October weather

Here's the October weather report for Pinoso prepared by Agapito Gonzálvez.

The highest temperature was on the 5th when it got to 28ºC.and the lowest temperature was 4ºC overnight on the 22nd. The mean daily high was 22.2ºC and the mean daily low was 10.3ºC which all averages out at 16.2ºC.

The rain was just 9.4 litres of water on every square meter in October and a third of that came down on the 20th.

We only had nine days of clear, sunny skies and another fourteen with sunny periods. Less to my taste we had four days when the sun didn't come out at all and it rained on seven days.

Everyone tells me that this is good for the olives. Personally I prefer the searing heat of August.

Very, very grave

Today is All Saints' day in Spain. Well I suppose it's All Saint's all over the Catholic World, maybe farther afield, anywhere in the Christian World. How would I know without asking Google? Anyway, where was I? Oh Yes, so it's the day or at least the period when Spanish families go and clean up the family niches, mausoleums and pantheons.

Yesterday, on Saturday afternoon, the local Town Hall here in Pinoso offered a guided tour of the local cemetery to tie in with the general theme. I thought it was a great idea and I signed up straight away but nearly everyone else I spoke to about it seemed to think it was a bit strange. Indeed Maggie, who I'd signed up for the visit, decided to give it a miss so I went by myself. Amazingly, I was the only Brit in the group. There aren't many things where we aren't represented.

The Mayor and a couple of councillors were there but it was someone called Clara who did the tour. I don't know who she is but I have to say that she did a superb job. Strangely, she started her introductory remarks by saying that some people thought that the idea of a graveyard tour was a bit rocambolesco (bizarre) but she hoped that after we'd done it we wouldn't agree. Maybe she'd talked to some of the same people as me.

Clara started from the entrance way explaining why cypress trees outside (it's yews, tejos, in the UK isn't it?) went on to the reason that the graveyard had been moved from alongside the church and near the town centre as a result of a decree by the provisional government sheltering in Cadiz at the start of the 19th Century and then went on to explain the history of the cemetery in general and some of the specific tombs in particular.

We saw the disused room where autopsies were once performed, we went underground to see the grave of the first person buried there in 1912 - someone who gets free rental of their plot. We saw political rivals buried side by side, we saw Modernist and Gothic style pantheons and someone with the group had a book, a family heirloom passed from eldest son to eldest son, that explained the history and management of her own eighty space family mausoleum. The Mayor did the bit about the ossuary (the place where remains removed from old and abandoned graves and plots are buried together) in Valencià but I got the drift and I knew why Eli, another councillor, laid a floral tribute by the little sculpture there.

The whole thing lasted about an hour. One of the best small scale visits I've done for ages. Whoever thought of that idea deserves a slap on the back.

Having a laugh

Normally, when I go to the theatre or somesuch I put the photos on Picasa or Facebook and that's it but I just have to tell you about the Flamenco performance we went to see last night.

The event was at the Teatro Vico in Jumilla. Getting the tickets booked was a right faff because the box office was only open when I was at work. Jumilla is 35kms from home and they have no Internet presence. Then, to top it all, I kept confusing the performance on Friday with the performance on Saturday in my various messages. By the time I'd finished I reckon I could ask the bloke from the box office to be my best man should I ever get married - I'd have to ask by WhatsApp though.

Our seats were on the front row. Right at the front. Just the orchestra pit between us and the tight flamenco suits and frocks. To get to the seats we had to pass by a very severe looking older couple who seemed as unmovable as Joan Baez. As I squeezed past under their piercing stares the vision of me standing on her foot, stumbling and crashing into him flashed before my eyes. I made it to my seat without incident.

The couple did not move through the whole performance. No applause, almost no asides to each other. The man looked at his watch by grasping the casing with his right hand and staring intently at the time for at least thirty seconds. He was so obvious about it, he did it so often and he was so near the stage that the performers must have noticed him.

