The walk in drive in

I had some WhatsApp messages from the village mayoress.

9th June: If you fancy enjoying the change of season come to the summer cinema in El Culebrón. With the aim of raising funds for the village fiesta on Saturday 21st at 10pm we'll be showing a film on the Chapel Esplanade. Bring your own rolls, drinks and sunflower seeds -and 2€ for the seat. We'll be waiting!

12th June: We won't be charging for the seats but we will accept donations.

My guess is that someone pointed out that there were lots of copyright issues with charging for a film but they decided to press on regardless. Quite right. What better way to celebrate the longest day? I liked the grandness of the Chapel Esplanade - la explanada de la ermita, I've never heard it called that before but she must mean the bit of tarmac opposite the village hall by our tiny church.

I'd already been to one film today - the very enjoyable Blockbuster- but I've got my beer chilled ready for this evening and I'll be there even if there is no mention of the film that we will see. I'm sure it will be top quality DLP digital with Dolby sound - the works.

Comfy

I don't start work for a couple of hours so I thought I'd go to a local bar for a bit of a read and a coffee. I'm in La Unión, quite definitely a part of Spain, but the story is based in Pinoso.

Last weekend I was in Pinoso. I laughed to myself when I noticed a sign in a bread shop "I don't speak English but at least I try." It seemed strange that the shop owner felt the need to apologise for speaking Spanish in Spain.

I was in town to get the tyre fixed on my car so with that job done a reward seemed in order. I thought bacon sandwich. A bacon sandwich and a cup of tea. If tea were involved I needed somewhere British so I went to the charity shop and café bar run by the animal charity PAPAs.

Despite spending very little time in Culebrón I knew the two people who were serving the food and drinks in the bar. Whilst I was sitting there a couple of people passed through who said hello to me. The bacon sandwich involved close questioning about the crispiness of the meat and the colour of the bread. I gave confident answers. It was all together a pleasant and comfortable experience. And it was a good bacon sandwich - just as it should be.

Now I'm off for this coffee. I have three bars to choose from and all of them are good. I always get a courteous welcome and sometimes a friendly one. I won't have any linguistic or cultural problems and if I did I would be able to cope with them. The exchange will be a short one though - businesslike. Nobody will ask me when Maggie is due home, comment on my Facebook photos or ask if I still have the same car.

One of my students, a bloke who speaks cracking English full of idiom and colloquialisms, told me yesterday that when he lived in the UK people would ape his pronunciation and snigger.

Language, language always language to make it just a touch more or a touch  less comfortable.

On Kings

I used to work with a chap who was fond of quoting Denis Diderot “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”. I worked with him over thirty years ago so it must have made an impact.

The truth is though that I'm not really bothered by what a bunch of rich toffs are up to. In fact I think it's funny that all the Royals seem quite keen to get married to non royals. At least when they were all marrying their cousins they could claim blue blood, or at least family genetic disorders. Now they're just more canon fodder for the paparazzi like any other celeb.

I must admit I always quite liked those fat ones - Andrew and Sarah. They were exactly what they should have been, a couple of Hoorah Henries going to parties or whatever it is that people with too much money and too much spare time do with their equally vacuous pals. They never tried too hard to pretend that they cared about dolphins or landmines.

An old friend said that he was surprised I hadn't blogged anything about the abdication of Juan Carlos I. Two reasons really. I've always tried to maintain the idea that this blog is about the things, the little things, that happen to me and around me in Spain and since the King stopped me giving blood he and I have not had a lot to do with each other. The second is that I don't care.

Juan Carlos has been a popular bloke. All the stuff around the transition, the way he handled himself then went down well. Also there were lots of urban myths about him helping stranded motorists, popping out to do ordinary things because he thought he was an ordinary sort of bloke. We all laughed when he told Hugo Chávez to shut up when he kept interrupting the then Spanish President in some meeting in Chile. We laughed again when we realised the ring tone on his phone was of one of the grandchildren laughing. Then a couple of years ago all sorts of stories started to pop up about his sexual dalliances particularly with a German princess, Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. (It's like some novelette isn't it?  - a German princess - does she have a hat with a spike?)  I think it was the elephant hunt that did for him though. From then on in his popularity plummeted and for the first time it was ok to have a go at the King. Just recently public opinion gave him 3.72 out of 10 against the 7.46 he scored in 1994.

