Nighttime stealth

Being old, getting a good night's sleep is a bit of a problem. We recently bought a new, expensive matress, one of those memory foam jobs or as they are call them here viscoelasticas. It was like a solid lump of earth with absolutely no give in it. A recipe for aches and pains. It seemed to be worse for Maggie than me but neither of us was happy.

Working has one big advantage over not working. I get paid. With this new found wealth I decided to buy another matress but Maggie had already made it clear that she wasn't happy with simply wasting the money we'd paid on the new viscoelastica. She was for toughing it out.

Cowardice and stealth seemed to be the order of the day. So I arranged with my old boss to buy another matress, a mix of springs and memory foam, at cost price. Delivery became a little complicated but I found someone with a van and I spirited the new matress into the house whilst Maggie was out. The new matress to our bed, the old but new matress to the guest bedroom and the now redundant guest matress to the garage - carefully stored should it need to be brought out of retirement.

Maggie didn't notice the change as she went to bed. This morning she complained of aching bones.

I suspect that the conclusion to this story will not be to my credit.

On the doorstep but new to me

There's a programme on the telly here called Cuéntame como pasó which has followed the story of a family through the Franco years and into the dawn of the new democracy. Two of the actors from the show have been eating their way around Spain on another TV programme. This week they were in Alicante our home province.

In Elda the screen brothers went to an, apparently, famous restaurant called La Sirena. I'd never heard of it but we checked it out today. There it was only a handful of metres from the bus station that Maggie and I used several times on our trips to and from Ciudad Rodrigo. It looks promising - crisp and modern, definitely worth a try.

The lads also popped into a chocolate shop called Torreblanca which (according to lots of web reviews) is the best chocolate shop in Spain. The bloke who owns it made the cake for the last big Royal Wedding. I'd never heard of it even though it's just 25 minutes from our front door. We bought a few cakey chocolatey things there this afternoon which I can still taste as I type this entry. I thought they were good without being exceptional. Maybe some of the 3€ a throw was because they came in a nice gold box with an interesting typeface!

Then there's the ice cream. Helado de Mantecado for which Santa Pola is, again apparently, famous. Now Maggie and I lived in Santa Pola for six or seven months. We never tried this ice cream. One of our pals has lived in the town for nearly eight years. I texted him today - "Where do you get this ice cream?" I asked - "New one on me," he said, "I'll investigate."

In the process of my Internet searches for information about restaurants, chocolates and ice cream I came across a review of a restaurant in the next village down the road, Chinorlet. We went to the Chinorlet Fiesta in August and we saw in the New Year in the village yet we didn't know this restaurant existed.

Do you reckon it's a product of being in a foreign land, is it hype or do we just go around with our ears and eyes closed?

A sort of Foxtrot

The Post Office sent me a text message to say that there was something I needed to sign for waiting in our PO Box. Usually this is good news, often something ordered from Amazon. But we weren't expecting anything and a letter or packet that needs to be signed for can be bad too - a traffic fine, a tax demand.

Over the counter it looked official, bad, but then I realised that it was for a friend who had used our PO box number as a temporary measure when he was between homes. I was relieved.

As far as I know when non residents, and our friend still maintains his UK residence, sell a house a percentage of the selling fee is held back to cover the tax payable on the sale by the notary who handles the transaction. The Land Registry people eventually arrive at the official figure and then either ask for more cash or pay back the difference. We guessed that was what the paperwork was about as well as formalising the land registry entry in the new names. It may have been something completely different though because without a dictionary to deal with the technical and archaic language used in official documents we couldn't be sure.

What I thought was interesting and so Spanish was that the couple involved "completed" on the house nearly four years ago. All that time to process the sale. Even more Spanish was that the couple had 10 days to appeal the ruling.

Slow, slow, quick quick, slow.

Bump

Someone bashed into Maggie's car whilst it was parked down in Cartagena. The damage wasn't significant in that we didn't spot it for a couple of days but there were dings and dents in the front wing and bonnet. The bumper was hanging loose too.

We talked to the insurance company and the claim process was simple enough but in the end it worked out cheaper to get the bumps fixed at the local bodyshop in Pinoso than lose the 210€ excess. Indeed the prices were so low that we asked the bodyshop to fix a couple of other dings and scrapes in the car.

Somehow I can't ever imagine that it would be cheaper in the UK to fix a car yourself than let the insurance take care of it.

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.