Day to day

Last century I passed a fair bit of time in schools. Firstly I had to study in them. My secondary school, between 1965 and 1972, was quite a violent place as I remember. Bullying from other pupils and downright violence from the staff. Later, between 1996 and 2004, I had an office in another school though I couldn't say I really took much notice of my surroundings. I was working in what was called Community Education - adult education, youth work and community development - and it just so happened that our office was there close to the classrooms and other facilities that we used for some of the programme. The only time I remember venturing into a classroom during school hours was to have a word with someone who organised the Duke of Edinburgh's Award for us. She was a teacher at the school and I went to hunt her out in her room. Noisy as I remember it, and much less formal than when I went to school but everyone seemed to be working with purpose.

I'm working in a school again now and this time I'm actually with the youngsters for at least some of the time. I have nine lessons a week with nine different groups. They are full classes with around thirty pupils in some, a few more in one and a few less in others. I think one of them is a special needs type group though, to be honest, I'm not sure. They do pretty well with the English and they seem keen which is all I need to have a good time.

The school is interesting. It's a very loud place. It's very informal. I'm at one with the dress code in jeans and t shirt and I may be a bit over finicky in having a shave before going to work. At times when the pupils are on the move, in fact every time, it seems a bit chaotic but I've never seen any violence or any bullying other than the sort of fleeting and unthinking attacks that young people unleash on each other without pre meditation and without malevolence. I'm sure it's there but I haven't seen it. I have, on the other hand, noticed lots of acts of kindness and friendship between the students which surprises me.

The youngsters don't show me any respect but they don't show the opposite either. Tens of them greet me every day as I wander the school and some even try to pass the time of day with me.

The noise level in the classrooms is pretty high and the real teachers who hold my hand in the lessons occasionally make someone change seats or leave the room. I presume this means the youngsters must be misbehaving in some way but I never notice. I do notice the ones who don't participate at all though. There are several who just stare at their shoes or draw elaborate pictures in biro. There seems to be no expectation that they join in at any level.

The academy, the afternoon sessions are a completely different kettle of fish. These are paid for private lessons. Most of the youngsters are there because their parents believe that English will be good for them. This may well be true but English is less appealing than the park, their friends or Sponge Bob on the telly. I sympathise. They go to school all day, they have homework to do and then they are expected to do more studying. So it's a bit of an uphill struggle and some of the little dears sorely stretch my patience. The adults and older teenagers in the academy are perfectly nice.

One thing I have probably noticed about the Spanish Education is the apparent use of books. In the school my role is to model real English so I am expected to talk and listen. I am not expected to work to any particular scheme or pattern but I get the idea that most courses start at page 1, exercise 1, go on to exercise 2, exercise 3 etc. The youngsters are certainly keen, conditioned maybe, to fill in the gaps in the exercises. In fact it seems much more important to fill in the gaps than understand the language that goes into the spaces. This involves a lot of pencil sharpening, rubbing out and the modern versions of tipp-ex. I was told yesterday that I will be given a timetable for working through the various books - you know the sort of thing. By the end of January you will have completed Unit 4. Apparently parents don't like to see the books that they have paid for not getting filled up with writing, rubber detritus and tipp-ex. Progress can be measured by the number of pages completed.

I'm sure that such an innovative methodology will turn out legions of capable English speakers.

Driving home the other way

Now that I work in Cieza my route to work has changed. It's about about 60 kms each way and the journey time - that is the time from when, with seat belt fastened and radio playing I accelerate away from our front gate to the moment I park up outside my workplace - is about 45 minutes. Even with my primitive arithmetical skills I can work out that means I average just 80kph or 50mph.

On the way to Cieza from Culebrón the left from our track onto the main CV83 would be an illegal manoeuvre involving crossing a solid white line and hatched areas. Should the car around the corner be Guardia Civil that would be a 300€ fine and goodness knows how many points off the spotless 15 of my licence. Would I do that or would I be more likely to make the legal right turn, cross into the village, turn around in front of Eduardo's and rejoin the CV83 heading out towards Pinoso? The choice, as that voice on Blind Date used to say, is yours.

