Gardening

I don't really have much to tell you about gardening. The problem is that it's over a week since I blogged anything and, as I've spent a lot of those day in the garden doing the sort of damage that is usually reserved for logging companies in the Amazon, it was all I couuld think of to write about.

We have a garden that I think measures about 1,000 square metres. Small by Spanish country standards but big in British terms. We have a lot of fruit trees such as figs, peach, nispero, almonds, plums, apple, pomegranate, cherry and quince; lots of ivy, lots of pine trees, and plenty more. The trouble is that I'm not much of a gardener. I can tell a tulip from a daffodil from a rose but that's my sort of level. Nature, colourwise, always strikes me as a bit monotonous. When a rose blooms, or the almond trees are in blossom (like now) there's a touch of colour in the garden but I consider  the countryside to be lot of shades of green and brown - for most of the year at least. This monotonous colour scheme doesn't help me to decide which of the various green and brown growths are good, nice, desirable plants that I should leave in peace and which are the weeds that apparently deserve to die.

We've spent years living somewhere else as well as Culebrón. After coming back from Salamanca one summer to find the weeds in our garden so thick and high that the chap with the rotavator said he didn't think the machine would cope, we decided it was time to employ a gardener. We asked our friend Geoff to do it. Just a couple of hours each week - to keep the weeds down and the garden tidy.

Now Geoff is British, English in fact. He has a British sensibility about gardens. He likes to see things growing. Maybe some nice veg, something flowering, certainly some variety and things like ground cover to keep the weeds down. He planted things. We had were able to eat homegrown tomatoes and cabbage during the Geoffrey years.

Spanish people very seldom come into our garden. Our friend Pepa came soon after we'd bought the house. She commented on the garden being limpio which means clean. This was because, between the various and obvious plants, there was bare earth where the weeds were being held at bay. Pepa explained to us that this was the Mediterranean way. Bare earth to avoid fires taking hold or spreading.

So, now that we are back in residence, we had the choice. We could build on all the work that Geoff had put in to produce a varied garden or we could slash and burn our way back to cleanliness. I think it was more my decision than Maggie's that we would cut everything back. And basically that's what we started to do in September. At first the jobs were obvious. The Torrevieja weed, which is a groundcovering succulent, was the first to go, then lots of the ivy that was growing beneath the fig trees. Next all the yuccas had to be dug out. We thinned out some of the other plants like cactus and iris and the palm tree and ivy hedge got their regulation trims.

None of it was really gardening. More like navvy work; digging, chopping, ripping and tearing. With the brute force stuff generally out of the way the garden began to look Spanish again. Maggie actually added some new plants and did some gentle pruning - with the help of tutorials from YouTube videos. All I had to contribute was a bit of weeding. That pruning though inspired me. I thought Maggie was being a bit timid about it. I tore up the last patch of decorative ivy over the weekend and, this week, I've been chopping down lots of pine branches.

Vicente, our next door neighbour passed as I hacked the other day. The garden's looking nice he said - very clean. I sniggered. It may be time to put the shears and clippers away, let the compost heap settle a bit and maybe just keep the weeds down. After all, to paraphrase Ecclesiastes "there's a time to plant and a there's a time to prune."

Evading tax

I got a letter from the tax people yesterday. Now letters from the tax people are not written in normal, everyday Spanish. They are Brontesque in style. With the envelope ripped open and the single page scanned it looked bad. There were lots of words I didn't understand but it was clear that the Revenue, Hacienda, were unhappy about the tax I'd paid on my pension. Tax people can be nasty. Tax people take your house and send you to prison when you're naughty. Unless of course you are very, very rich in which case they are extremely nice to you.

I explained my situation last year in a post on Life in La Unión Just a quick recap. Normally, if you are a Spanish resident, your worldwide income is taxed in Spain. However, I have a local government pension from the UK and there is an agreement between Spain and the UK that government pensions are taxed at source, in the UK. So far so good but where I turn into Al Capone is about my additional voluntary contributions. They provide an additional pension of about forty quid a month. Rather than declare that cash in Spain I simply left it in the UK tax regime. I shouldn't have done. I should have declared it in Spain.

