Now there's remarkable

The Mini garage that I bought the car from offered me a cheap deal on servicing for the next three years. It looks like a good offer but the problem is that the garage is in Elche - only 45kms from home in Culebrón but a long way from the weekday home in Cartagena.

I went to talk to the BMW/Mini dealer in Cartagena - could they offer me the same package? After lots of hooing and aahing the answer was no. Par for the course.

I rang the garage in Elche, I explained that I'd like to take up their offer but that it would be a problem getting in to see them to sign the paperwork and make the payment. Was there any chance I could do it by phone or post? I didn't expect them to say yes. This is a country where things are done face to face but the woman on the phone surprised me. "Of course, I'll send you the contract by email, you send it back signed by post or email, transfer the cash to our account and I'll send you the finished paperwork by mail."

There was no particular fuss, the email turned up, I've made the payment, it looks like we have a deal.

Jijona

When I was a lad I fell over regularly and often bumped my head. I have no idea why as I hadn't discovered cheap brandy then. Anyway, my mum would rub the bump with butter. Again I have no idea why unless she was on the brandy herself but I suppose it meant that I got some sort of attention and that made me feel better.

I have no doubt that when lads fell over in the 1950s in Alicante their mums would apply olive oil. The stuff that's to hand. Using whatever is to hand happens all over the World.

In Jijona which is in the hills behind Alicante they have a lot of almond trees and hens and bees. The result is that the town is famous for a sort of nougat called turrón which is made from almonds, eggs and honey. There are two traditional types. The tooth breaking variety has whole almonds set in a brittle mass of eggs and honey whilst the soft one, that drips oil, the has the almonds reduced to a paste along with eggs and honey plus extra almond oil. Turrón and Christmas are inseperable in Spain.

It was a nice sunny day today and a Sunday afternoon drive seemed like just the ticket. We set off for Alcoy after seeing a programme on the telly last night extolling the virtues of the countryside around there. When we passed the sign for Jijona we changed our plan as neither of us had ever been there. We expected to find the town bustling with people buying in stocks of Christmas turrón but instead the place seemed to have been abandoned and it took us a long time to find an open bar never mind a turrón seller.

I suppose we'll just have to be satisfied with getting our turrón from the local supermarket like every other year.

Getting a taste

Sometime back in the summer Maggie heard about a winery and restaurant very close to the town of Yecla and, consequently, close to us. Now this is Maggie's idea of the perfect trip out. So we went to get lunch. For some reason, I now forget, it was closed. Elephant like this little excursion has been lurking in the back of Maggie's mind. Today was the day to act.

Smart sort of place. The bodega is a big, low looking, modern building surrounded by vineyards. The restaurant is upstairs. Enormous windows with a view to the hills beyond, clean modern look, lots of wood, good sized tables, crisp white linen. The sort of restaurant where they don't leave the wine or bread on the table.

The menu was full of the Spanish equivalents of all those compotes, drizzles and terrines - lots of things that sounded dead interesting. We couldn't decide. So we took the easy way out and went for the "menú degustación." Basically these menus are an opportunity to taste a range of things from the restaurant's range but in reduced portions. I think it was four starters, two mains and a couple of puddings, two bottles of wine plus water, bread and coffee. At 35€ not exactly cheap but rather nice with all that over the left shoulder service and what not. Some things weren't detailed on the menu, "Were those flowers that we just ate?" "No sir, they were artichokes frozen so that they could be cut into wafer thin slices and then deep fried." Crikey.

It's only the second time that we've tried one of these tasting menus and both times the restaurants have been real winners. So, the next time you're in our neck of the woods I'd suggest you give them a go.

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.