Life in the UK

I've just been back to the UK. Here are a few things I noticed.

Beer. I went in a pub and bought a pint of bitter. I had no idea what to ask for from all the strangely named brews but whatever I bought tasted like proper British beer. I have nothing against the beer I can get in any bar in Spain but the stuff I was buying in England was much more interesting. I had to be sure though so I visited a fair number of pubs.

Heat. It's hot in the UK. It was sometimes a tad cold outside but inside it was roasting. I haven't walked around in shirt sleeves inside in Spain for months. It was horribly dark though. Grey.

Streetfood. From time to time people eat in the street in Spain but, generally, only where there is some sort of event - like a Mediaeval Fair or fiesta. In the UK people were walking down the street eating all sorts of take away food. In Cambridge the woman on the bench next to me polished off a whole tray of sushi using chopsticks whilst the wind blew and the sky drizzled.

Restaurants, takeaways and food outlets were everywhere. We have plenty of bars and restaurants here too but the huge variety of food in the UK was noticeable.

Shops seemed much more adventurous than the shops I have become used to. There are plenty of interesting places in bigger cities here but I was in St Ives and Ely, as much as Cambridge, and even there the breadth of retail was impressive.

Work. Lots of people asked me about my work and I responded by asking about theirs. Work is a long way down the list of conversational topics in Spain: long after family, food, Spanish, the weather etc.

Money. No wonder everyone in the UK waves their credit card at the machine to pay for everything. Things seemed expensive to us though I suppose price bears a direct relationship to income. Nonetheless things do cost a lot of pounds and you would need to carry a lot of cash to keep up. I know young people use credit cards more than older people here in Spain but the terminals are not as obvious and ubiquitous as they are in England.

I was constantly taken unawares by cars driving on the wrong side of the road. More than once I thought a car was out of control simply because it was on the side of the road I am no longer accustomed to.

English. Everyone tells me that the UK is full of people from different countries but it was great to be able to speak freely and competently. Well except in Starbucks where successfully buying a cup of coffee seemed to require passing the specialist subject round on Mastermind.

Police. There weren't any. Short of the vested and impressively armed police at the airport I didn't see a police officer on foot. In Spain the police walk around all the time.

Bags. We still get plastic bags when we buy things in Spain. It struck me as a good thing that they are not given away with gay abandon in the UK but it did leave me struggling with armfuls of small items at times.

Skin. I nearly forgot this. In all seriousness I asked Maggie's niece if there was a fashion for women to wear very white face makeup with bright red lipstick and pronounced eye makeup. The answer was no. Apparently Britons are a fair bit paler skinned than Spaniards.

And a special mention for the guided bus. It's an ordinary bus that can be driven around the streets but, between Cambridge and St Ives the bus runs along the route of the old train lines in a sort of concrete conduit with little guide wheels sticking out to the side. Most impressive.

The people have spoken

The last time that the people of Pinoso voted, in the December General election, they went, overwhelmingly, for the Partido Popular - the conservative side. The time before that they voted just as definitely for the PSOE - the socialist side; well yes and no. That time, in the Local Elections they voted for Lazaro and Silvia and Paco and César and the reat of the list. They voted for people they knew and a group that had a track record, of which they approved, in the town.

The Mayor of Pinoso is my Facebook friend. I don't think this means that much. I'm sure if you asked he would say yes to you too. I knew one of his councillors pretty well at one time in the past though nowadays we don't even always nod and say hello in the street. When there were only really two political parties in Spain I tried to join the PSOE a couple of times without success.

A few years ago I went to a couple of  Agenda 21 meetings here in Pinoso. The meeting I remember involved a  bunch of us sitting in a room and talking about what we thought was important for the town. Not much happened, except that we got an invitation to visit the local clock tower, but, at least, there was lip service to the idea of a Citizen's Forum; to people contributing their hopes, ideas and concerns. Shortly after those meetings I moved to Ciudad Rodrigo and then to Cartagena and La Unión. When I finally came back to Culebrón to live I was still working in Fortuna and the meetings and my work day did not fit together. I was always pleased though that the meetings were still happening and also that my name was on a database somewhere so that I continued to get text message invitations to the sessions.

