Footpaths

Though it's not something we're likely to make a habit we went for a walk in the country today.

Near Villena there are some old kilns that were used to turn gypsum into the raw material for plaster - the Hornos de Yeso - and they are near where the Villena Treasure was found.

It wasn't the most scenic spot in Alicante. There was a tip close by and lots of people seemed to have lost heart within sight of their goal and just dumped stuff by the side of the track. Nonetheless, the spot did have a certain charm and lots of lizards.

We followed a public footpath. There's a very simple system in Spain for marking paths. Red and white bands are used for long distance paths, yellow and white for shorter paths and green and white for the local stuff. The bands are usually painted on rocks, fenceposts, walls etc and they are normally well maintained. If the bands are crossed it means not to go there and a hinged symbol marks a turn.

The markings for the path we followed today were haphazard to say the best. Illusionist markers - now you see them, now you don't.

Well now - there's a thing

The Chair of The European Committe on Constitutional Affairs, Carlo Casini, sent a letter to Erminia Massoni the Chair of the EU Committee on Petitions about the two petitions sent by Estelle Gouerou (French Citizen) and Christopher Thompson (that's me) (British Citizen) on the right of EU Citizens to vote in another Member State.

Erminia kindly copied the letter to me.

Carlo told Erminia that the AFCO Coordinators had agreed, at their meeting on 10 October, that no EU treaty gives the right to citizens to vote in other member states. He did point out that Ms Gurmai has suggested, as paragraph 10 of her draft opinion to the PETI Committee on the  EU Citizenship Report 2010, that countries, like Spain and Germany, where Regional Assemblies are vested with legislative powers, could be invited by the EU Parliament to grant voting rights to EU Citizens in regional elections. Carlo also mentioned that a member of his committee, Mr Duff, has asked that the European Commission ensure that all Member States take action on the European Convention on Human Rights which guarantees the right to vote.

It looks as though it will all be thoroughly aired at the Conference on Inclusive Democracy to be hosted by AFCO and LIBE on the 9 and 10 November at the European Parliament when EU Citizens' voting rights will be on the agenda even though the primary purpose of the conference is to disseminate the outcome of the research done by the European Union Democracy Observatory based, as I'm sure you're aware, at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute

So that's nice and clear then.

Beetles

Why so many? Why are there so many lying on their backs waving their legs in the air? We have tens, maybe hundreds, of biggish beetles circling the house and, ocassionally, popping in to say hello.

No need to worry

Driving licences are a regular bar conversation topic amongst expats in Spain.

One line runs something like "We're European citizens, we have a European driving licence, we're entitled to drive." At the other end of the spectrum there's the "We're resident here so we have to change our licences for Spanish ones." Actually it's somewhere in between. Once you're resident there's a time limit on using the UK licence unless you register it with the Spanish authorities. It's easier and a bit cheaper to simply exchange. No need for another test or anything and for the first licence at least you don't have to do the medical.

At the beginning of July I took my licence to the local driving school, filled in a bundle of forms and handed over 75€ so that the chap from the driving school would do all the legwork for me. I could have popped down to Alicante, stood in a couple of long queues and done it myself but I chose the lazier, and much more expensive, option.

I forgot all about it for a while. The chap had said he'd phone when I needed to hand over my UK licence. Nowadays I understand that nothing much official happens very quickly, especially over the summer, and I trusted the bloke to do his job. But eventually I remembered and my British sensibility kicked in. I went to ask. 

"Should be soon," he said, "I've been getting the June ones back recently." 

"My problem," I said, "is calling into your office as you're not open on Saturdays." 

"No problem, I can always open up for you on a Saturday if I need to."

No need to worry then.

A taste of Blighty

We're having a very British weekend in Culebrón. We've just had lunch at a new bar restaurante run by Britons on the outskirts of Pinoso. It's now called Rafael's and it's using the building that once traded as RústicOriginal. I used to work for Rustic three or four years ago. It was strange to be back in the building that was so familiar and yet so different.

The place looked good, the staff were very welcoming, the Spanish translation of the, all British, menu read pretty well and the food was tasty, well presented and reasonably priced. All in all it was a very acceptable if not outstanding meal.

In the UK, when I lived there, I used to often eat in those chain pubs. I'd read the menu and think that the "freshly caught North Sea cod covered with organic wheat batter and accompanied by rough cut, blanched and deep fried potatoes," sounded good. I was surprised when I got fish and chips. In Spain menus tend to be straight forward, at least in the inexpensive places. The listing is basic: pork chops, chicken breast, hake etc. and things don't generally get more complicated than descriptions like steak with pepper sauce.

Back at Rafael's I noticed that the young man who served us was keen to correct our sloppy descriptions of the food. I don't remember exactly but I do know that when we got to the puddings he stressed things like stem ginger and black cherries when confirming our order.

I was transported back to the Boathouse in Peterborough.