The financial year in Spain is the calendar year. Sometime early in the year, March I think, Hacidenda do their sums and decide whether you owe them money or they owe you money. In 2014, for the tax year 2013, they caught up with me. I came clean and paid the unpaid tax. It was about 70€. The tax office said that to sort out the same underpayment for 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 I'd have to go to an accountant. So I did. I just chose an asesor at random in the town where I was living, La Unión and asked for advice. To be honest the accountant didn't exude reliability but he told me that I earned so little in total that it was all straightforward and I didn't need to do anything. No fines, no clink and no public humiliationn coming my way.

So when I got that letter I started to curse the accountant and think bad thoughts about the man from the Prudential who sold me those worthless AVCs too. Ten minutes later though with a more careful reading of the letter, and only needing to look up two words as it turned out, I realised that the tax people were actually offering an amnesty to we foreigners who hadn't paid up on our pensions. They mentioned the special circumstances we are under i.e. we don't understand the lingo or the culture and we have no idea what's going on. We have till June to sort it out.

Now I have an accountant because I am technically self employed. I phoned him. No worry he said. If it wasn't sent registered post it isn't dangerous. We can talk about it when we next meet.

Thinking about it this letter is actually good. It's a general letter. The accountant in La Unión could be right and it could be that I owe no tax. It could also be that the accountant in La Unión was wrong and I do owe some tax. However, with the amnesty there will be no fine and no interest to pay so the worst it could be is four times the amount I handed over last year or thereabouts. But the best thing is that Hacienda has a process for sorting this out and once I've filled in the appropriate forms and paid any debts it will all be nice and starightforward.

And I do value a quiet life now I'm in my dotage.

Funeral in Santa Pola

David Collins died this week. He was cremated today in the Santa Pola Tanatorio. We went along as old friends.

David used to live in Pinoso though he's lived in Catral for years now. I think, because I gave him a hand with his computer, he suggested me as a possible worker to his daughter Julie. At the time she ran a furniture shop called RusticOriginal. I ended up working there and it remains my favourite job of those I've had here in Spain.

It's the first time I've been inside a tanatorio in Spain - the translation in most dictionaries is funeral parlour but a good number of them seem to have the facilities of a crematorium too. I've never quite worked out the system for Spanish funerals and cremations and I decided against doing the research and describing it here. I get the idea though that the tanatorio is where close family stand vigil as it were and receive other family members, friends and colleagues. Someone in Cartagena told me that they often used the bar in the local tanatorio for a late night drink as it is always open.

When we turned up in Santa Pola today I noticed that another family were camped out in one of the side rooms off the main entrance of the building. Some of David's golfing pals were there before us and together we waited. The family turned up at the appointed hour in one of the undertaker's limos. They came with a couple of Spanish friends of David's who had helped the family make all the arrangements for the cremation and the transfer of the ashes back to the UK.

Together we all went into a chapel with David's sealed coffin on a trolley. Two of David's daughters, Julie and Tracy, looked after the proceedings. They arranged some photos on and around the coffin and there were a couple of David's favourite songs on CD. Jules and Tracy read their own tributes and a piece from the other two daughters, who were not able to be there because they live in South Africa and New Zealand. There was no "official" input either lay or religious and I wondered if that were the normal routine at a tanatorio. I have this vague idea that in more routine funerals the priest conducts a service before the body is moved on to the tanatorio but doesn't officiate after that. I could well be wrong though.

With the talking over, a chap, in a blue work coat, wheeled the coffin away. A few moments later we were called to join him. The coffin was now behind a glass screen and the lid was lifted so that we could see David for one last time. The second of David's two songs was given a reprise as the coffin was sealed and then set on an apparatus which slid the casket into the furnace.

I wondered if the last look and such a close up view of the final act had a history behind it as though to prove that there was no last minute skulduggery.

And that was it. Goodbye for ever to David. A little discussion about the paperwork and the choice of urn for the ashes before the family went off in the waiting car.

