Figs

I quite like figs. Not a staple in my diet but, every now and again, one of those little packs of three from Waitrose.

The question though is what to do with thousands of the little blighters. We have three fig trees and they are all very fecund, we have green figs and the dark purply brown ones. There are thousands of them. The windfalls make a right mess of the bottom of your shoes. The birds swarm in the tree tops.

It's not the same with the cherries, plums, pomegranates, peaches, quinces, nisperos, grapes, tomatoes and apples that grow in our garden. Those crops are manageable or non existent; we usually get plenty of peaches for instance but each one has a resident beast which makes them inedible whilst the birds always get to the cherries before we do. The figs though just come and come.

Smokey Joe

Plodding tractor and trailer rigs on the road suggest that it's grape harvest at the moment though I think the main wine crop is still on the vines. It was almonds in the trailers a little while ago but it looks as though we're right at the tail end of that crop now

The almonds end up drying in big piles outside the local processing plant. Shelling the nuts makes the crop more valuable and cheaper to transport. It also leaves tons of almond shells to dispose of.

I've heard that before we got here someone had the bright idea of burning the shells (they're loaded with oil, burn well and produce stacks of heat) to provide the fuel for a power station. So a power station was built. Unfortunately the burning shells produce a thick black smoke and the locals weren't too keen on the layer of soot that settled on their houses. It didn't help that someone had forgotten to get the proper permissions to build the power station in the first place.

So it stands empty. That's it in the photo. Well it's one of the photos. The other is of almonds.

Don Quixote

Have you ever read Ulysses, Tristram Shandy or Moby Dick? I've managed to get through a couple of these literary classics but, more usually, I grind through the first twenty or so pages, skip a few pages, try a few more chapters and eventually give up. Classics they may be but the style is so ponderous or distant that they just don't do it for me.

After our trip to Castilla la Mancha I was reminded of Don Quixote which I did read when I was young. I can still remember that dread almost of ploughing through it, a few pages each evening until boredom set in.

I still have the same copy, pages browned at the edges now but useable enough. 940 pages including the introductions. And I read it, and what's more I enjoyed it. I was amazed.

My dad once commented on my liking for the bitter lemon sweets. "You won't like those when you're older, your tastes will change." He was wrong about the sweets, they're still one of my favourites but maybe he would have been right if he'd talked about tastes in literature.

I don't think I'll bother with the re-read of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel Cervantes Saavedra in the original Castillian though!

Being there

With the long summer break over it's likely that Life in Cartagena will be busier than this blog for a while.

An evening at the theatre

I always enjoyed the Stainland Players. Technically there were usually problems, missed cues, forgotten lines even the occasional falling over but any detail problems were always overcome by the sheer gusto of the performance.

Torre del Rico is significantly smaller than Stainland. I'd seen a poster for a play, Nelo Bacora, being put on there by la Asociación de Mujeres Rurales (the Rural Women's Association) at 8pm this evening so we went along.

The snap was taken at 20.11 hrs. Not quite in full swing by the promised hour. A bit warm to start yet said the MC.

When it did start I have to be honest and say that the Stainland Players would get the better of it on any sort of technical or acting criteria. There were sound problems, prop problems, line problems and a lot of laughing from the cast whilst the passing tractors perfumed the outdoor auditorium with something very rural. Plenty of heart though. Good fun, even moreso because it was short.

I can't pretend I understood more than about 25% of what was said. I missed most of the puns and lots of the detail but we understood the basic plot. The women of Torre del Rico done good. Special praise to the woman wearing the uniform in the blurry snap. Her name is Carole, I delivered a lot of furniture to her a few years ago. She's English and she delivered her lines, in Spanish, really well. The product of several sleepless nights I suspect.

On the dangers of friends

I'm not too keen on having fun, people describe me as stand offish, gruff even.  Fortunately Maggie has a nice, friendly, outgoing, character which means that we have several expat friends around Culebrón. We're due back in Cartagena next week so we've had a rush of invitations to shoehorn in before we go. In fact we haven't cooked at home for the past three days and we've had four meals out in the same period.

A set lunchtime meal with a couple of pals from the next village but eaten on the coast in Santa Pola, an Indian meal with more chums and their visiting family, a barbecue shared with about forty or fifty other people  and an invite for a meal at the house of my old employer and Maggie's Pilates teacher. We enjoyed all of them.

The problem though is that those meals have done more damage to my waistline than a whole week on the cruise ship. Never mind; we'll soon be alone and friendless and then we can get back to our reasonable portion diet and knock off a few kilos more - at least that's what Maggie says is going to happen!

Summer

Summer in Spain is an odd time. Whole towns and cities more or less close down. Rural villages fill up as people move to their country houses often inherited from relatives, now dead, who worked the land. Even the shops and offices that stay open generally change their opening times usually doing just the morning shift rather than re-opening after the long lunch break. All to avoid the heat.

Summer lasts two months, from the first of July to the thirty first of August. The Guardia Civil, who deal with traffic, mount special campaigns because there are so many traffic movements. Madrid, for instance, more or less empties its population to the various coasts and inland resorts. Once upon a time people would take a whole month off, more or less their whole holiday entitlement, but that seems to have become a couple of weeks in summer with the rest spread around the year particularly at Easter and Christmas. Spain is in the midst of a financial crisis so not everyone can get away but even then family visits and time with friends offer some compensation.

Fiestas, the local carnivals, are in full swing. They are everywhere. For instance today we could have gone to the big wine harvest celebration in Jumilla or to the much more modest events in la Romana, Chinorlet or Paredon all of which are only a few kilometres from home. There are lots more.

Our summer has been excellent. Maggie's teacher holidays are two full months and with me not starting work till September first I've been sunning myself too.