Anyway. So why am I writing now. The answer is that I was shouting at the radio the other day.

The Spanish Constitution says, in article 14, that everyone is equal before the law. Later in articles 71 and 102 it gives some protections to parliamentary deputies, senators and members of the government to stop them being legally harassed. A later "organic" law dealing with the judiciary gave similar cover to various law officers. The King goes one better, he's above it all, he's untouchable. Those with protection still have to go to court but it takes a lot longer to get them there and they don't have to go along to the local courts. They generally go directly to the Supreme Court. The regional governments have done something similar for their regional deputies and  it's reckoned that there are now about 10,000 people with special judicial protection.

So, the King gives up his job and they are having to write a law to get his boy into place. When he goes lots of things change - like his daughters no longer being princesses - and he stops being above the law. A little side piece to this was that the abdication law should ensure that the present King maintains a special legal protection even when he becomes a regular citizen again. Some radio pundit was giving his very important opinion that it was imperative that this dispensation continue. "Why?" I shouted at the radio, "give me a reason!" Rich and powerful people get away with murder (hopefully not literally) anyway.

There are 1,700 officials being investigated in cases of corruption in Spain, 500 of them have been charged but only 20 people are in prison. The other day four bankers who had awarded themselves pensions of just short of 30 million euros didn't get sent to prison when they said sorry they'd been so bad and gave back the money. Rich gets have already got all the protection they need.

If the local court isn't any good then it should get fixed and if the local court is good enough for me it's good enough for him and for everyone else.

Scotty, beam me up!

I went to vote. I hunted through the thirty nine piles of candidate lists till I found the one I wanted, pushed it in the envelope, had fun with the spelling of my name at the voting table and that was my part played in the democratic process for another couple of years.

There was though another envelope and another ballot box for the consulta popular - a sort of referendum organised by the local town hall. More fun, more democracy.

The first question was whether we wanted to make Pinoso a Slow City giving priority to bikes and pedestrians and limiting motor vehicles to 30 kph. The second question asked us to prioritise upgrading a road to a local shrine, constructing a walking and running route around the town or building bike lanes between the town centre and the outlying villages.

Fair enough. I wondered why those particular schemes but I thought it was relatively clever to use the election turnout to canvas opinion. Afterwards though I considered what a cumbersome process traditional voting is. It would certinly slow down declaring the Eurovision winner if the system relied on polling stations.

One of the election manifestos I read yesterday, published only on the party's website, said that it cost about two million euros for an election mailshot to every voter in Spain. There must be lots of similar costs with all the palaver of voting slips and their counting not to mention the cost to individuals of travelling to a central location to vote. It can't be long before some much less cumbersome system takes over from the sort of systems that I have experienced all my adult life, can it?

Then of course they'll be able to ask us if we want the road up to Fatima tarmacking at the cost of the cycle ways or the exercise track whenever they want.

Village hall and pub

I'm cool with a romería and with Elena gone on to her birthday party it was up to me to save the vermouth session. Last night we had the annual village meeting to plan the summer fiesta.

I forget the reason. Actually I've got a bit of a bad head this morning because I popped into Amador's bar on my walk home and that sort of set me on the path of wrongdoing and amnaesia. I've just remebered a conversation with Eduardo outside his restaurant which was faltering, as always, but this time because of alcohol rather than more general stupidity. Anyway, whatever the reason everything got changed around a bit this year.

