Fame again

There have been quite a lot news items recently about a shortage of blood donors in Spain. I heard one such item on a programme I often listen to as I drive to work and so I wrote a comment on their Facebook page.

This is what it said: 

Oí algo sobre los problemas de donación de sangre en vuestro programa y recientemente hay muchas noticias sobre la falta de sangre en España. La mayoría de los británicos que viven aquí, muchos con una historia de donación en el Reino Unido, no pueden donar por un decreto que tiene algo que ver con las "vacas locas" de los años 90 y la posibilidad de contraer la enfermedad de Creutzfeldt-Jakob - algo que no pasa. Un sencillo cambio de ley y, de repente, tendríamos más donantes. Espero que entiendas mi versión de español

Or more or less as a translation; 

I've heard something about the problems of blood donation on your programme and recently there have been a lot of news items about the lack of blood in Spain. The majority of the Britons who live here, many with a history of blood donation in the UK, can't give blood because we are banned by a Royal Decree which has something to do with the "mad cows" of the 1990s and the possibility of contracting Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease - something that hasn't happened. A simple change of the law and, hey presto, we'd have lots more donors. I hope you understand my version of Spanish.

Who knows, maybe someone might hear it, dust off the legislation and let me exchange half a litre of blood for a sandwich and a can of pop. No tea and biscuits in Spain.

If you want to hear it, and of course you will, the bit should be on the official embedded thingy below but I'm not sure it works - we've got Internet problems at the moment so I can't be sure. If not you might try this link at 13 minutes and 55 seconds for the programme Primera Hora 16/06/15.

Primera hora - 16/06/15

A cinema, a parade and something on words

Here are some ramblings from this weekend.

Once upon a time Pizza Express used to serve really good pizzas in interesting buildings. The person who launched the restaurant chain was a chap from Peterborough called Peter Boizot. One of his other ventures in the town was to try to restore the old Odeon Cinema to its former glory as a single screen venue. I've not been to Peterborough for ages but I have this vague recollection that the venture failed. People must prefer multi choice cinemas.

Spain, like everywhere else, has multiplexes in amongst fast food franchises and out of town shopping centres. The big, single screen cinemas are a thing of the past. Youngish people, twenty somethings, I taught in Cartagena still talked nostalgically of the city centre cinemas so it can't be that long ago that they disappeared. Nowadays the old cinemas are gone, boarded up or used as retail outlets.

Years ago, on holiday, I saw my first ever Rus Meyer film in a cinema in central Alicante. On Saturday as I Googled the films from a restaurant table on my phone I was surprised to find that there was a cinema, Cine Navas, just 400 metres away. And, for once, Google maps wasn't fibbing. It was all pretty run down to be honest but it was still pretty impressive, acres and acres of velvet curtains lined the walls and the floor was raked downwards from the screen so that you naturally looked up to the screen. Quite different to the tiered seating of today. The screen was big enough but the image was a bit dull and the soundtrack less than crisp so I wondered if it actually was a real film. The film by the way was terrible - Viaje a Sils Maria or the Clouds of Sils Maria in English I think.

When we came out of the cinema we could hear music. At the top of the road there was a parade. We went for a nosey. Hundreds of people were walking along the street wearing "traditional" clothes. We presumed, and I later confirmed, that it was an early procession as part of the "Bonfires of St John." Nowadays this big Alicante festival is usually given its Valenciano name of Fogueres de Sant Joan rather than its Spanish or Castellano name of Hogueras de San Juan. It marks the Saint's day on the 23rd but it also turns around the shortest night of the year. Huge statues are burned in the street. I like San Juan, it's a very community festival in lots of places with people lighting little fires to cook food, setting off fireworks, jumping over waves to get pregnant etc. San Juan seems also to be a signal. People go and open up their winter long abandoned beach or country house ready for summer.

We'd been in Alicante on Saturday to collect some visitors for one of Maggie's Secret Wine Spain bodega tours and we'd taken advantage of being there which meant spending money. So Sunday was quieter. Very quiet. Too quiet. I polished the car and, as I did so, I listened to a podcast from the radio about the visit of the Beatles to Spain. The Spanish expert on the Beatles explained that their first single Lips Me hadn't been a big hit. I had to listen three or four times to eventually decide that Lips Me was Please Me. The pronunciation and also the mis-titling of Please Please Me didn't help. Later in the programme I was told that the big break for the Beatles was thanks to Harrison Knight. I thought of the people I could remember as being associated with the Beatles - not Brian Epstein, not Mal Evans nor Neil Aspinall nor that American chap because he was an Alan something. Then it struck me. A Hard Day's Night.