Apart from the week and a bit on the boat and the weekend in Castilla la Mancha we've not been away from home overnight but a quick skim of the photos shows that we've spent a lot of time doing this and that and we've seen a lot of friends.

Very nice.

In a place of La Mancha, whose name I would not like to remember...

Don Quixote, el Quijote, usually billed as the greatest book ever written in Spanish, is big tourist business in Castilla la Mancha and this weekend we took a short break based in Campo de Criptana a town where there a number of old style windmills just right for tilting at.

In el Toboso, the village where el Quijote's imaginary lady Dulcinea lived we went to a small museum full of hundreds of copies of the various editions of the book, in every conceivable language, signed by the famous and infamous alike including names like Margaret Thatcher, Benito Mussolini, Nelson Mandela and Carlos Fuentes. On the museum wall a painting showed a thin bloke, lance in hand, riding a skinny horse and by his side a tubby man riding a mule. The four figures are dwarfed by a dazzling azure sky and the parched earth that stretch on and on for ever.

We've crossed through la Mancha several times on our journeys to and from Madrid or up to Albacete. That painting tallied exactly with my impression of the landscape - flat, featureless and dusty - dotted with mean villages and tedious towns. A landscape that I've read has its charms - but only after long acquaintance.

Our weekend started in Campo de Criptana with a tour of a winery, a meal and our hotel. The windmills were there looking as they should and the town gleamed in blue and white. El Toboso village was stone, sun and silence whilst the Ruidera Lakes were a hubbub of hundreds of people shattering the peace and quiet. In Alcaraz's magnificent town square we wondered where the money had come from. We climbed hills and dropped into deep valleys, we drove across kilometres of vineyards, through stands of oak and olive, we passed castles, rivers and streams - a varied and often changing landscape.

Alonso Quixano and his trusty sidekick Sancho Panza must have seen a thing or two as they rode into the heat haze all those years ago

Sixteen tons and a song

One of the chief reasons the Romans invaded Murcia near the present day Cartagena and La Unión was to sieze the silver mines. By 200AD the mines were, apparently, exhausted and fell into disuse but with the new technologies of the late 19th and early 20th Century the lead, silver zinc and iron ores became profitable once again.

Mines need miners; people willing to crawl down dark, dangerous, hot tunnels and hack away at the earth. In La Unión lots of those people came from the depressed rural south, from Andalucia. They brought their singing with them, the style we call Flamenco, and mixed it in with the local song.

They sang about their lives, particularly their lives in the mines.

When the mines closed for good the singing began to disappear so a local enthusiast decided to try to keep the music alive. The competition, el Cante de las Minas, the Song of the Mines, began back in 1961

The modern venue for the competition is one of those big old glass and steel market halls now converted into a performance space. The basic format is a competition for amateurs in three classes, one for singers, one for dancers and one for guitarists. The overall winner gets the Miner's Lamp trophy and, presumably, a crack at fame and fortune on the Flamenco circuit.

As well as the competition there are six days of Flamenco stars - we wondered about going to see Paco de Lucia but baulked at 45€ for the cheap seats. We did pay the 10€ to go to see day two of the competiton though. It was enjoyable in a sort of masochistic way. Three and a half hours of Flamenco without break. Squirming on the hard chairs, aware of aching this and itching that.

Apologies for the photos - long lens, high magnification, low light, moving targets - bad mix.

Wired

The firm we buy our Internet services from, Movistar, is the most expensive broadband provider in the whole of the European Union.

Movistar charge over 70% more for midspeed broadband access (2mgb to 10mgb) than the average price of the other old state monopolies across the European Union. The average is 34€ and Movistar charge 58€

Even the cheapest broadband access in Spain comes out nearly 11% more expensive than the median of the other European offers. So your average European pays 29€ whilst the most savvy Spaniard pays 32€. Goodness knows how much the difference is between the best European offer and what we pay.

Spaniards get overcharged even more on the over 10mgb lines where the cheapest Spanish is 35€ against 30€ European average - over 16% difference.

Apparently one of the big variations is that most of the headline prices on the various Spanish offers do not include the line rental as part of the package.

Just in case you think we are particularly stupid in paying over the odds we don't have much of a choice. Until very recently the only operator who would provide our house with broadband was Movistar. Nobody wants to provide infrastructure to we country bumpkins.

Two fingers of red eye

My old school pal, Bob Filby, commented on the entry I did about our visit to a local bodega. His comment was that there is a much held belief in England that there is no such thing as a decent Spanish wine.

Actually it's quite difficult for us to make a direct comparison because wines from anywhere but Spain are almost totally absent from Spanish supermarket shelves. On top of that I know very little about wine but I've had a quick Google around this morning and it looks to me as though the expert opinion is that the wines from the North of Spain include plenty of varieties that can hold their head up against anything produced anywhere in the World. The wines from the centre (which includes Alicante) are much more ordinary but they are sturdy, inexpensive and intended "to swill down food." What I should have remembered and what I should have fought the Spanish corner for are the brilliant sherries and manzanillas from Jerez and Sanlucar.

Here's an offer Bob, get yourself a bottle of La Gitana manzanilla (they used to keep it in Waitrose), pop it in the fridge till it's nice and cold and if you don't think that's quality stuff then I'll buy it for you.

For lots of Spaniards though, particularly older Spaniards, wine is a staple. Old chaps in bars drink it instead of having a small beer or a coffee, families buy it in recycled five litre water containers to drink along with their evening meal. It's like bread, olive oil, garlic, onions and tomatoes - one of the standards in the larder rather than the sophisticated tipple that it is in the UK. That's why, often, when we go into a slightly trendier bar Maggie finds that she can't get the red wine she wants and has to settle instead for vodka.