So on Friday instead of the vermouth session to kick off the village fiesta we're going to have a catered meal followed by the music and dancing. Cost cutting was the order of the day because the grant from the Town Hall will be 900€ again this year and lottery ticket sales haven't been very healthy either. There was talk of not having live music. The blasphemy of a "party tape" was suggested.  Eventually they decided on Raphael - for pasa dobles and cha-cha-cha. I tried a little joke with the woman sitting next to me about it not being the Raphael but she had no idea what I was talking about.

That was like me and the meeting. I was just about keeping up with the gist as the ten or twelve people there mounted simultaneous conversations but to say I understood would be being economical with the truth.

The foot race has been moved to Sunday along with the football and the chocolate. The gachamigas and the church parade have moved to the Saturday. I think we cut out the rockets to save money. I realised that the vermouth session was missing from the plans. I nearly spoke up but, in the end, my nerve failed. Kipling would have been cross. Fortunately when Inma was checking the budget to see if we could save any money anywhere she spotted the vermouth and she had the temerity to suggest scrapping it. Elena spoke up for alcohol as the perfect accompaniment to the football and the vermouth was saved.

Then there was the romería. Someone suggested a romería instead of a procesión. Suddenly everyone was voting. I was nodded at across the room - join in - vote for the romería along with everyone else said the nod; so I did. There was talk about whether it should be in plan formal or informal. Now I know what a romería is. It's a Catholic festival where there is a journey to a shrine or suchlike with or to a saint or Virgin. I asked my neighbour what the route would be but, again, she had no idea what I was talking about. So I asked Inma when she was checking that I'd understood what was going on. "Yes, that's right," she said, normally romería is a bit of a pilgrimage but we just mean that it's not like this - she crossed her hands across her body at waist height - and everyone gets to follow the saints instead. The problem is because the priest can't say mass till eight it's going to be in the dark so we'll have to choose a route that goes to lighter places. Another of those things where I know but I didn't.

And the vermouth? Well as Inma was showing me the running order I pointed out that the vermouth session was missing. "So it is," she said and it was written down on the back of the official envelope.

It's a country

I'd been surprised when the door of office number two had opened as I leaned on it. I half stumbled and half leapt into the room on the other side. Two women gawped at me. I gawped back. I stammered out a greeting. 

"Hello, I want to send this to Qatar," I said, holding out a small padded envelope, weight about 20g and similar in size to an iPhone. 

"Qatar in Cantabria?" she asked. 

I pointed to the address printed on the envelope. 

"No, Qatar the country in the Middle East - next door to Saudi Arabia."

"Is that close to Lebanon?"

"Closeish," I said. 

"Is it part of Saudi Arabia?" she asked. 

"No, it's a country."

"Ah, I see; it's an island," she said, staring at the Google entry. 

"More a peninsula," I countered

She rang someone. "It'll be 97€," she said - "same as Lebanon." Back there again. I blanched but handed her my credit card. "We've got no machine," she said. I'm sure it was Gilbert O' Sullivan on the radio. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I asked if this were indeed a business. When I was outside again I couldn't help it. One very long, very crude outpouring at high volume. I went and got the money, I went back to the office, I paid and I left the little envelope with them to lose.

It was a strange office even by Spanish standards. When I'd first arrived I was sure the building was abandoned. Blinds down, litter strewn yard, no vehicles, no opening hours, no sign of life. I don't think they get many personal callers. Hence the gawping. 

Maggie has lost a contact lens. The sort of lens she needs is not available in Qatar. Fortunately she bought her last lenses in Cartagena so I was able to go to a local optician and order up a replacement.

Today was my first opportunity to ship the lens. I got up early to go to a carrier before work.  It was so early I hadn't been able to buy an envelope to put the lens in. I suspected, rightly, that the carriers would sell packaging. The lens was in liquid in a little bottle. The receptionist woman peered at it over her headset.

"You can't send liquids to Qatar," said the woman. 

"Fine, I'll put it in this case without liquid," I said. 

"You can't send contact lenses to Qatar," said the woman. 

I asked "Why not?"

"No idea." 

"Could I put it in something else; disguise it?"

"Not possible, they check everything."