Towards Pinoso then, at the roundabout just before the town off to the right skirting the industrial estate and the open land where the bullocks are chased around by the local lads at Fiesta time in August. I've wondered about stopping a couple of times to take a snap up the hillside there because with the morning sunshine the houses on the hillside in the Santa Catalina area look very colourful and jolly. Left at the next roundabout then and skirting the North of Pinoso before clearing the town and heading out towards Jumilla. Careful of the speed limit through Casas Ibañez - lots of stories there about speed traps - and across the border into the Murcia Region. Off to the right the Sierra del Carche and its 1372 metre peak. All along the road small hamlets, cultivated land - lots of vines and olives and almonds - a modern bodega and quite a lot of fallow or maybe unusable land.

The road is relatively straight with almost no traffic and the car tends to settle at something comfortable. It would be easy to find myself exceeding the 90kph open road speed limit. There are a few bends just before and past the failed Venta Viña P Restaurant and Los Olmos, the very strangely located kart racing track, hotel and restaurant complex. After a while the road straightens and drops with a great view out to the Sierra de Sopalmo - a big wall of hills and, in the distance, the A33 motorway.

Up to now I've been heading basically East but somewhere around here I want to start heading South on the A33 which runs down to Murcia City. Until quite recently I would have used one of the  trunk roads, the National or N344 to make that journey but, in 2012 the first 30kms or so of the Motorway, the Autovía, A33 between Blanca and close to Jumilla was opened having cost some 122 million euros. Eventually the A33 will connect motorways coming out of Andalucia and Murcia with motorways in Alicante which will make all sorts of routes faster but will principally create an inland route to cut the corner on the way up to France. There is a snag though. Although the Pinoso road is the principal East West road in the area the road builders, in their wisdom, chose not to add direct access to the motorway. Instead I have to drive a few kilometres on the old, and now very quiet, ex main road or I can cut the corner and go through the village of Encebras. I like the Encebras route despite the 20kph speed limit, which I obviously keep to, because there is the vague chance of seeing somone on foot. I did pass a tractor the other day but otherwise no vehicles so far. And Encebras has street lighting which always strikes me as bizarre for a village that can have no more than 50 inhabitants.

I do about 18kms on the motorway. Nice black tarmac and clear white lines with very little traffic. So far the journey has taken about 20 minutes. The motorway bit takes another ten minutes or so. Suddenly there's a built up area just off the motorway, the village built around the old, 1868, railway station for Blanca. It's 10km to Blanca but there's Spanish railways for you. Apparently 800 people live in Estación de Blanca but all I notice really are the Blancasol agricultural co-op and the bar where the Guardia Civil park up for a mid morning coffee. It's quite a strange road layout to get onto the RM402 which connects the motorway I've just come off with the motorway I want to join, the A30, heading out of Murcia for Albacete and on to Madrid. There is a marked change too from countryside to messy urban in this bit of Murcia and that means much more traffic.

I have to take a bit of a left turn across traffic which is quite an unusual operation on a free flowing Spanish road. It's much more common to send you right into a little semicircle to allow you to turn left by crossing traffic from a stop sign. The junction is marked by a strange, single, abandoned block of green and white flats built in the middle of nowhere. The junction also has unexpected adverse camber and leads into a another slip road which is both the exit and entry to the A30. That can be fun at times. Some eight kilometres heading back North now, off on the Cieza turn, a couple of roundabouts and into the entrance to the town. Bonica Cieza it says on a big sign just there, a very Murcian way to suggest that the town is pretty. Certainly the local inhabitants seem to stick up for it and what I've seen looks nice enough. Down past the park and a big sort of esplanade which is always full of people out for a bit of a stroll in the evening, full twist around a roundabout and then a right turn onto the bit of wasteland that surrounds the school where I do my English teaching. Then it's just a case of parking up and avoiding any large shards of glass from any newly broken beer bottles from the night before.

The route home isn't an exact repeat but my guess is that you've taken as much as you can now so let's pretend it is.

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.