We went off to have a coffee and stare at the Med.

Hey Mr Beaver

It was quite early, maybe around eight in the morning, but the newsagent in Chatteris was open. I was on my way to some absolutely essential meeting I'm sure. Chatteris is a town in the Cambridgeshire Fens, stories of incest, potato headedness and child swapping abound. Chatteris was not in the fast lane of the (then) 20th Century. A couple of older women were in front of me, they were buying but chatting. After waiting nearly five minutes I asked if I might just have a packet of Hamlet and be gone. I had the correct change, it would be a quick exchange. The woman behind the counter wasn't having any of it and didn't heistate to chide me for my hurry.

On Monday I was in the library cum youth centre in Sax. Six of us were gathered around a table parked at an edge of the big barn like room. We Brits outnumbered the Spaniards two to one. The idea is that it's a sort of group language exchange - I have no idea why we use a room large enough to stage a concert in. My fellow Brits were expounding on a failing of some Spanish system or another - maybe education, maybe good manners. I forget. We often complain about most things in our adopted home. Then one of the Brits said that she had been told, by a Spaniard, that it wasn't fair to judge Spain by what happens "around here."

I know exactly what she means. It wouldn't be fair to extrapolate an impression of the UK from Chatteris or its somewhat prettier rural cousins alone. If you did, and you worked in the film industry for instance, you may have a population that never took its wellies off or lived in half timbered, thatched roof cottages and shopped at family owned supermarkets all the time. Obviously there are no films like that.

I made a little coment on Facebook about Maggie stopping in the middle of the road to greet someone and used it as an example to prove that she was becoming Spanish. Marilo came back to say that she really was Spanish and she would never stop on a zebra crossing to chat with someone. Forgive us, we're country bumpkin Spaniards I replied - we do folk dances. I don't suppose they do a lot of folk dancing in the Palacio neighbourhood of Madrid either. Only the other day when I wrote the form and function blog entry I was thinking that there are some pretty trendy places in Spain, there are first class restaurants, people buy Audi A7s as well as white vans and Internet connections run at 100 Mb in the big cities. When I talk to telesales people there is often a lot of confusion about our address. Their expectation is a street name, building number and maybe flat details. They do not expect some description of a piece of muddy (winter) or dusty (summer) field.up a farm track.

Fortunately though the blog is called Life in Culebrón not Life in Spain

Shifting money

For years and years I've had a bit of a deal going with some friends who have a holiday home here in Spain. They pay money in sterling into my UK account and I pay Euros into their Spanish account using the FT exchange rate. They get money to pay their direct debit bills and I got enough to service my Amazon habit.

The more usual methods of transferring money can be quite costly. There are all sorts of schemes and methods but most of them make their money by giving below the "money market" exchange rates (the ones that say no commission) or by charging a fee. To give an example for small amounts, say £300, my normal method is to use an account I have with the Nationwide. They charge me £1 per transaction plus 2% of the amount. So that's £7. Actually that's as cash so it's a bit different but the figures are illustrative.

Recently Cliff told me about a scheme that he had heard described as peer to peer. It's what my friends and I have been doing all these years except that the firm charges a commission and I don't. In these schemes the money goes between bank accounts.

I used the company for the first time last weekend. I paid my Pounds into the firm's account in the UK. Somewhere in Spain  a Pedro, Paco or Maria wanted Pounds and they paid Euros into the same firm's Spanish account. The firm pays me with P,P or Ms money, the firm pays Pedro, Paco or Maria with my money and takes a commission from both of us. The commission rate on the same £300 seems to be around £1.50. In effect it's a national rather than an international transaction

If only we'd been smart enough to realise we had a business idea my friends and I could be rich by now!

Strange and bizarre

We'd popped in to town to do some exciting jobs - buy screen wash was one of them. I was also going to bank some money. Take note of the opening sentences and be warned now that this blog is not going to be the usual emotional roller coaster ride of an entry.