The Village Fete

Culebrón, the name of our village, probably derives from the word culebra meaning snake. Add the -on ending to a word in Spanish and it often gives the idea of big or oversized. Big snake then. Maybe the village achieved fame because of a big snake? Culebrón is also the Spanish word for a soap opera presumably because the story goes on and on. When we tell Spaniards, who don't know the village, that we we live in Culebrón they usually think we've mispronounced the word but, when we persist, they laugh. What a strange thing to call a village they say.

There is another village just up the road called Paredón. Like Culebrón it's part of the municipality of Pinoso. Paredón means the place where people are executed by firing squad. Spaniards from outside the area think it's an even stranger name for a village than Culebrón.

My mum lives in St Ives in Cambridgeshire. She posted this photo on Facebook of their August Bank Holiday fete at the vicarage.

Pinoso has an active branch of the Royal British Legion, the poppy charity. Today, in Paredón, in the grounds of a British run business there, the Legion held a Gala Day. I bought a coconut cake and home made chutney. Paredón  may be a long way from St Ives, the weather and scenery may be different but there is no doubt about the lineage of the two events.

Heart and soul

Spain has a proud record on organ donations. Although donations fell a little in 2010 (1502 donors and 3,770 transplants) from the all time record of 1605 donors in 2009 Spain still tops the Worldwide list of donors and donations. Based on the donations per million inhabitants it's Spain, then Croatia, Portugal, The United States, France, Austria and Italy. Their main methodology here seems to be to talk to families after someone has died rather than to rely on donor registers.

Nonetheless, there is a donor register and I signed up for it on the Internet last week. That's why I'm telling you this as my donor card arrived today. The card has no legal validity, it just indicates to my family that if there is any part of my poor and degraded body that may be useful to someone else I'd like them to have it. Just one thing: please get someone to check that I'm dead first!

So now you know

A change in the air

There was a haze of steam vapour. The drops of water coalesced into little rivulets and ran down the mirror. Something was different

I'd just finished my morning shower and I realised that, for the first time in a couple of months, the temperature difference between shower water and environment was enough for to produce condensation. A tangible change.

There was a storm last night; big fat raindrops then a torrential downpour that bounced and shouted for a while. That's not the difference; that's not the change. The difference is the calendar.

When Spaniards talk of the summer they seem to mean July and August. There appears to be an almost magical relationship here, at least in my mind, between the date and the weather. It will be September on Thursday - summer will be gone.

To put my money where my keyboard is I predict now that the next big change will be on 1 November. Mark it in your diary now and hold me to account. Expect me to complain how autumn has suddenly become chill winter

Ironmongers and gold diggers

There is a huge ironmongers shop in Villena, a town close to us in Alicante, and being the hosts with the mosts that we are, that is where we were taking our houseguests. What man could resist three, or it may be four, floors of tools, fastenings, machinery and gadgets? We thought we may even have a meal in their canteen afterwards. Our plan was foiled when the place was closed.

Never mind. We did get to see the town Archaeological Museum.

In 1963 a couple of workmen in Villena, found a bracelet in the gravel they were spreading. The foreman hung the bracelet up on the wall so that whoever had dropped it could reclaim it. A bit later one of the workers thought they might just pop it around to the local jeweller to see if it was worth anything. As it was made of half a kilo of 24 carat gold it did have a certain value but the jeweller thought there was something odd about it and suggested showing it to a local archaeologist. In turn this chap recognised it as being 3,000 years old or from the late Bronze Age. Fortunately for the Villena Treasure there were none of the "I Buy Gold" shops that there are now on every Spanish street corner. They'd have weighed it in and turned it into a nice charm bracelet without batting an eye lid.

The archaeologist, a regular Hercule Poirot, suggested they go and have a look where the gravel had come from just in case there was anything else there. They found a clay urn which contained seventy pieces of gold, 9 kilos in all, along with some silver vases and a few other smaller items thrown in for good measure. Not as romantic as Howard Carter breaking into King Tut's tomb but a pretty impressive haul nonetheless.

We got this story from a subtitled version of a No-Do, the Spanish equivalent of the Pathé News. I thought the No-Do piece told the story rather well even though the re-enactment of the discovery of the bracelet by the real life Spanish workmen, jeweller and archaeologist was of about the same quality as my portrayal of a penguin in the St Paul's Cub Scout Christmas Pantomime that same year.

The man from the museum opened the cupboard in which the treasure is kept so we could all have a look.

There is apparently no idea where the pieces come from, how they ended up in Villena or who made them but they really are very pretty.

I really need to get some clips to re-attach that glass shelf to the bathroom mirror and without a new saw how can I trim the palm tree? Maybe any old ironmonger's will do.

The future of the Valley of the Fallen

This isn't about Culebrón or our life here.  I wrote it for the TIM magazine and it was published earlier this month. I just thought I'd save it here too. It's long.