Last week I got an SMS to say there was another Citizens Forum meeting. I got two days notice but maybe I missed the earlier publicity. I intended to go. The time of the meeting meant that I could go directly from work but, in the end, laziness and a touch of forgetfulness meant that I didn't.

I read the press report about the meeting. The agenda looked pretty sterile and it was noticeable that it was Town Hall driven. I'm sure that people are interested in what to do with the old flour factory, interested in hearing about the 3 million euro fine the town has to pay and, finally, complying with the law and renaming streets and removing, emblems which celebrate the Francoist dictatorship. I hardly think though that any one of them would be the first idea on the whiteboard at an open brainstorming session.

There's nothing wrong with a Town Hall feedback session. In fact it sounds like a good idea but it's a long way from the original purpose of those meetings. I was also a bit rattled by the photo that accompanied the piece. It showed the politicians and experts on the top table, a table that was raised above the audience and a table that came with microphones. It didn't look like the most particaptive set up and the power relationship was glaringly obvious. I'm only guessing of course. I wasn't there.

It made me wonder. The last time I heard the Mayor giving one of his welcome speeches both Maggie and I commented on the length and the triteness of it. I seem to remember, in the past, that he tended to be an interesting and snappy speaker. I also thought about the dealings between the local Neighbourhood Association committee, of which I am vaguely a member, and the Town Hall. I found myself bristling at the autocracy of those negotiations but then I get angry about almost everything nowadays.

No coman pipas

Don't eat sunflower seeds. It was a little notice on the wall of what is now the Centre for Associations in Pinoso. It made me laugh.

I'd popped into town to see one of the events built up around International Women's Day "Sarah y Nora toman el  té de las cinco" - Sarah and Nora take afternoon tea. It's a play about the personal and professional rivalry between Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse.

In all the publicity Bernhardt is spelled as Bernhard. Spaniards don't take long to Spanishise anything they don't like the spelling of. I was reading a book the other day and it took me a while to equate taper with tupper taken from the trademarked plastic containers Tupperware which is used as the generic for plastic food containers. It's a word I know and use but I'd never thought how it was written. The misspelling, nonetheless, made me laugh.

The Director is, I think, a Spanish bloke but the company is Mexican, from Durango. I turned up at 7.59 for the 8.0 clock performance. I know that the possibility of a Spanish event starting on time is the same as the hell bound cat's but old habit's die hard. Actually we didn't wait long. About ten past the Director stood up and started explaining the background to the play. During his discourse the councillor, whose department was sponsoring the event, showed up. Maybe they are a bit more punctual in Durango than in Pinoso. That made me laugh too.

The play was fine. Competent acting and easy enough to understand which is always a bonus. It made me smile from time to time though it didn't make me laugh.

Road signs

There are a lot of road signs in Spain. Most of them are pretty standard and give orders, warnings or advice in the way that road signs do all across the world. Some of them though, particularly speed restriction signs can be really difficult to work out.

In general there are fixed speed limits on roads which do not need to be signed. They are the default. They vary for different types of vehicles so I'll limit myself to cars. On motorways the speed limit is 120k/h, on roads with a wide hard shoulder it's 100, on standard two lane roads it's 90 and in towns it's 50k/h. All of these speed limits can be amended by the usual round sign with a red border and the black number on a white background. I didn't realise till I was checking details for this post that there is also a general minimum speed limit which is half the maximum. So you could be fined for going faster than 120k/h or slower than 60k/h on a motorway.

There is also an interesting exception to the 90k/h rule. Where there are no signs on a normal two way road you can exceed the speed limit by 20k/h during an overtaking manoeuvre.