"What can you send to Qatar?" I asked. 

"I can't tell you," said the woman.

"Can you send clothes?" I asked.

"Only with a receipt and a customs declaration," said the bearded man sitting next to her.

I felt we had maybe failed to build the human bridge so necessary for a fulfilling business relationship. Later I bought an envelope. I took the lens out of the liquid and put it into a dry case. That's why it was the second on my list, office number two.

Still in business

Facilities in Culebrón include a post box, a social centre and a dusty basketball cum football area. Business wise we have the bodega and oil mill and rather surprisingly we still have two restaurants. For me these restaurants have the huge advantage that they are only a few hundred metres from our front door. Drinking alcohol with the meal becomes a possibility.

The Nou Culebrón opened in December 2012 and it's still open. Three separate bar restaurants have failed in the same building whilst we've been in the village so congratulations to Amador, the boss, for keeping it going.

The other restaurant Casa Eduardo was open when we arrived in the village and it still is. Eduardo's is best described as singular. The décor, the furniture and the tableware have not, to my knowledge, changed in the nine or so years we've been eating there. My chair was a bit wobbly. The man at the next table tried to find one that wasn't but gave up. The culinary offer is usually local rice or stews but not always.

I quite like going to Eduardo's. The man shows fortitude. I like the idea of supporting a local business. In his way Eduardo is always pleased to see us. He does tend to mumble a bit though and the imprecision of some of his offers along with my faltering language can cause misunderstandings. Maggie is less taken with the place than I am. She remembers the time when we played the inevitable game and she got a sausage.

It usually goes like this. Eduardo lunges; what would you like to eat? We parry; what have you got? For several years it used to get quite vague at this point. Only when you'd not ordered something did you realise that it was available. Mussels, for instance, used to be a regular on the unwritten menu but we were never offered them.  Working on the principle of ask and you shall receive Maggie asked after the availability of the local sausages. Her daring was rewarded with a single sausage served in splendid isolation on a well worn side plate.The last couple of times though the vagueness has gone.  I have been firmly guided towards the correct decision. The answers are restricted to yes or no. "Would you like a nice lamb chop?" I suspect that the kitchen is not overstocked.

Geoff and I went there today. Our meal included the inevitable fried almonds mixed with plain crisps, a basic salad and toasted bread served with sobrasada. Main course was a selection of perfectly good grilled meats with chips. For puddings we were given a choice of two, some hesitation on my part so Eduardo offered both on the same plate. I suppose there may have been very little of either left as we were given very small portions. Coffee too and the whole lot for the two of us was just 20€. Can't complain.

I'm sure Eduardo will still be there when Maggie gets back home in the summer. Something I am sure she is looking forward to

Two sheds Jackson and landscapes

I was thinking, as I drove between La Unión and Culebrón, about what I could see out of the car. I decided it was family and friends. You get what you're given. Blood's thicker than water and all that. History and culture from hand to hand and gene to gene over the generations. Alfred and the cakes, 1066, Glorious Goodwood, Cornish cream teas, feet and inches, Ant and Dec. Your friends on the other hand you get to choose. No blood ties, no original shared history. Something you manufacture between yourselves. I watched the dusty, brown grey, scrubby lunar landscape, the almond groves and the vineyards pass by. I looked at the bright blue sky and I thought how lovely it all looked. In the beginning, when I first got to Alicante and Murcia I thought it looked desolate. The sort of place that John Wayne ate beans.

Maggie and I had a great time in my old MGB car driving around the Cotswolds. I thought the Cotswolds were amazing. When we saw Calendar Girls, when it was new and first at the cinema here dubbed into Spanish, I looked at those North Yorkshire landscapes and thought how stunning it all looked

I was reading a piece that turned up on the English language feed to my mobile phone so it was either El País in English or more likely the Spanish pages of the Guardian. The author was a Brit writing from Spain. He said that some survey had shown that expats living in sunny climes were less happy than people living in the British climate. He suggested that British refugees to Spain were likely to be a bit curmudgeonly anyway because most were dissatisfied and were looking for something better. His main thesis though was that what was great as a break for a couple of weeks didn't really match up in the long term. He likened it to some chap who celebrates Christmas every day. I didn't agree with him.