As usual the event started late. Spaniards call it courtesy time. It never seems very courteous to me to the people who turn up on time but I suppose that's my funny British sensibility. It wasn't late enough for a couple of people though. We got under way for the 9pm event at around 9.20 but some chap in the third or fourth row of the stalls turned up a few minutes afterwards. He didn't lower his voice at all as he and his partner discussed who should take which of the two seats assigned to them. The seats were at the aisle end of the row. He chose the more interior seat so, ten minutes later, when presumably his bladder betrayed him, there was another full volume conversation and quite a lot of noise as he headed for the toilet.

On row two, behind us there was a conversation that was perfectly audible above the music. The only part of it I caught though was about how and what one of the women was going to eat later. Maggie said that when a phone somewhere behind her rang the woman didn't hesitate to answer it or to have a perfectly normal conversation. All in all it was a very unsettled audience which is a bit unusual for flamenco.

Up on stage the flamenco wasn't bad at all. Four, I think, different acts doing their set. Singing, playing, dancing and even some poetry. It did seem to go on a long time though. The compeering was done by a chap who must have gone to great pains to choose his very light coloured suit. The trousers were long, the jacket was tight across his stomach but a bit big on the shoulders and the cuffs were palm covering. Later we had a cavalcade of local presidents of this association or society to hand out certificates and bottles of wine to the performers. Not one of them wore trousers that were not brushing the ground. One bloke, with a cardigan and flat cap looked like he'd come directly from his allotment. Another had a slightly grubby looking combination of black shoes, blue trousers, pink shirt and green jacket. Choosing that ensemble could not be pure chance.

All in all it was a very enjoyable event and not all of the fun was in the performances or even on the stage.

A nation of writers

I once worked with someone who was keen on illicit drugs. He came from Huddersfield but we were working near Newcastle and he was having trouble finding a local supplier. He picked up what we used to call a sexually transmitted disease and ended up at the local GUM clinic. He told me later that finding a supplier in the clinic was the work of minutes and he wondered why he'd never thought of it before.

If you want to find Britons in Spain the Post Office would be fertile territory. In the Pinoso office at least we usually outnumber Spaniards. I've been told, by a Spaniard, that this is because, until recently at least, there had not been a big tradition of reading and writing in Spain so the Post Office never became important to ordinary people. I have to say that I thought the analysis lacked academic rigour.

Today I was reading the local news over a lunchtime coffee. There was a piece to say that Pinoso had twenty one restaurants featured on a website called gastroranking.es which is a website that compiles the results from a range of other websites of the TripAdvisor type.

I had a look and I was quite surprised to find that the top rated places in Pinoso included places I would not have instantly thought of. The outright winner is very popular with both Spaniards and Britons but the rest of the top performers included places that I certainly don't care for. Risking the possibility of being ostracised by my own all I can think is that maybe the Post Office literacy comment is more accurate than I suspected. Maybe there really is very little tradition of writing by the home population and that extends to restaurant reviews.

Cobbling it all together

Our palm tree is fit and well. You will remember that I was alternately worried about it bringing down power cables or being eaten by beetles. Well everything sort of miraculously self resolved. All I do now is spray it with some deadly chemical every six weeks and that's it. Just another routine job.

I bought the pesticide from the bodega. In their shop they sell all sorts of things for we horny handed sons of toil. Much later I was checking information that I'd heard on the local radio about the the beetle plague with the local environment office. I mentioned my spraying regime. The Park Ranger I was talking to, you could tell she was a ranger because she had those trousers that are baggy behind the knee and have lots of unexplained and apparently useless flaps, asked me if I had a certificate for handling pesticides. I don't of course. No problem she said. Nobody is going to bother you about it but really you should either do the course on how to spray safely or get a professional to treat your tree. As it stands I am apparently on the wrong side of the law if I spray. I remembered her advice when I saw a poster outside the shoe shop advertising a spraying course.

A few weeks ago I was shovelling down some breakfast longanizas and tortilla in Eduardo's when David asked me if I used any chemicals in the garden. He had heard that, from the beginning of October, only people who had been on the appropriate courses about handling pesticides, herbicides and similar would be allowed to buy them. His advice was to stock up before the law changed and that's exactly what I did.

Today as I drove to work I had the local radio on again. This time I heard how the containers for phytosanitary products have to be disposed of in an approved way and that not doing so is a serious offence with attendant fines. Now my guess is that they are talking about the farmers, who spray thousands of litres of the stuff on their crops and then dump the chemical tubs all over the countryside, rather than me and my one litre bottle. The principle, nonetheless, is the same.