This sort of strange pronunciation of English words is very common here. English is fashionable so using an English word in place of a perfectly good Spanish word is rife. There is also a tendency for the English way of saying something to supplant the more usual Spanish form. Lots of English language sounds are very difficult for many Spaniards, hence the mispronunciation. There is a second problem too. If a Spaniard knows how to pronounce an English word correctly it often isn't recognisable to other Spaniards who haven't studied English. So words are intentionally mispronounced to make them intelligible. Sometimes there is a sort of recognised half way house type pronunciation. I can usually guess at common words but names are a real problem - trying to interpret the names of music artists on the radio is by turns a lot of fun and frustrating.

Words on a page

Reading is a funny thing. When I worked in the UK I grew to hate reading. I had to wade through so many pages of so much verbiage full of TLAs (three letter acronyms,) where spades were never spades. Nowadays I'm back to reading for pleasure, well pleasure and for the information that reading provides.

I try to read novels in Spanish. Sometimes I can't understand the books I choose but nowadays I can read most novels without too much difficulty. That's one of the reasons that I usually read on a Kindle because it allows me a dictionary for those key words I don't know. Obviously I'm reading the read the book because something about it interests me but there is also a part that is about trying to improve my Spanish through the practice, the vocabulary and the language structures. More importantly though I'm trying to get a handle on the culture. Not culture in the Cervantes or Shakespeare sense - culture in the description of how life was or is, the historical context, the commentary on everyday life.

My dad used to buy the Express. A friend still reads the Daily Mail everyday. Once upon a time a newspaper, a snapshot in time of the news filtered through a politically biased colander, gave us our view of the World. I haven't read a printed newspaper for a while now. I generally read the news on my phone collected through a newsreader app. The app collects local and general news in Spanish. I also read Spanish news in English from both a Spanish and a British source. There are politically divergent slants on the news from the "papers" and a strange national bias between British and Spanish sources. The truth is though that I can't keep up with the quantity of news. The phone app provides about 400 articles a day but Twitter and Facebook add plenty more. My patience threshold is well below that.

My reading habits probably point to some form of psychologically dodgy behaviour. This wish to become more au fait with the place I live. It extends to the books that I have read in English this year too. After reading a Spanish novel about an uprising in Madrid during the Napoleonic era I went looking for another novel about the Spanish Penninsula War or the War of Independence as it's called here. I found one in English and read it without realising that it was part of a series. Like Magnus once I've started I like to finish so I read all five books only to find that book five did not complete the story. Book six is due out next week. I have it on pre-order. I hope that gets Wellington past Vittoria and heading for Waterloo.

I realised the other week that things must be seeping in. Bear in mind that I often forget what it is I went for by the time I arrive in the room. So I am not at all surprised when I cannot remember a Spanish name. It doesn't matter how obvious Gutiérrez Mellado is, as a name, to a Spaniard because names for me are Brown, Smith and Chalmondley. Nonetheless in a couple of chance conversations I was able to come up with the name of a Spanish David Attenborough equivalent, a knapsack wearing, protest singing MP, two Spanish diplomats who saved Jewish lives in the Second World War and a handful of Spanish authors. When a conversation turned to politics I was perming any two names from Manuela, Ada, Cristina, Cifuentes, Colaua and Carmena but my Spanish partners were stumbling too and, names aside, I knew what was going on and why which was surprisingly gratifying despite my stumbling.

That aside I just love it when a book drives me forward. The myriad times when finishing a book becomes a joyous imperative. Those times I can't stop when I should - just a few more pages before I go to bed or to work or whatever. And the way that the same words used  in a shopping list can be used to make poems sing or a novel vibrate is just astonishing. The occasion when a phrase in a book has to be re-read because it has just caused a total surprise. I have to admit that it's a lot easier for me to spot the beauty of a phrase as simple as "at the still point of the turning world" in English than it is in Spanish but I jotted down "sin periodismo serio no hay sociedad democrática" the other day so maybe that's coming too.

The LSC, DfEE and NYB nearly took it off me but not quite. 