On Sunday evening at about 9.30 I went to get some cash from the bank machine in the main part of town. La Unión is not a pretty town. The chewing gum plastered onto the flagstones looked particularly disgusting and I worried that one of the several footballs being kicked around by small groups of young lads would get me in the head. I turned left into the High Street, I was in shirt sleeves, the town was lively with people. A churros and chocolate van was doing good trade.The comparison with Huntingdon High Street crossed my mind. I often enjoyed a swift pint in the George before the weekend was over during the Huntingdon years. I was rather pleased with myself for being in La Unión.

It's not a comparison. It's a bonus. I got lucky with my family. Some of my friends I've known for over 40 years.

Strong Murciano accents, computers, the naming of parts and the solution close to home

Now I've told you about our palm tree several times. When the tree man failed to turn up last time I did the beetle slaughtering patrol myself. It was hard graft. Nonetheless, the basis for my doing the job every six weeks was there. I had the spray gear it's just that the tree is taller than me even with the spray gun wand in hand - I simply needed a longer reach. With a bit of extra kit I could avoid either having to climb a ladder with 16 litres of insecticide on my back or to coax the tree man into coming to the house.

An internet search had revealed an agricultural supplier in La Palma which seemed to have the tubes, connectors and paraphernalia I needed to gain the necessary height.  I wasn't looking forward to explaining what I needed so when I was able to sneak into the big, empty store I was well pleased. I found the section I was looking for and started to connect this to that like some fetishistic horticultural version of Meccano. I would have soon had a solution without the need to explain myself but someone noticed me and sent a sales assistant to help.

The man had a strong, strong Murciano accent. We had a communication problem. He seemed to be a bit clumsy. He snapped at least one of the connectors as he attempted to engineer a solution. Eventually he thought we had it right. I wasn't so sure mainly because his idea of a three metre extension and mine varied by about one and a half metres. I was in no position to argue and we moved to the cash desk. He couldn't get the computer to work out the bill until someone showed him how to do it.

I went to buy petrol in the same town, in La Palma. I needed a receipt. The man in the petrol station had a strong, strong Murciano accent and he couldn't get the computer to work out the bill either until someone showed him how to do it. Sherlock Holmes like I noticed the pattern.

Back in Culebrón I fastened the whole kit and caboodle together and it nearly reached, it nearly worked but it needed fine tuning. A couple of extra bits. Today I went to one of the farm shops in Pinoso. There I found a specially designed 3.2 metre telescopic spray gun extender. It wasn't cheap but it works perfectly. Excellent I thought. Elementary.

It's just rice

I was going to say that we had a famous restaurant in Pinoso then I thought about it. Obama is famous and Shakira too but I don't think that even restaurants as well known as el Celler de Can Roca are really famous. Well known maybe?

So there's a restaurant in Pinoso that's quite famous and it's famous for the local rice dish. I worked for a couple of years in a street very close to the restaurant. Time after time some big Audi or Porsche or Bentley would pull up alongside me, roll down the window and ask politely for the restaurant. My reply was word perfect I'd done it so often

This well known Pinoso restaurant is renowned amongst the locals for the unpleasantness of its owner and the outrageous price of its food. After all it's just rice. I've heard that said by Britons and Spaniards alike. I've never been. Too expensive for my wallet.

I need to take a moment here to make sure you're OK on this rice/arroz concept. Paella and rice are virtually synonymous. The big flat pan that rice is cooked in is called a paella and so the food cooked in it came to be called paella. In reality though paella/rice can vary significantly from the original Vesta recipe. In Valencia paellas seem to have a lot of seafood, chicken and veg. There's a rice, traditionally for Fridays, to comply with the once common "no meat on Friday" of good Catholics. It's made with cod and cauliflower. The rice cooked in fish stock has lots of names - in Cartagena it's called caldero. Down in Elche I think arroz con costra has loads of sausages and maybe chickpeas as well as the rice and the whole is topped off with an egg crust. Arroz negro is coloured with cuttlefish or squid ink. In Albacete they seem to like quite gooey rice, arroz meloso. And so it goes on. And on.