It's obvious that something has been going on in relation to agricultural spraying. There was David's news, the conversation with the ranger, the news item on the radio and the training course poster.

To be honest, I have no idea how I kept up with things when I lived in the UK. I suppose it would be a mixture of things - an information leaflet here, a news item there and, maybe, a conversation down the boozer to top it all off.

We, we Britons, don't generally keep up quite so well here. We're disadvantaged because we live on the edge of mainstream society. Most of us don't watch the home grown telly, share the same WhatsApp messages, read the home grown press, live with a Spanish person or even have the same sort of  bar room conversations. Our news tends to be filtered by someone who understood the Spanish in the first place or who has heard it passed on in a sort of Chinese Whispers way.

A few years ago there were sweeping tax changes. Perfectly reasonably the Spanish media centred on those things that would directly affect most people - income tax changes, sales tax changes, pension and salary freezes. In amongst those measures were increased duties on air fares. To your average Spaniard the air fare news was inconsequential but to a retired Briton living in Spain on a pension paid from the UK, paying no Spanish Incom Tax but flying "home" every few months the key bit of information was simply not reported.

So, often, it's not the lack of information that surprises me it's the fact that we somehow manage to cobble it all together one way and another.

My new job

Forgive the indulgence of this entry.

I started a new job a couple of weeks ago teaching English with a language school based in Murcia city. They didn't give me a job in the city though but asked me to work in a co-operative grant maintained school in Cieza which is a very pleasant but lengthy 60km drive from home.

For three mornings a week I work in the school, with classes of youngsters. Their ages range from 12 to 16. I am there to do the authentic English bit - real structure, real vocabulary and real accent. Mainly speaking and listening rather than writing or reading.

For four afternoons a week I work in the same school buildings alongside a team of three or four other English speaking Spanish teachers. Indeed I work in the same classrooms, but this time for the academy, the private language school which sells English classes. The age range there is from six year olds up to adults.

I'm far from settled. The students seem nice enough and nobody has hit me or abused me directly as they did when I worked in Fortuna. First impressions are that the school is good and the staff have been perfectly friendly. On the other hand I still haven't worked out how a lot of it works or even got all of the various text books and other materials that are the basis for the ten different groups that I work with in the afternoons. Teaching full classes of ordinary schoolkids in a school is something completely new to me too.

All in all I have nineteen diffferent groups and getting to know them all is not something that comes easily to an old man with a failing memory. The teaching has been fine, I've even enjoyed most of it, but the record keeping has been driving me crazy. The records are necessary to ensure that I don't cover the same thing twice with the same group. Planning has also taken much longer than I like, and probably than it should. The truth is though that simple maths says that with so many groups even ten minutes per week on each means I'll be doing over three hours of unpaid work. All I can hope is that it will all become easier and faster as things settle down.

Or maybe I'll just decide that working isn't really for me any more and give it all up, sit in Culebrón and try to live off my small pension and the sweat of Maggie's brow.

Broken mugs and Timberland loafers

I heard a loud crash in the kitchen and a louder curse from Maggie. She'd dropped a mug which we got free with some Fontaneda digestive biscuits (McVities to you and me) when we lived in Santa Pola. That would be about eleven years ago now. "It was nearly an antique," she said, sadly.

A little while ago one of my nephews got married. Originally I intended to go to the wedding but airlines and bosses conspired against me to make it more or less impossible or at least impractical. Looking through the wedding list I siezed on sending a canteen of cutlery. I remember the myriad times that my mum would comment on a tea caddy spoon, a vase or some other trivial household object and say - "That was a wedding present from Uncle So and So." I rather like the idea of permanancy amidst the never ending change.

We have quite a few chipped tiles on the floor and lots of things that were new when we moved in here in 2005 are definitely looking a bit tired now - then again they also make the place look lived in, worn in - like it's ours.