En español

The other day I wrote an essay for my Spanish class. It was that essay which gave me the idea for the blog about trademarks and names. I got the corrected essay back today and there were few enough mistakes for me to bother to correct them on my original. So here, for my two or three bilingual readers, is my attempt at complaining, hopefully in a light hearted way, about a few things Spanish. Nothing new in the content but waste not, want not, as my old uncle used to say - that was before he was dead of course.

Cuando vivía en Ciudad Rodrigo buscaba el lavavajillas en un supermercado pero no puede encontrarlo. -Perdona, ¿dónde esta el lavavajillas, por favor?-pregunté a un reponedor- El mistol está cerca de los congeladores, al fondo -me dijo. Fue la primera vez que escuché este sobrenombre para el lavavajillas. A veces, en Inglaterra lo llamamos Fairy Liquid pero, normalmente, utilizamos un genérico – washing up liquid – detergente para fregar platos. Ya sé que hay muchas cosas que tienen estos sobrenombres – supongo que minipimer, kleenex, danone y los demás no son exactamente sobrenombres, no es como llamar a los Ecuatorianos “Panchitos” por ejemplo, ni es exactamente un neologismo como wasapear o sexting. Sobrenombre servirá. Y por eso, por el uso de este nombré en aquel supermercado, compré Mistol por la primera vez.  Me gusta, es un detergente bastante fuerte y tiene una gama de olores y colores. Pero una pregunta ¿por qué tienen las botellas ese pico tan gordo? Creo que es un pequeño timo, una estrategia de marketing, para que despilfarre el costoso líquido. Pensé en ello la última vez que estuve en un supermercado y compré Fairy – este sí tiene un pico del tamaño adecuado.

Me gusta otro líquido que hay en España – el café. En la mayoría de los sitios el café está muy bueno. Es un placer sentarte en un bar, pedir un café y mirar todo el mundo pasar frente a mís ojos. Pero soy inglés. Levantamos un imperio sobre el té, pues, claro té, gin tonic y una marina poderosa, y de vez en cuando quiero tomar un té fuera de casa. Los Turcos, los Chinos, los Árabes, hasta la mitad del mundo, tienen sus ideas sobre el té. Nosotros también. Y nuestra idea no tiene nada que ver con el té español. Nos gusta una variedad de té que se llama Broken Orange Pekoe – es un tipo de té negro. Normalmente lo tomamos con una gotita de leche y, quizá, azúcar pero, claro para gustos los colores. Lo hacemos con agua hirviendo y la mezcla necesita tres o cuatro minutos para extraer todo el sabor de las hojas sagradas antes de añadir la leche. Los españoles saben mucho sobre comida y bebida, son dueños de una gastronomía impresionante, pero no tienen ni idea sobre el té. Lo hacen con agua templada, creen que se puede calentar el agua en un microondas, los peores, las más canallas, ponen el sobre en agua fría y calientan el agua con el sobre dentro. Muchos ponen leche caliente y, de vez en cuando te sirven un té que parece un café largo de leche o un cola-cao - un líquido pálido, débil, un candidato ideal para la guadaña - demasiado débil para seguir vivo. No; los españoles no saben nada sobre el té y cuando no me apetece un café en un bar o restaurante no me queda otra opción:-ponme (no nos gusta la deferencia de usted) una copa de Magno, por favor- ah, sí, los españoles saben mucho sobre el brandy.

A todo el mundo le gusta hablar. Es muy natural, y aquí a los nativos les gusta preguntar sobre todos los detalles. No importa que haya un folleto, una hoja informativa, una octavilla o un cartel, colgada en la pared, con toda la información. Para los españoles preguntar y pedir es un deporte nacional. Es tan natural que sirve de excusa a los maleducados - las personas que se saltan la cola y dicen, como explicación de todo, -solo una pregunta.... -está perdonada por toda la cola desesperada sin remilgos. Nosotros somos distintos. Somos bastante tímidos en este asunto, tenemos nuestras costumbres. No nos gusta molestar a una persona, no queremos hacer perder el tiempo a los demás con tonterías. Por eso, habitualmente, preferimos leer la información. Un ejemplo muy cotidiano sea en un bar o restaurante, es: -Hola, buenos días, ¿tienes una lista de tapas o una carta, por favor? -Vale, señores, hoy tenemos un guiso de ternera estupendo, un arroz meloso muy rico, una lubina de primera -etcétera. Creo que para muchos restaurantes sería un pecado capital, peor que la lujuria o la gula, tener una carta escrita. De vez en cuando sí, hay una carta. -Pues,vamos a tomar cuatro croquetas de jamón, unos chopitos, las almejas...... -Lo siento no quedan ni chopitos ni almejas y las croquetas son de morcilla pero tenemos un guiso de ternera estupendo, un arroz...-. Pero mis favoritos son los eventos. -Eh, Chris, aquí hay un cartel que dice que hay fiestas patronales en el quinto pino, -ah, sí, y ¿cuándo son? -Uff, no lo sé, no hay ninguna fecha. O -Eh, Chris, aquí hay un cartel que dice que habrá un circo en el pueblo  -ah, sí, y ¿dónde estará? -Dice que está en el sitio de siempre. Supongo que todo el mundo, todo el mundo español, sabe cuál es el día de cada santo y cuáles son sus fechas o cuál es el sitio de siempre, pero yo no. Claro, no me queda otra opción - al bar. -Camarero, -¿Sí, señor, en qué puedo servirle? -Bueno no he podido encontrar ni las fiestas ni el circo y, en este momento, no me apetece un café, por favor, ponme una copa de Magno.