My phone rang when I was in the bank queue. It was our next door neighbour to say that Iberdrola, the electricity supply people, wanted to get into our garden. You will remember I talked to Iberdrola about moving some supply cables that were either menacing or being menaced by our palm tree. Nothing has happened for months. The discussion that I'd had with some Iberdrola employed tree trimmers had suggested that we were talking thousands of euros if we got the cables re-routed and I'd quietly let the whole thing slide.

We hurried back from town. I feared the worst. I could imagine the euros flowing out of that bank account to pay for new cables, new installations and a new meter. The three blokes said they wanted access to our garden. The three blokes said they were replacing the uninsulated supply to our house, and those of our neighbours, with a beefier insulated cable. There was no mention of the palm tree, there was no mention of me having asked for the work. So far as I could tell, and I didn't want to ask too many questions, it is a simple, routine upgrade of cables that haven't been changed for thirty or forty years.

We left them to it, in fact I couldn't get away fast enough. When we came back, they had happpily run the new cable through the palm tree branches and left enough slack in the wire for it to be able to deal with a bit of a pumelling from a palm tree thrashing around in the breeze. They are coming back tomorrow to connect it all up. How strange. Provided that there are no last minute hitches it looks as though our palm tree has just been saved and our electricity supply ensured.

I went back to the bank. As I've said in an earlier post I've been driving to the nearest branch of my bank to pay in cash at the start of each of the last few months. Last month though I read an article about the huge differences in fees charged by the different banks. It seemed that a bank with an office in Pinoso would only charge me 2€ in transaction fees. That seemed a lot better deal than driving 30kms to stand in a long queue to pay the cash in at my own bank. It was a short queue in Pinoso but the man wouldn't take my money. He said I couldn't pay the money in to another bank from their office. I was amazed. I explained that I understood there was a fee. No it's just not possible said the man. Why don't you go to the Santander office around the corner?

Now it is true that there's an office in Pinoso that has a Santander Bank sign outside. I'd tried to do some form of banking there a couple of years ago without success. The chap behind the counter told me they only sold financial products and did not offer banking services. Today I poked my head around the door of the empty office but for the man at his desk playing some sort of game on his phone. "Can I pay money in to a Santander account here?," I asked. "You can indeed," he replied. I was pleasantly surprised and handed over a piece of paper with my 20 figure account number on it. "Ah, it's an old Banesto account," he said, "I can't pay into that." I asked him if it were possible to pay into the account from other banks. "No, you have to go to a Santander branch, an old Banesto branch," he said.

Now Banesto had been largely owned by the Santander Bank since the early 90s though both banks continued to have a high street presence till 2012. It was then that the Santander bought up the last of the Banesto shares and combined the two entities closing down various branches of both. The Banesto logos disappeared. Later the websites, account names and everything else took on the Santander name and look. Everywhere that is but for the office in Pinoso where the division was still alive and well. I have to give the man his due he did try to access my account but his computer said no and that was the end of it,

How bizarre. A banking system which won't, apparently, let you pay money in except under very strict conditions. I don't understand. I've done it in the past. It seems crazy if it is no longer possible.

I drove to Monóvar and paid the money in there. "Oh," I asked the teller as I was about to leave, "Can I pay into this account from other banks?" "Course you can," he said. "They usually charge you to do it though."

Aaargh!!

Getting off the stool

A warning: This blog will contain lots of rude and crude words. Do not continue if you are easily offended.

I've not been to the doctor very often whilst I've been in Spain. I did have to go though - years ago - because I had a problem with my waterworks, a certain pain when I urinated. As I walked into the doctor's office I apologised for not knowing the doctor words for certain actions and parts. Consider that I were talking to you about my bathroom habits. The verbs would be shit and piss, I'm sorry. They would not be defecate, micturate and urinate; I would not talk of motions, stools, faeces, movements or waterworks and I find the half way words like pee and pooh (does it have an h?) much more embarrassing than the Anglo Saxon words. At the doctor's though it's all bowels and penis.