This morning I decided to clear my summer sandals from the bottom of the wardrobe. There were a pair of Timberlands that I bought specifically to come to Spain. I thought that Spaniards, like Italians, probably didn't wear socks and I wanted to fit in. As I put the summer shoes away I pulled out some sensible black Oxfords much more suitable for the coming weather and I dragged out a Harrington windcheater that I bought when I first started working In St Ives back in 1996 I think. Perfect for the light chill of mid October.

The MGB, Mary the cat and I crossed the border into Spain eleven years and ten days ago now. Long enough to remember that such and such was a gift from so and so or came from here or there. Slowly building a history.

September weather

The blogs about the weather are amongst the posts that get most visits. So I've been looking out for the July and August summaries on the Town Hall website. Then a couple of days ago, the September report popped up, leapfrogging the earlier months. Obviously there was no weather to talk of over the summer.

On the same website there were some very seasonal reports. Apparently the grape harvest for the local wine co-op is shaping up nicely. Good grapes and plenty of them. It's the same for the almonds. An abundant crop with decent prices to the farmers. But not everything is sweetness and light. The tractor and trailer combinations that haul the grapes to the co-operative bodega and dried fruit and nuts processor are causing frustration for local car drivers. It is very annoying to get stuck behind the trailers and hemmed in by the very common - do not overtake - solid white lines of Spanish roads. Tractor drivers are being asked to use the route that skirts the town usually used by the heavy lorries. The farmers are also being warned that if they spill the grapes on the road (which soon get churned into a thick blood coloured paste) the local police may well prosecute. How they can be sure who spilled which grapes where I'm not quite sure.

In Cambridgeshire I used to get stuck behind beet lorries. Now it's grapes and almond tractors.

Anyway, September weather. Well the highest temperature was on both the 21st or the 22nd at 32ºC and there were seven days in the month when the temperature was over 30ºC. The lowest temperature was 10ºC overnight between the 28th and 29th. The mean daily high was 26.6ºC and the mean daily low was 10.8ºC which all averages out at 20.2ºC. 

The rain dumped 78.6 litres of water on every square meter in September though one day, the 7th, was responsible for 30 of those litres. 

We had 15 days of clear, sunny skies and another seven with sunny periods. Even with all that rain there were only three days when it was completely overcast.

Not enough meat for a post

I was trying to decide whether there was enough material for a post or not.

I went on a tram. I parked outside of town and rode in on the tram to save car parking fees. That's it. That's the nub of it, the kernel. I don't think it's enough. It doesn't have the lurid appeal of "I Married an Alien" nor the biting, if misplaced, immediacy of "Gotcha"

Maybe I could pad it out? Details about the Murcia City tram system: length of line, stuff like that but just reading the information was boring enough - test line in 2007, opened 2011, only one of the four lines built, 21kms in length etc.

What about a trip down memory lane? Illuminated trams in Blackpool dresseed as rockets, Lisbon trams scraping past walls or Huddersfield trolley buses passing through Elland on the way to the terminus in West Vale. Hardly appropriate for Life in Culebrón.

Something on the organisation of public transport perhaps? The Alicante to Jumilla bus that stops in Culebrón? How, within towns at least, there is a fixed fare scheme nearly everywhere in Spain. About the per kilometre price for main line trains with slower trains cheaper than faster trains? Even more yawn inducing. Anyway I seem to remember a remarkably tedious post about a narrow gauge railway somewhere.

No. Not enough for a post. And the photos were blurry anyway because it was so dark and dismal in Murcia.

Absent minded

Today we took part in the day of the absent Pinosero. 

Pinoseros are people who were born in Pinoso. The idea of the day is that it celebrates the locals who, for one reason or another, no longer live here. Each year some of them make the journey back to Pinoso to meet with friends and family or just to renew acquaintance with the town. Those who will never come back are remembered too.

The day included an official welcome, a presentation about the local salt workings and then a trip, by coach, to the top of Cabezo to have a look the actual installations on the ground before travelling back to town for a quick church service, a group photo and a meal.