In the wind

In most Spanish bars the gents is a normal household type toilet. The sort we men leave the seat up on. In some places, like cinemas, shopping centres or motorway service stations there will be stalls and, usually, a row of urinals too.

Personally I prefer urinals. Less chance of unintended spillage. My experience though is that Spanish men don't. They choose to use the stalls and a lot of them neglect to lock the door. This can cause a degree of embarrassment from time to time. ¡Uuff; perdón! 

I wonder why the preference?

Get me an aspirin and an elastoplast will you?

It was a few years ago now. I was in  a small supermarket. The product organisation escaped me. I'd found the washing powders and bath cleaners but the washing up liquid was laying low. Breaking with my usual stubborn silence I asked a shelf stacker where it was. The Mistol is at the back, near the freezers," she said.

Just as we Brits use aspirin, escalator, biro, trampoline, thermos, sellotape, catseye, dormobile, durex, bubble wrap, photoshop, stanley knife, armco, JCB, fibre glass and lots more trademarks to describe generic products so do the Spanish.

So Mistol is a brand of washing up liquid. I bought it that day, just grateful that I'd found the stuff. It's good stuff, it smells nice, it has lots of flavours. There is a little dodge, a little marketing ploy, with Mistol though. It has a really wide spout in relation to most other brands of washing up liquids. The liquid gushes out and gets used up very quickly. I've decided it's an abusive design and I've bought Fairy again the last couple of times.

Obviously I don't know all the Spanish trade marks that have become household language but these are some of the ones I've noticed. Actually as I worked on the list it became so long as to be boring so I cut it down. Bimbo is used for sliced bread, Danone for yoghurt, Avecrem for stock cubes, Casera for a sort of lemonade often mixed with cheap wine, Bic for Biros (see how whimsically I write?), Dodot for nappies, Rimel for mascara, Kleenex for tissues, Táper or Túper (mispronounciation of abbreviated Tupperware) for plastic food containers and Post-its for, well, Post its.

I suppose these words change with age and possibly with location. I hoover up (not often enough according to Maggie) but I don't think it's a popular generic term amongst younger people or amongst people from the South of England. I had something similar with aspirin, aspirina, which is a Bayer trade mark. I asked for aspirina in a chemist's in Yecla. The chemist asked if I were sure and produced the trademarked brand at, say, 4€ and a generic at well under half the price. I went for the cheaper brand. I only use them to ward off heart attacks after all. The chemist obviously thought this was all a huge joke and spent the next few minutes coaching me in the pronunciation and rhthym of ácido acetilsalicílico, acetylsalicylic acid. Years later, now fluent in ácido acetilsalicílico, a chemist in Cartagena took me to task. "For God's sake, don't be so prissy, say aspirina," he said.

May weather

Only a little while ago one of the chief weather forecasters from the state TV broadcaster came to Pinoso to celebrate the 25 years of weather data collection in the town. She was here to praise the efforts of a local chap called Agapito Gonzálvez better known as Cápito. Because of him Pinoso, which is no more than a village really, has a weather station that provides data for the Spanish equivalent of the Met Office - AEMET or Agencia Estatal de Meteorología.

Each month the Town Hall publishes Cápito's summary of the previous month's weather. Here is my summary of his summary.