Maggie has been pruning trees in our garden, she started with the almonds. She learned how to do it from a range of  YouTube videos. She preferred the one where the demonstrator didn't say that you had to get rid of all the shit in the middle of the tree. Gardeners don't have the same reputation as rappers for bad language so I presume it must be an everyday sort of word for at least one gardener.

We saw a Pat Metheny concert in Cartagena a while back. Maggie loves Pat. We were on the front row and Pat dropped a plectrum within arms length - at least my arm was long enough to requisition it for the good of the people. Someone else tried the same thing later, with another plectrum, and was berated by one of the roadies "Would you like it if I came around your house and stole your shit?" The translation would be nothing more than stuff.

Shit is a multi-purpose word. There are lots like it in Spanish, words that are more or less friendly, vulgar or attacking depending on tone of voice and situation. This includes the direct translation of shit. You can be complaining, you can be being rude, you can be describing a process and you can be no different to a Pat roadie.

The Valencian Community seems to be worried about my shit. More accurately they are worried about the health of my bowels. This is good; at least I think it is. They have a campaign for men and women between the ages of 50 and 69 to check whether we may have bowel cancer or not.  First they sent us a letter and when we sent back the "Yes, we'd love to participate" card they sent us a little stick inside a container. You don't need to be able to read Spanish to understand the instructions in the images above. The black thing is a turd. Once the stick was back inside the sealed container it was off to the collection point in the local health centre. Actually Maggie took it whilst I went for breakfast at Eduardo's. I wonder if it will be a person or a machine that has the job of checking the, presumably, thousands of samples? Whilst most of us will get a standardised "no problem" letter some will get the "please pop into the health centre" version.

Back at Eduardo's everyone wanted to know where Maggie was. When I explained one of the Brits retorted with - !Ah, playing Pooh Sticks." I thought it was clever.

I am the egg man

We once asked Eduardo if he would sell us a beer. He has a restaurant in the village. He was there, the door was open and the sun was shining but he said no explaining that he didn't run a bar but a restaurant.

That seems to have changed and Eduardo's now has cars parked outside, and presumably customers inside, most mornings. On Wednesday mornings, or at least for the past three Wednesday mornings, we've joined the throng and gone in. We've eaten a late breakfast with some Spanish people from the village and some local, though not Culebronero, Britons. I like going there. I like supporting a local business and I like doing something community.

When we were there today we bought some eggs. One of the expats keeps hens and she has found a ready market for their eggs in our neighbours and in us. A couple of weeks ago Maria was saying that she had been waiting for the man who brings the gas bottles - he hadn't shown up before breakfast time so she'd left the bottles out. He'll just charge me when he catches me in she said - he'll do the same for you she said. The cheese man came today - apparently one of the types he sells is good for deep frying to serve with jam. Next it was the bread man who comes Wednesdays and Fridays  - he'll hang the bread on your gate if you're not in - next to the recharged gas bottles presumably.

This is not earth shattering, It's not even particularly interesting. When I was a boy there were mobile shops everywhere. Moving to this century my sister has ordered all her staple food online from Tesco for years and, as far as I know, if we were about half a kilometre down the road Mercadona would do the same for us here.

The interesting thing is that we have lived here for years and we didn't know. Why didn't we know?

Form and function

I think it was John who told us there was a nice new bar in La Romana so, as we were passing, we dropped in for a coffee. He was right. Lots of right angles, tonal furniture, predominantly white, nice clean lines, modern looking, warm welcome and it was warm in the heated sense too,

The majority of Spanish bars and restaurants are very everyday. There's seldom any attempt to do what they've been doing with Irish style pubs for twenty five plus years in the UK - fishing rods, sewing machines and soap adverts or what all of those coffee shops that sell lattes, mochas and espressos do with overstuffed bookcases, creaking floorboards, chesterfield sofas or roaring log fires. They try to add a certain style. Ambience, well ambience not centred around handwritten notices for lottery tickets, crates of empty bottles and piles of detritus by the cash till, is in short supply in most, though not all, Spanish bars and restaurants. Bear in mind that I spend most of my time in Fortuna, Culebrón or Pinoso rather than Madrid or Barcelona.