Pinoso mines salt, a lot of salt but there's not a mineshaft, pick or shovel to be seen. One of the local topographic features is a rounded, dome like, hill which stands about 320 metres above the general terrain and whose summit is at something like 890 metres above sea level at Alicante. It's a salt dome. Millions and millions of tons of Triassic salt that have squeezed up through the surrounding rocks. Nowadays a mining company injects water into the ground, dissolves out some of the salt and sends it down a 53km gravity fed pipeline to Torrevieja. There the brine is added to the salt lagoons, filled with already salty water from the Mediterranean. The Pinoso brine ups the concentration of salt in the water so, when the water is evaporated away, they are left with tons of salt ready for road gritting, the chemical industry and other industrial uses.

To be honest I've been to much more exciting salt workings where huge trucks work underground or where salty white miners work with picks and wooden wheelbarrows (well in front of tourists they do) but this was interesting because it was on home turf. Something that we'd not done either before.

The meal wasn't bad. Mass catering and a very normal sort of menu but the rabbit stew, the gazpacho, I had was good and Maggie said her rice, rabbit and snail paella, was good enough too. The company was excellent. We had gone with a couple of recently arrived Britons but otherwise we were, obviously enough, surrounded by Spaniards and they seemed more than happy to chat with us. There were a couple of quite impish chaps sitting opposite who must have been studying irony at the University of the Third Age and were  determined to try out some of the things they had learned.

So, about seven hours after we started we came home. Fatter and more knowledgeable about local geography, geology and industry and, rather surprisingly, grasping one of the group photos.

Thick cut marmalade

I met Maggie as she left work today and on the way home we went food shopping. Maggie told me we were saving money because she had some sort of customer loyalty voucher. I suspect we may have saved more by not going in the shop at all though following my plan to its logical conclusion we would starve to death.

Based on a mix of store layout, friendliness, price and choice the shop we went to, Consum, is probably my favourite of the four larger Pinoso supermarkets. Recently I've done more of the food shopping than Maggie so, as we moved around the shop, I was playing the tour guide on new lines and innovations. What I hadn't really noticed, until today, was how many "British" items the shop now carries.

It was around 3pm when we were shopping, a time when most Spanish people are getting their lunch. The only Spaniards in the store were the workers. All of the customers appeared to be Britons. Obviously whoever does the buying for our Consum had noticed this customer profile long before me and that's why Consum sells Cheddar cheese, thick cut marmalade, Sharwoods pastes, chillis, kidney beans, Heinz tomato soup and lots of other Brit familiar produts. I suppose it's why masymas has in store adverts in English too.

Here's a blog entry I thought.

Now as I said there are four biggish supermarkets in Pinoso as well as a couple of local food shops. I thought that if I were going to mention Consum I should do the same for Día, Hiperber and masymas. You might not think so but I try to be reasonably even handed when I write this blog. So I Googled the supermarkets for a bit of background info and I was quite surprised by what I found.

Hiperber is the simplest story. They set up about forty years ago in nearby Elche with a philosophy of larger retail units when other food shops were still pretty small. They tend to be no frills stores and they seem to be doing fine as a small, regional chain.

Día is another no frills business. It runs on a policy of limited product lines and lots of own brands to keep the stores firmly at the cheaper end of the market. I vaguely knew that Día had something to do with the Carrefour chain and that it ran as a franchise operation. It turns out that my Carrefour information is out of date. The businesses separated in 2011 and of the 4,781 Día shops in Spain only around 1,650 are franchises. Día seem to have done alright out of the problems of other food retailers. They bought the ailing Arbol supermarkets for just 1€ in 2014 and, in 2015, they took advantage of the financial problems of the third largest food retailer, Eroski, to buy lots more shops. Eroski had run into problems because of its huge investment in shopping centres at the height of the building boom.

Masymas was a surprise. Más y Más means more and more and I thought that was the name of the shop. Actually the name seems to be masymas - lowercase and just one word. It's not simply one compay either; it's four different companies that have very similar logos and, I think, share some bulk buying, Our local shop is one of fifty seven shops that can trace their roots back to a dried and cured food business that opened in Villajoyosa at the tail end of the 19th Century.

And Consum? Well it's a co-operative with nearly all the workers being partners in the business. Apparently it's the largest co-op in Valencia. They formed in 1975 and were later a founding part of the Eroski group until the two businesses parted ways back in 2004. They also have a franchise arm which trades as Charter supermarkets.