Speed limit signs and no overtaking signs are everywhere on Spanish roads. I often wonder if someone powerful has a brother in law who makes road signs because, at times, the proliferation of them seems so excessive. It's very normal for instance to count down from the open road as you approach a town or a hazard such as a roundabout. 80k/h, twenty metres, 70k/h, twenty metres, 40k/h.

One of the key places where there are no overtaking signs and speed restrictions on what would normally be considered "the open road" is around a junction. These signs are usually backed up by changing the central road markings to single continuous white lines. These signs can be odd. Often there will, for instance, be a 60k/h sign a couple of hundred metres before a junction but, after the junction there will be nothing to say that the restriction has been lifted. Sometimes there are signs to mark the end of the no overtaking rule which I always take as showing that you can speed up again but, often, you seem to have to presume that once the hazard has been passed you are back to the general speed limit. In the case of a T junction this can mean that there are different speed limits on the opposite sides of the road because the hazard is only important on the side of the road where the junction is.

Another interseting one is where the sign is more descriptive. For instance there is an 80k/h limit on the way through a wide spot in the road outside Pinoso called Casas Ibañez. A few metres inside the 80 zone is a second sign which says 50k/h in the crossing. A few hundred metres later there is a second 80k/h sign. So I know where the 50k/h restrction ends but I have no idea where it starts.

And then, there are the completely contradictory signs. In the photo at the top of this entry the 20k/h sign is obvious but, on the road, the markings say 30k/h. Actually I understand that the cycle way marked in red is actually at variance with the rules for bikes which says that they should keep as close to the edge of the road as possible and means that cyclists using the track could actually be fined.

Hey, ho!

Custom and Practice

When I first started the  blog it was simple. The idea was to celebrate, or at least note, the diffferences between what I'd always considered to be everyday and what was now ordinary in a new country. So the fact that I ordered neither quantity nor type of beer - I just asked for a beer - gave me material for an entry. Everything from a fiesta to a supermarket visit was grist to the mill.

Nowadays it's different. I don't want to repeat the same entries over and over again and I'm, perhaps, no longer the best person to notice the differences - or so I thought. Strangely though in the last twenty four hours, a couple of tiny incidents have reminded me that I've still not quite caught on.

I do lots of English language exercises that revolve around food. In one drill I have the students do a bit of imaginary food shopping to mark vocabulary like savoury, packet, jar, seafood, game, poultry, herbs etc. They have to produce a meal from their list of savoury ingredients which come in jars and so on. A second is a variation on the TV show Come Dine With Me and there's another on preparing a romantic dinner. In all of them the end product is to produce a meal of starter, main course and pudding. I've always presumed that the minor confusions around starter and main course were simply linguistic ones. Yesterday though when we popped in to a restaurant for a meal something clicked. The eatery, on the outskirts of Fortuna, only had British clients. Maggie and I chose different starters from the set meal but we had the same main. I noticed that the menu, the list of food with prices, didn't use the Spanish equivalents of starter and main. Instead there was a list of first and second courses followed by the dessert. It wasn't something new to me but I suddenly realised that my interpretation wasn't quite right. The difference is subtle. Here we have two courses of equal weight rather than a lighter starter followed by a more substantial main course. If we were going to emulate that in Spain it would be much more usual to share the starters in the centre of the table. So there is an ever so slight difference between the structure of a standard three course "English" meal and a standard three course "Spanish" meal. Just enough of a difference to discombobulate my students.

Someone who works in the school that I work at in Cieza has been suggesting that we should get together. On Thursday he seemed determined to make it this weekend. He said that he thought he was free for Saturday "por la tarde", and he'd be in touch. When he didn't phone this morning I just presumed it was off. A couple of hours ago I noticed a message from him on my phone saying that he was sorry but things had changed and he wasn't free. When he said tarde to me I automatically translated it to my English idea of afternoon. Now, even to we Brits, afternoon is reltively flexible. It may, technically, be bounded by 6pm but I think the interplay between afternoon and evening is much more subtle than that - a combination of daylight, activity and time. It's similar in Spain except that tarde covers both afternoon and what would be relatively late evening for us. My pal's mental picture of having a drink in the "tarde"and mine were poles apart. It wasn't a translation error it was a cultural error.

