centres. If they want entertainment Elche and Alicante and Murcia are all less than an hour away. Terra Mítica, the huge theme park is an easy day trip.

Maybe the knife seller from Albacete, the ham and sausage from Galicia and the dodgems just don't have the appeal for the population that they once had. Or maybe I'm a foreigner and I still don't understand how Spaniards like to party.

Flies

One of the downsides of living in the country is the flies. Sitting in the shade with a cold drink in hand the little blighters start to pester. Their tiny little feet pitter pattering across your face, in your ears, up your nostrils, drowning in your drink.

I like to think I'm pretty zen about small beasties. Spiders removed from the bath before showering, beetles scooped up from the living room and released to the wild. Yesterday though there were more flies than I could cope with. Out came the fly swat. Tens of corpses surrounding the sun lounger; higher body count than Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It ain't half hot mum

It isn't really. The highest temperature we've had here in Culebrón over the past few weeks has been 36ºC and normally daily maximums have been around 32ºC. For those dinosaurs amongst you that means our maximum has been about 97ºF and we're generally running at around 90ºF.

When we got back from holiday several of our English pals were keen to complain about the heat - suffocating, unbearable, nightmare - were common words. The complaints were nearly as loud as the moaning about the rain, icy winds and low temperatures of a few months ago. 42ºC was bandied about. At those sort of temperatures the State Meteorological Service starts issuing weather warnings along with advice about drinking plenty of water, wearing hats and buying a camel. It has been over 40ºC recently in several parts of Spain, it's been on the telly, but Alicante hasn't featured.

It's hot, no doubt about it, but it's far from unbearable. In the full sun (where the temperature zooms off the top of all the thermometers I own) the sweat will soak your clothes, dribble into your eyes and turn your hair into a dripping sponge but in the shade a heat haze just helps to increase the profits of beer and soft drink companies and it reminds me at least of one of the things I like about Spain. It's sunny. And I can't remember when it last rained.

Minimums, by the way, turn around twenty, it was 18ºC for instance last night so a perfectly pleasant temperature for sleeping.

Another little glitch

This is another in my series of moans about Spanish websites.

We booked a couple of days away with the Castilla la Mancha tourist website. I booked and paid online without any difficulty. I got a confirmation of the purchase by email. The next working day a courier turned up with the voucher and a really well presented booklet. I was well impressed; the website had worked, the organisation seemed efficient.

The package contained a voucher which can be exchanged for a series "weekend" breaks. I could either ring or send a request by email. So, for the usual reason of avoiding a phone conversation, I sent an email. The next evening I got one of those "This is an automatically generated message, delivery of your message has been delayed, you do not need to do anything, we will try to resend the messsage." I checked the email address and I even replied to the email that they had sent me as a foolproof way of getting the address right. I've just had another "undeliverable" message again on both emails.

Ah well, on the phone tomorrow then.

P.S: I did phone and they were dead efficient. They confirmed the details of our telephone conversation by email within moments, phoned through the confirmation in a couple of hours and sent the voucher for the trip at the same time by email.

The Floridablanca garden in Murcia

When I did the piece on gardening in Spain a couple of days ago I had a root around on the Internet for information about Spanish gardens and gardeners. One bit of information that I turned up was that the oldest public garden in Spain is in Murcia City and, as that's very close to home, we went to have a look today.

Nowadays the garden is a traffic island so it's hardly peaceful but it was certainly shady and well used by a mixture of strollers, newspaper readers and bench sleepers. The parkie was having a fag as we passed.

Apparently the garden was designed and opened in 1786 on what had been the tree lined avenue, the Alameda del Carmen. It was designed to a Romantic style and when it was remodeled in 1848 it was given a new name in honour of one of the city's notable citizens, Jose Moñino Redondo, Count or Conde de Floridablanca.

We'd never heard of the fellow before but at our next stop, the Hydraulic Museum, his name turned up again as the promoter of the old water mill which had doubled as a flood defence system.

Not Camarón de la Isla

I have lots of Flamenco records. We've been to several Flamenco concerts. I've even read books about it. Sometimes it's a fat bloke and a guitarist, sometimes it's tight flouncy frocks or a long haired chap with high waisted black trousers. Sometimes they dance, sometimes they stay stock still, sometimes there are dozens of people on stage. I have no idea what's good, bad or indifferent though I have personal likes and dislikes. Give me another twenty years and I may work it out.

This evening we went back to el Cortijo, the Brit run bar and restaurant out at Paredon where we saw the World Cup England v USA game. Good evening I thought with a bunch of snacks and a Flamenco troupe of three female dancers and a couple of musicians for just 10€.

The music was pretty lightweight but they put on a good show; an appropriate show for a non specialist audience who would soon have tired of anything heavier.

Oh, and they had Maggie up and dancing.