In May we got eighteen days of sunny and cloudless skies and another twelve with sunny spells  - that leaves just one sunless and cloudy day. The highest temperature, of 38ºC, was recorded on the 14th of May - that was one of the seven days when the temperature got above 30ºC. The lowest temperature was 5ºC on the 23rd May which was one of the five days when temperatures dropped below 7ºC. The mean maximum across the month was 27ºC and the mean minimum was 11ªC. We got 10 litres of rain per square metre for the whole month but 7 litres of that fell on the 7th. Rain fell on just three days across the month.

I agree, it's desparate isn't it?

Stone built

Culebrón is a part of Pinoso. Pinoso is a part of the province of Alicante but Pinoso, like Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, is a frontier town. There are no adverts for Viagra here but there are different languages and different holidays. Even if it's only with Abanilla, Jumilla and Yecla there is definitely a border, the border with Murcia Region.

We have plenty of hills of our own in Alicante. Looking North from our front garden we have the Sierra de Salinas (1238m/4061ft) and the Sierra de Xirivell (810m/2657ft) is to the South. Indeed the garden itself is at about 605m/1984ft but over the border, into Murcia, the Sierra del Carche is higher still at 1372 metres or 4,500 feet. Maggie has tried to get us to the top a couple of times before but today we finally made it. To the very top, to the geodesic point. Admittedly we didn't walk, we went in a little four by four, but we got to the top.

It was pretty crowded and very cosmopolitan at the top of el Carche. There was a Swiss man with Argentinian, Mexican and Belgian clients for his parascending "course." Down the road a chap, probably Ukranian, was assembling his hang glider before hurling himself into the void. There were two Spanish cyclists and I think the chap on the scrambling bike was Spanish too. Then there were four Britons.

On the way up we stopped off at a Pozo de Nieve, a snow cave built in the XVIIth Century. Before the advent of fridges and ice making machines people built these big holes in the ground, lined them with stone walls, well over a metre thick, and used them to store ice. The one we saw today apparently goes down twelve metres though, as the conical roof has now caved in, it's a little shallower than it was. It sounds as though ice was big business at the end of the XVIIIth Century. For instance, Valencia, the city, used two million kilos of the stuff each year. The ice was used mainly for medical procedures, principally to bring down fevers. Ice was even exported from the port of Alicante to Ibiza and the North of Africa.

The caves worked like this. In Spring, when it was reckoned no more snow would fall on the high mountains, men would climb to the high slopes, dig up the snow and take it to one of the pozos where it was compacted to form ice. It must have been cold, hard work without modern tools or fabrics and wearing esparto sandals! When the well was full they would cover the ice with earth, vegetation and timber. In summer the men would return to the ice wells, cut the ice into blocks and transport it, by night, on the backs of mules and donkeys, to the nearest large town where it was sold.  I heard something on the radio about sthe research done on this commercialisation of ice and snow caves. The researchers explained how, in some places, there were chains of snow caves which allowed the hauliers to work in relays and so move the ice more quickly down to lower ground.

Whilst we are on stone constructions I thought I'd mention cucos which are stone built sheds. They were built principally as shelters for shepherds and herders moving livestock along the cañadas, the drovers pathes, that criss cross Spain. The cañadas were introduced by legislation written in the reign of Alfonso X in the XIIIth Century so the cucos have been around a long time too.

¿Is that correct?

I've been doing a Spanish class recently. Not that I expect it to make me any more understood in the street. I just feel I have a responsibility to try to improve my Spanish somehow. I would have preferred an intercambio - the half an hour of Spanish for half an hour of English language exchange - but, despite a fair bit of effort, I couldn't find one. Well, actually, that's not true. Alvaró and I met a couple of times but then he went off to seek fame and fortune in Guildford.

So, unable to get  a bit of Spanish for free, I asked a local academy about paying for a weekly grammar class. It's not that exciting but it's structured practice, of a sort, with correction. My teacher is a pleasant and well organised young woman.

"Why not write something for me to correct?" she suggested. So I did. I've done something the last couple of weeks and I was working on this week's piece today. Writing the essay is pretty straightforward. With a biro I can write nearly as quickly in Spanish as in English but as I two finger type the clean copy I see tons of errors, wonder about lots of grammar and spend ages checking spelling and especially accent marks. Tidying up the text can take a long time. I did try writing direct to computer but the mechanics of my two fingered typing inhibit any spontaneity.