I know that a couple of Spanish people read this blog from time to time. It's possible that they will dispute my reading of the situation. I would point them to Restaurante and Mesón. Several Spaniards have told me that there is an obvious difference. When pressed though they don't seem to find it so easy describing those differences to me. It all becomes a bit Cockburn's - one instinctively knows. In just in the same way I remember entertaining a couple of Spaniards in the UK who were perplexed as to why this was a pub and that was a bar or why this was a restaurant and that a café. I knew, indeed it was obvious, but I was unable to enumerate those differences in any logical way.

On the doorstep

Corruption isn't really news in Spain any more. I don't mean that literally. Corruption is always in the news. Its just so commonplace that it has lost its impact. I just had a look to see how many politicians are facing charges at the minute and the information is a bit confusing. One of the problems in getting a figure is that there is no specific charge called corruption. So the figure depends a bit on what you count. The other thing is that lots of the corruption involves people at the edge of politics. The husband of a princess isn't a politician but the charges around him are clearly political. And someone who used to be a vice president and went on to manage the International Monetary Fund and then one of the big banks isn't a politician any more. So let's just say that the number is on the top side of 2,000.

Most of the political corruption belongs to the PP, the conservative side. The last three party treasurers are all in trouble. There are eleven open cases in the Balearic Islands, six in Valencia, three in Madrid, three in Madrid, another three in Galicia etc. Just so nobody can accuse me of political bias I should mention that the Socialists have a big case of their own down in Andalucia. It's quite difficult to keep on top of these cases too. Spanish justice makes snails look like rapid movers. So a case will disappear from the headlines for months and then suddenly pop up again. I find it difficult to remember whether its Punica or Pokemon that's in Madrid or Galicia and cases I'm sure were done with will suddenly re-appear with fresh impetus. Lots of the cases interweave or involve court appearances by the same people and I'm always amazed how big names seem to be able to shrug off accusations with impunity. Maybe there was something in that New York Times article that suggested the Spanish press isn't very investigative because it is so in debt that exerting pressure on the media to keep quiet is dead easy.

There's plenty of private corruption too. Banks must top the list but a dodgy pyramid selling scheme based on stamps was one of the first cases I remember as we arrived here and I don't think that's finished yet. The most recent case centres on a dental franchise but there have been lots more - travel agencies and fish canners spring.

On the radio this morning I heard something about the amount of money that the tax agency reckons is hidden away but Google can't find the story because there are simply so many financial fraud stories. Dodgy practices with meat processing came up a lot in that search! I was going to use the tax story to suggest that financial practice here isn't above a bit of low-level corruption on the cash in hand, not paying VAT scale.

Then there are enchufes. An enchufe is the old "it's not what you know it's who you know". I remember when I taught a lot of adults there were lots of speaking exercises that were based on job interviews and interview experience. They didn't work very well because most of my students had got their job through the help of an uncle, a brother in-law etc.

I have heard bits of gossip here in Pinoso about political corruption but I'm not well enough informed to be able to say how true the stories are. The other day though I saw a YouTube link with someone talking in the Valencian Parliament about how the enchufe system was alive and we'll with political favours in the regional health service. As I listened to the link I heard a name I know well, someone who I greet in the street. 

It was a bit of a shock being so close to home.

Eat my dust

When I came home that May afternoon back in May 2008 a bit of the roof had fallen in. The immediate cause was a combination of heavy rain and the heavy boots of Iberdrola workmen walking on our roof. The underlying, and uninsured, cause was rotten cedar wood beams. The roof couldn't be patched and, at one point, the house was no more than four scarred and unsteady walls with the floor piled high with debris.