So around Pinoso our rice is thin, quite dry and with rabbit and snails. With my mum being here we've been to a lot of restaurants. Most of them cheap and cheerful. She wanted something better when we were in Culebrón. I took her and her pal Sheila to a restaurant called Elías in Chinorlet village very close to our house. Our welcome was very iffy and we were finally given a terrible table but once we were under way the service was excellent and the food a revelation.

Good wine is wasted on me. I'm of the "I like what I like" school. It's normally the same with food. But as I tucked into the traditional all i oli and tomato paste on toast I wondered if I could ever eat the normal supermarket all i oli again. I'd seen the cooks preparing it (If you don't know what all i oli is think of it as garlic mayonnaise) in the glass fronted kitchen as we waited for a table and I thought the whole rigmarole of rice cooking over wooden twigs and garlic being ground in a pestle and mortar was a bit pretentious. I have to admit though that it tasted fabulous. When the rice came it looked just as usual - not like the stuff you get in a ten Euro menú place - like the stuff from a decent mid range restaurant. It didn't taste like it though. I could actually taste the wood smoke that they go on about, the mix of tastes was just right, the rabbit and the snails (hunted not reared - yes they breed snails too!) were, well, just right too. It was a taste experience, a revelation. I now understand all the fuss about paella being the pièce de résistance of Spanish cuisine. Even my mum, who had suddenly declared that she didn't like rice after we had ordered the food but before it came, was won over.

Pinoso featured on a TV programme about the rice and other local foods in a programme called "Cooks without Stars." The man talking about Fondillon wine is Roberto from Culebrón. What a media star.

Fred and Wilma, Barney and Betty

When I used to work in the furniture shop I often delivered furniture to cave houses. There are quite a few in the Pinoso area. In fact there are lots of cave houses all over Spain. It was often a bit of a struggle to get bed frames or sofas to go around corners and into the designated rooms.

I was in Rojales, Alicante last weekend where lots of the caves have been turned into craft workshops. Yesterday I was in Guadix, Granada where there are supposed to be over 2,000 caves used as homes. Indeed in the museum there, dedicated to cave dwelling, to troglodytism, there was an information board to say that in 2002 there were 5,838 caves in Granada province which were the principal home for just short of 15,000 people.

It's not a complicated idea. You find some rock that's easy to dig. Usually that's clay. You start with a vertical cut to produce the façade of the house. In the centre of that façade you cut the arched door and from that door you excavate the first room generally with a square base and a vaulted roof and then work backwards into the hillside cutting galleries and rooms. The work is done with picks and shovels. The actual distribution of the rooms depends on how much money you have to pay the people who dig the galleries and rooms but also on the general topography of the land. The expert digger has the experience to determine the best shape.

Normally the principal rooms are towards the front of the house and the less used rooms at the back. Natural light is only available to the rooms that are close to the façade so people try to have the façade south facing so as to get as much natural light as possible. The general wisdom is that caves maintain an even temperature which is warm in the winter and cool in the summer. The average temperature inside depends a bit on how deep the caves are dug but generally they maintain the average air temperature of the region from summer to winter. In most of Spain that means the inside temperature hovers between 17ºC and 23ºC without any marked seasonal change. Humidity is around a very healthy 50% though damp seems to be a problem in lots of the caves I've been in.

Many of the caves are given a frontage of more typical building materials and sometimes, in the style of building a conservatory onto your house, an extension is built away from the rock face to give some extra room.

It can be quite odd sometimes, driving around Spain, to see a chimney sprouting out of the ground and to realise that someone is living below ground as people have done for thousands of years.