Today I was being a bit more playful with my writing than I have been the last couple of times. Well that is if you consider this sort of thing to be playful - The British Empire ran on tea, well tea and gin and tonic - oh, and quite a powerful navy. I included speech in the writing to liven it up a bit too. I started using inverted commas then I remembered, vaguely, that in Spanish the inverted commas are used to quote what someone notable said - Joan of Arc or Henry Kissinger sort of quotes. I asked Google and got a nice piece about how to deal with reporting speech in Spanish. In essence Spanish uses long hyphens, which join to the words and stick with them across line breaks and suchlike, to isolate the speech from normal narrative. There are different rules for how the hyphens are placed under different circumstances and also how to deal with other punctuation marks like full stops and question marks in and around the hyphens. I read it, it made sense and I instantly forgot it.

I was thinking about English punctuation. Do you know, I haven't a clue (probably if you read these blogs critically you do know.) I don't know about how to use parentheses - is the full stop correct and is it in the right place within that last set of brackets for instance? I don't know about single, as against double, inverted commas, I don't know where other marks go in amongst the brackets, quotes, hyphens and what not. My big ally is that I suspect that lots of other people don't know either. Whereas the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves may well have cheered up the sort of person who writes to the BBC about the pronunciation of envelope I'm certain that any ordinary person who slogged through it will no longer remember much, if any, of it.

So, I foresee a truly interesting conversation about how to correctly punctuate Spanish in one of the next classes. Life surely is a riot.

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And here is the text, in Spanish, from a blog called Tinta al sol, about how to do it for anyone interested.

Según el Diccionario panhispánico de dudas de la RAE, lo primero que hay que aclarar es que los diálogos en un texto narrativo no van precedidos de guiones, sino de una raya, que es ligeramente más larga que un guión.

Esta raya antecede a los diálogos, tras una sangría, y sin dejar espacio entre la raya y el comienzo del parlamento.

La raya también enmarca las acotaciones del narrador, y debe cerrarse sólo si el diálogo continúa tras el comentario del narrador.

—Hola, ¿cómo estás? —dijo ella tras verle entrar—. ¿Vas a salir?

—No, no saldré —dijo él sin mirarla.

Cuando se utiliza un verbo de habla para el comentario del narrador (decir, exclamar, afirmar, responder, etc.), éste va en minúscula, aunque el diálogo haya terminado con un signo de puntuación del mismo valor que un punto, como un signo de exclamación o de interrogación.

—¿Eso es todo? —preguntó ella.

Si el diálogo del personaje continúa tras la acotación, y la primera parte termina con coma, punto, punto y coma o dos puntos, este signo de puntuación se coloca tras la raya del cierre.

—Todo —respondió él—. Y tanto que es todo.

Cuando el comentario del narrador no lleva un verbo de habla, la primera parte del diálogo se cierra con un punto, y la acotación comienza con mayúscula. Si el diálogo continúa después, se escribe un punto tras la raya de cierre.

—Estupendo. —Ella se volvió para que no viera su sonrisa—. Me llevo la llave.

Casting a vote

I've described this process somewhere else, in the past, but as it doesn't happen very often even my most trusty reader may have forgotten - so.

There are two elections going on today. The first is for the majority of the Autonomous Communities, the Regions, which deal with the powers not held by Central Government in areas like health and education. Our region is the Comunitat Valenciana which is made up of three provinces, Valencia, Castellon and Alicante. We are in Alicante and that's where we should vote except that European legislation denies me a vote at this level. I cannot vote regionally either in the UK or in Spain. The second elections are for the local Town Halls. These people decide how much our water and car tax cost, what we pay for rubbish collection, how to organise the local fiestas and lots of the day to day decisions that affect our lives. I do, at least, get to vote at the Town Hall level.

My polling station is in one of the schools in the local town of Pinoso. There is no polling station in the village. There are basic procedural differences between Spain and the UK.

In Britain, provided the system hasn't changed whilst I've been away, you turn up and show that you have the right to vote because you are on the electoral register. That done you are given a ballot paper which you mark with your choice in secret. The marked ballot paper is then placed in the ballot box. You vote for a named person using a first past the post simple majority system.

In Spain you cast your vote by sealing a list of candidates inside an envelope and placing that envelope in the ballot box. The lists are available at the polling station but the lists and envelopes are also available beforehand. This means that lots of people turn up at polling stations with their sealed envelopes already prepared. If you don't have an envelope ready you will need to prepare one in the polling station before you approach your designated electoral table. You prove your identity, I used my passport, someone checks you are on the electoral roll and, provided you are, that's when you are able to place your sealed envelope in the box.