When we first moved in to the Culebrón house back in 2005 we had some serious work done. The sort that knocks down walls, digs trenches in the floor and leaves bundles of electrical cables sprouting flower like from the gouged walls. 

On the other side of an interior patio we have a bedroom separate from the main part of the house. Two or three years ago we had the roof on that replaced and we had a serious remodelling of the interior space done at the same time.

Paying for work and living in dust seems to have been one of the hallmarks of our time in Culebrón.

I've complained repeatedly and vigorously about the horrible Spanish winters in Alicante. It's been warmer this winter but it is still chilly. Fortunately we are currently well enough off to turn on heating whenever we want it. It's not sophisticated heating. Our power supply is so pathetic that we can't really heat with electric. Instead we use gas heaters. They use butane cylinders which are a pain to haul around and relatively expensive. The heaters can smell of gas, they produce a lot of water and Maggie is a bit scared of them. Oh, and she can't carry the bottles easily or fit them to the valves. When I am no longer able to lift and cart the bottles she could get very cold.

So Maggie decided that she wanted a pellet burner. It's a modern type of burner or stove that burns pellets which seem to be reconstituted wood fragments. I presumee the pellets are produced from trees grown specifically for the purpose. The heaters were probably designed to run central heating systems but they can be used independently too. I was against the pellet burner for a number of reasons, and I still am,  but Maggie went ahead and bought one anyway. Let's just hope that I'm proved wrong and it's a resounding success.

Maggie rang the builder we've used the last couple of times to ask if he could fit the stove before she bought it. He came to have a look and gave us some advice about the type of burner to buy. We also gave him a list of other little jobs that we wanted him to do whilst he was here. It ws a longish list but none of the jobs were particularly big. Cut a bigger space in the paving for the palm tree here, replaster that bit of wall there, reposition this bit of guttering etc.

It took the builder a while to get to us. Meanwhile we have had an 88kg pellet burner parked in our kitchen for the last fortnight. He and his brother finally started work a couple of days ago. All the jobs have got bigger. The stove needs power so the wall had to be channeled so why not have a couple of extra sockets in the kitchen at the same time? Whilst the chimney for the old burner was being removed they noticed holes in our last remaining original roof. The colour of monocapa, something a bit like pebbledash, is no longer available so the cracks in it can't be patched which means the whole wall needs skimming. And so it goes on.

The builder is a very mild mannered man and our experince with him has been very positive. Sometimes he comments directly on the shoddy or botched work he is repairing or replacing and sometime you can just see what he thinks. I saw him sadly shaking his head as he stared at the guttering that we'd asked him to sort. The gutter has never collected water because there is too much space between roof tiles and channelling so the rainwater splashes onto the floor or onto the head of anyone using the door beneath it.

I sometimes wonder if this house ownership malarkey is all it's cracked up to be. I lost money on the first house I ever owned. This one is presumably worth a lot less than when we bought it and the spending on it over the years would be enough to buy a house outright at the moment. Alternatively the money spent on repairs would have paid a €400 a month rent for twelve or thirteen years. Taking into account that we have rented an additional flat for around seven years of the time that we have been here anyway this house must be one of the worst decisions I've ever been involved in even though it's a nice enough place.

Cakes and talk

I went to a meeting of the junta directiva, or mangement committee, of the village neighbourhood association this afternoon. I was worried beforehand that I would stutter and stumble so much that I would make a complete fool of myself. In the end I thought I did alright. I wasn't exactly Lincoln at Gettysburg but I managed to respond to what was going on around me and, even, to initiate topics and ideas in a reasonably coherent way. It's amazing how the right and better verb, adjective or noun repeatedly came to mind fractions of second after I loosed my second rate and simplistic phrase into the room.

Some of the committee members had met with the town mayor and a councillor earlier this week. They were reporting back to the couple of us who hadn't been there and looking for a decision. I'm not quite sure how much of what I heard is confidential and how much is public domain but, as it's not very interesting to anyone outside the village, I won't go into detail anyway.