El Valle de los Caídos is a huge mausoleum and basilica church carved into solid granite and topped off with an enormous cross in the Cuelgamuros Valley in the Sierra de Guadarrama, near Madrid. It was built, on the orders of Franco, between 1940 and 1959 with money from the National Lottery. The work was done by as many as 200,000 Republican prisoners of war according to some sources and as few as 2,470 according to others. The prisoners were able to gain remission on their sentences by working on the construction. Some sources suggest the workers were reasonably paid whilst others charge slave labour. The supposed number who died during the building of the the complex varies from 14 to 27,000, depending on whether the source is pro Franco or pro Republican. The monument was consecrated by Pope John XXIII in 1960 with care being taken to build a curtain wall within the basilica to ensure that not all of the space was consecrated. By this device the church was kept smaller than Saint Peter's in Rome. Over the main entrance an inscription reads "Fallen for God and Spain!"

The altar of the basilica is directly beneath the tallest cross in the World, all 150 metres of it. On one side of the altar, under a one and a half ton granite slab, lies Franco, el Caudillo, whilst on the other side is José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, the Spanish fascist party. More than 33,832 other victims of the Spanish Civil War keep them company. At least 491 bodies were transferred there illegally, to fill up spare tomb space, from some of the more than 2,000 mass graves dotted the length and breadth of Spain. The monument is easily the largest mass grave in the country. Most of the others are much less grand - roadside ditches and shallow graves usually dug and filled in the dead of night.

When Franco finally died in 1975, after nearly 40 years in power, there was a tacit agreement amongst politicians and society in general to forget the past. No settling of old scores, no mass trials, no national blood-letting. Then in October 2007 the Zapatero Government introduced the Historical Memory Law which recognised and extended the rights of those who suffered persecution or violence because of the Civil War and the dictatorship that followed.

The law directly condemns the Francoist regime, recognises certain rights for victims on either side during and after the war, prohibits political events in the Valley of the Fallen, legislates for the removal of all Francoist symbols from public areas, provides state aid in tracing, identifying and possibly exhuming victims buried in mass graves, annuls laws and some trial court rulings carried out during the dictatorship, grants Spanish nationality to anyone who fought in the International Brigades and gives the right of return to exiles and their descendants.

This law is a bit of a problem for the Valley of the Fallen. How can this monument, built as a symbol of the victory of National Catholicism, be turned into something that doesn't glorify Franco's reign? It's a particularly thorny problem for the Benedictines who live in the Santa Cruz Abbey within the valley and who are technically responsible for the monument. Under the new law they are supposed to ensure that the monument restores the balance between victors and vanquished though they don't seem to have knuckled down to the job so far. Another difficult question is to decide what happens to Franco's body, the only person in the whole complex who isn't a casualty of war. Everyone else, down to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who was executed by firing squad in Alicante during November 1936, died a victim.

The Government's answer has been to appoint a commission to work it all out. There were similar failed attempts under the Governments of Adolfo Suárez and Felipe González. The Commission's job is to decide how to tackle the problem of the status of the monument in relation to the new law. They have already had to disappoint Republican family members, who wanted to exhume and re-bury their forebears in places far away from their executioner. Government forensic scientists found that it was impossible to determine who was who in the jumbled and deteriorated piles of bodies.

Views vary as to what the commission will finally decide but the clever money seems to be on Franco's remains being removed from the Valley maybe to rest alongside his wife. Other options include moving Primo de Rivera as well, turning the place into a non religious museum or even converting it into a monument to the victims. There was even talk of dynamiting the giant cross which some have compared to an enormous swastika.

In true Spanish style the monument was suddenly closed in November 2009 for "urgent safety work." A pragmatic if short term solution. The commission is due to report late in 2011 and it looks likely that the safety work will be completed shortly afterwards.

Kiss me, Hardy

We had some Spanish pals here yesterday. Thinking about it this may be only the second time that we've had Spanish guests in the house. It doesn't say much for our integration. Maggie pointed out we don't have many people around at all. That doesn't say much for our friendliness.

The food didn't go down too well. The conversation was a bit forced at times and our Spanish may well have been quite comical but it was still a nice day.

One of our topics of conversation was about families. That led to kissing. Not the physical act, a conversation about it.

When I left the UK people never ended their conversations with family or close friends with "I love you" indeed for the most part I was able to avoid any of that false and ritualised sentimentality. I very seldom hugged the people I met. For colleagues and new acquaintances a firm handshake served very well. For old and dear friends words of greeting sufficed. I approve of handshaking, an ancient and appropriate gesture. I approve of old friends and the shared experiences. When some sophist was determined to give me a hug there was always the possibility of bloodshed, or at least a good nutting, as my forehead crashed into one part or another of the other person's head.

In Spain the greeting has rules too. Between men a handshake, possibly with a hand on shoulder to add warmth. Fine. Between women or between a man and a woman a kiss on each cheek, first  right to right then left to left. Brushing cheek to cheek for first timers or acquaintances, more cheek or even lips to cheek for close friends. I understand the rules. I like the gesture. Bloodshed has been minimal.

My Spanish pal was explaining that close male family members and those solid, friend for life male friends also do the two kisses thing. I can't imagine that would go down too well in the UK even now.

Just a note: After Marilo's comments on Facebook I have changed the English slightly so as not to give the impression that Spanish people go around snogging each other in greeting.