The list system means that you vote for a group of people rather than a single person. The order of the candidates on the lists is chosen by the parties. The number of people elected from each list depends on the number of votes cast and the mathematical formula applied to those votes using a system called the D'Hondt method. It's a proportional representation system based on highest averages. Like all voting systems it has pluses and minuses, supporters and detractors.

Polling stations are open from 9am till 8pm. There are only 5,584 people registered to vote in Pinoso and the vote is local so I presume we will get the local results very quickly. The national picture, reflected in the regional votes, will take longer to firm up just as in the UK.

A few things that crossed my mind when I was trying to think of a blog entry

It stopped being cold in our house a few weeks ago now. I forget quite when but suddenly we weren't using the gas heaters, I started to pad around the tiled floors in bare feet as I got up in the morning. Winter was gone and there were flowers in the garden. Last week, I think, it was warm - a few days in the 30ºC bracket. I folded up my pullovers. That turned out to be a bit premature. I've needed a woolly the last couple of days.

I was just about to go to work, Maggie was on her way home after work. We were together. We decided a quick snack was in order. We chose a roadside bar café that we haven't been in for years. It was a mistake. It was scruffy, barn like, dark and a bit dirty. Nonetheless we sat at the bar, ordered a drink and surveyed the tapas in the little glass display cases. Lots of them looked like food left on the plates piled up by the side of the sink after a good meal; perfectly nice when freshly prepared but well past their best now. We ordered a sandwich instead but as I ate and surveyed the sad looking tapas their aspect began to lose ground to their potential taste. I wondered about ordering something. I didn't, but I nearly did.

I work in Fortuna, It's a small forgotten town, or maybe a village, in Murcia. Litter blows around the streets of Fortuna. The traffic misbehaves. Dogs, or dog keepers, misbehave. Our local town is Pinoso. it's a small forgotten town, or maybe a village, in Alicante. I have always thought of Pinoso as just another no mark town, the one I happened to end up in. I now realise we fell lucky. It's a clean, inexpensive, well organised, little place.

The election campaign this time has been odd. Not that odd but not exactly to formula. There have been lots of leaked news stories that have affected big candidates as usual but there are new names all over the place touted as possible victors. The clever money is on the collapse of the two party hegemony. At least two of the "important" high profile politicians don't have a manifesto to speak of. They think it's not important. Policy isn't the thing this time it's who you trust.

In our own local elections I went to an election meeting where they had no manifesto either. It'll be out tomorrow I was told. It's well past tomorrow now but I haven't been able to find one. I have to confess that my search has been a bit half hearted. Working, as I do, till around 9pm I've found it difficult to get to any of the meetings but the publicity about when and where they are taking place has been a bit thin on the ground anyway.

Still on the elections I was surprised to hear a very partisan interview on the town radio yesterday where the interviewer fed one of the candidates the questions he wanted. "Words of wisdom" commented the interviewer after one response. The interviewer is one of the candidates for the same party as the interviewee. I stood up for him in the social media when his candidature was announced.

The elections are on the streets though. We were having a drink. When only one other table was occupied we could hear its occupants making their predictions for the vote. A second table was occupied later. They talked about the elctions too - they had clear views on some of the candidates. "I'm not telling you who I'm voting for," said the female to the male partner, "it's a secret vote."

Apparently it's the fiftieth anniversary of the European flag - the one with the yellow stars on the blue background. I was, as so often, listening to the radio and some chap was talking about the flag's anniversary. We fly the flag a lot in Spain he said, the same in Italy. In Britain they hardly ever fly the European Union flag because of their feelings towards Europe.

It was International Museum Day, IMD, this week. In Cartagena, where we used to live, the Night of the Museums was a huge and joyous family event with the museums open for free till 2am, on a Saturday evening nearest to IMD and all sorts of street events alongside. I wondered if there was anything happening close to Culebrón this year as Cartagena is a fair distance away. There were 138 events listed for Spain and another 295 for the rest of Europe though the nearest to us was some 40km away. Out of curiosity I wondered who was doing what in the UK. At first I couldn't find anyone but, with a bit of probing, I found that the Auckland Castle Museum and the Thackray Medical Museum were doing their bit.

I am reminded of the oft quoted headline, puportedly from the Daily Mirror in 1930. Fog in Channel Continent Cut Off.