Gone to ground

I may have told this story before. I used to live in Cambridgeshire where agriculture is big business. A farmer friend had a visitor from Kenya. The farm visit over it was tea and scones time. As they went into the farmhouse the visitor asked if there was a problem with the land in the garden, was it not as fertile as the general farmland? My friend puzzled, said that it was good earth. "Then why are flowers growing on it, what a waste of good land, you can't eat flowers."

I think the Kenyan may be wrong, I'm sure I've eaten flowers in salads in expensive restaurants but the general principle is right enough.

I think Spaniards may have a similar appreciation of land - it's either good for crops or it is left to its own devices. True the Arabs built some splendid and fragrant gardens when they ruled Spain but I hear that is an attempt to recreate paradise as envisaged in the Koran. Those gardens were built around shaded patios and fountains.

A Spanish friend looking around our garden was being shown our various fruit trees. She commented, approvingly, that the earth between the trees was "clean" - bare soil in other words. Kept clear of weeds to help prevent fires.

We Brits of course like our flowers. Nearly everyone around here has land and all of our British chums set about landscaping the ground - belvederes, gravel here, plants there. Without constant watering nearly everything dies unless it is native to the area so palms and olives and figs and almonds and rosemary do well but lots of things you would expect to thrive in the sun simply curl up and die or are slaughtered by the first nippy evening.

I was reminded of this when Maggie asked me to escort her to the nearest garden centre. Garden centres are a reasonably new thing in Spain and none of them resemble the UK theme park type garden centres where ice cream vans vie for the business of the hordes of people who dress up and go there for a day out. Spanish garden centres have plants, compost, maybe a few tools and garden furniture but they are pretty basic affairs.

More cold calling

Our phone doesn't ring very often. When it does I usually blaspheme. I'm that grumpy.

This morning it rang twice. Maggie took the first call but I picked up the second one. It was someone doing some cold calling. I braced myself for the coming confusion arising from my dodgy Spanish and for the thanks but no thanks conversation. This was the ex state telephone company Telefonica, recently rebranded as Movistar, calling to tell me that they would like to thank me for my loyalty by giving me a discount of 10€ per month for the next six months.

That's the sort of sales pitch I don't mind.

I took up another offer they introduced a couple of weeks ago for free calls from the landline to all mobiles at the weekend. I suspect that, after years of a near monopoly, they are now feeling the pinch of the liberalised phone market and they're fighting back

Safe home

Maggie thinks that my idea of a holiday isn't much like a holiday. It goes something like this "Do you fancy going to suchandsuch?" So we book a hotel for suchandsuch and drive there. On day two we have no more plans. I say "thingummyjig, is only 200/300kms away do you fancy that?" We drive there and hunt around for a hotel which is usually a bit more pricy and a bit less pleasant than we hoped. We traipse the streets, we eat in a restaurant, we go in museums and churches.

I'm a bit fed up with them myself. I can't ever remember which church had the Churrigueresque door and which the Rococo. I quite fancy a bungee jumping holiday or a wine tasting one or maybe one of those themed history trails but somehow, instead, we seem to end up driving thousands of kilometres and forgetting where we've been.

Maggie wanted a cruise. Not too expensive as holidays go, your clothes stay in the wardrobe for the week, waiters serve you too much food, the bars are always open, the cities and museums and Rococo doors come to you and of course you can have a go at karaoke or bingo if you tire of the smooth sounds of the classical duo. Oh, and you're on a boat too.

We popped across to Mallorca on a local flight, got a boat called the Thomson Dream out to Italy where we did Rome, Pisa, Livorno and Santa Margherita then into France for Marseille and into Spain, well Catalunya, for Tarragona before heading back to Mallorca.

It was good enough. The people we met were pleasant though the passengers did tend to elderly and overweight (like me!) The sun shone. There were flashes of splendour and unexpected gems in amongst lots of ordinary. On the boat I realised how Eduardo the cat must feel when he's in the flat in Cartagena - plenty of space really but nowhere to go.

I won't keep rabbiting on but there are photos on the "some of my snaps" link. It's a bit like coming round for the holiday slide show but without the amusing anecdotes or sherry.

And here is the news

There is only one thing on Spanish telly and Spanish radio and in the Spanish papers today. Pictures of fans jumping in fountains in capital cities all over the World, Spanish troops dancing in Afghanistan, getting ready for the open top bus parade in Madrid.

¡¡Campeones, Campeones!! The newsreaders are beaming, the commentators have a lilt to their voices.

Here in Culebrón, like in Lake Wobegone, it has been quiet. Vicente, next door, let off a few bangers and we could hear the car horns and fireworks in Pinoso but we'd drunk just a spot too much to be able to drive in and join the celebrations.

Brilliant.

That'll do nicely

Spain 1 Holland 0

A sufficient sufficiency