On Saturday, as a birthday treat, Maggie took me to an eatery that we have never dared venture into before - partly for price and partly for the Porsches, Ferraris and  two a penny Beamers and Audis parked outside. It's in Pinoso and it has a reputation province wide, food guide wise and nationwide amongst cognoscenti for being a temple to the local rice dish made with rabbit and snails seasoned with wild herbs and cooked over burning bundles of scent giving twigs. The restaurant sees no need for a sign outside and makes do with a discreet nameplate so that diners know they have found the place.

The inside of the restaurant was nothing special. The tablecloths were cloth, the cutlery and glassware were clean and the servers were smart and civil but it looked like thousands of other eateries in Spain. I think it had tiles half way up the wall but then it had the stippled paint, it's called gotelé here but it's like painting over anaglypta in the UK. I wouldn't have been too surprised if there had been a telly on the wall showing the Simpsons. I don't think you could get a similar reputation for being quality eating in the UK without doing something about the decor. Different philosophy.

Down the road, in one of the villages, there's another restaurant with a growing reputation for rice. They have glass walls to the kitchen so you can see the paella being cooked, they have a printed menu (we weren't offered a written menu) and I think the waiters have some sort of modern uniform. The whole place looks like someone had a concept in mind when they talked to the builders and furnishers.

It was a good experience in Pinoso though. We had a good time and although the prices were high they were not frighteningly so. We saw another couple stick to beer and water, a pair of simple centre of the table starters, the rice of course and coffee and they got to pay with a single fifty euro note. Perfectly reasonable. To be honest though it wasn't the best rice I've eaten - a bit over salty and a bit greasy for my taste. The bread and ali-oli, also one of my yardsticks, was good but not exceptional and the salad was served a tad cold.

Now I have an idea for a place that looks great, has good looking young staff and serves only variations on egg and chips. What do you reckon?

Going native III

I talked to my mum on the phone today. She asked me how my birthday had gone on Wednesday. She apologised for only having sent a card and a Facebook message and for not having phoned. I didn't ring she said because I guessed you would be out for a meal.

My mum was wrong, I wasn't out to eat. After work I'd come home and set about a bottle of birthday brandy in front of the telly. As we talked I realised that it had never crossed my mind to go out for an evening meal. In fact we are booked in for a celebratory lunch on Saturday at a well known and well regarded local restaurant.

In the dim and distant past when I used to come to Spain on holiday the routine was simple enough. Something light for lunch and then a nice meal in the evening. That's the way my British upbringing told me to do it. The equivalent of the lunchtime sandwich at your desk with something cooked in the evening. Generally though that's not the Spanish case. Obviously Spaniards do celebrate big meals in the evening. Generally though the more substantial meal is at lunchtime and there is a whole industry of inexpensive lunchtime set meals to maintain that habit.

So is it, that like taking to stone garden furniture, our eating habits have also become unknowingly Spanish?

Going native II

We, no let's be honest, Maggie has just had the patio around our house extended. It looks good and it means less ground for me to keep clear of weeds.

Maggie is a bit of a comlpletist. I was impressed enough with the slabs of marble laid crazy paving style but, for Maggie, they are not enough. She sees plants in pots and garden furniture. She can taste the summer drinks. She mentioned fountains. She's already decided what sort of garden furniture. Not the sort of stuff you get from B&Q or Homebase with wooden slats and nice green brushed cotton cushions. No, Maggie knows that the beating Spanish sun of summer and the 20ºC daily tmperature changes of winter destroy the stitching on nylon chair webbing and anything made of wood. Plastic goes hard and brittle whilst metal colours are doomed to fade except for the reworking of the colour scheme by various layers of rust. Stone, concrete and ceramics are the answer.

She didn't really mention this to me until we were in a local garden centre staring at the stone tables with matching benches. Some were shaped like toadstools. Some were covered in Andalucian style painted ceramic tiles.

"I think I'm turning Spanish," she said, "I think these look nice."

When we first arrived she thought the style of furniture was too hideous to contemplate.