So what did I learn? Well that at least 60% of Spaniards like snowballs, the cakes. It took a while for anyone, except me, to risk one but eventually three more were eaten with very favourable comments all round. Who knows what the approval rating would have been if the other two members hadn't exercised restraint?- maybe for Lent, maybe for health or maybe to avoid the calories. I was able to use the cakes to make a point. I suggested that the people around here tend to stick with the things they know; the tried and tested. Different things are, largely, ignored. Just as an aside you see that I took food. So did everyone else. No Spanish event goes without food and I knew.

In dodgy Spanish I tried to push the idea that the neighbourhood association should be trying to find solutions to those things that cause problems to people in the village. I mentioned transport for older people or those who don't drive and I was instantly told that buses couldn't break even which gave me the perfect in to talk about dial a ride, car sharing and community transport schemes. I mentioned the village's pathetic power supply and how that might be something for a bit of community action and I talked about the multi role shops in Teruel. It was like the old days - talking vaguely about community development.

Of course I didn't really say much. I did a lot more listening and even more nodding. I found out a fair bit about the village that I didn't know and about the slightly less than democratic process that provides the town hall with a village spokesperson.

In the time that we've lived in Culebrón I've been impressed with the effort that several individuals have put in to make the village a better place. It will be interesting to see if the larger committee manages to do anything differently

Hello bed, hello room

There's one of those professional looking videos that does the rounds on Facebook that I rather like. In it a succession of people walk into a bar and greet nobody in particular. Then someone comes in and sits down at the table without saying a word. There are meaningful looks between the waiters and the bar becomes a little less lively. The bar owner goes over to the customer and asks "Is it that we slept together?" The client immediately grasps what is being said and restores calm and good humour to the bar by saying hello to everyone and no-one in particular.

It's absolutely true. Spaniards say hello to the room. Waiting in a bank or post office you get to greet lots of strangers. Maggie and I were in a hospital waiting room yesterday morning and everyone who came in said hello or good morning as they looked for a space to wait and most people said goodbye too as they came out of the consulting rooms and headed off somewhere else.

I know this is the custom. My trepidation over speaking Spanish does not stretch to problems with saying hello - though there is a little linguistic catch. There is not the usual match between a couple of paired words in the morning greeting - it's not buenas días it's buenos días. Spaniards do the opposite of Britons by shortening, for instance, "good evening" to "good" rather than following the English language habit of cutting "good evening" to "evening". The easy thing about this is that I can avoid this potential arror by simply saying "buenas" and, even better, that easy to say word will work at any time of the day.

There's something though that stops me greeting the room. I have no idea why but it doesn't seem to be just me. I was thinking about it this morning and I'm sure that most Britons who live here, Britons who are well aware of the practice, don't generally follow it either though I'm sure there are exceptions.

Consultation with smiley face clap clap

I think I mentioned that I was "voted" onto the committee of the Neighbourhood Association last November. Nothing serious, no work involved, just an ordinary member. Turn up from time to time.

A little while ago a news item on the town hall website explained that local politicians wanted to talk to the pedanias, the outlying villages. A bit of PR mixed with a, presumably, real wish to serve the local community. A few days or weeks later the WhatsApp group for our local committee burst into life. A councillor wanted to speak to us, as the closest thing to representatives for Culebrón, given that our "mayoress" resigned recently. It was Wednesday and the meeting had to be that weekend.

The WhatsApp messages flew thick and fast. There were little spats. One of the committee members is a friend and colleague of the councillor and that made her position a little awkward at times. She was acting as the intermediary between all the messages and the town hall. Misunderstandings, apologies, jokes. A couple of people made their views pretty clear. I didn't say much. WhatsApp tends not to be the most gramatically correct medium. There are often strange abbreviations and phonetic jokes as well as puns. It's also semi permanent and quite definite so when I did join in the glaring linguistic mistakes in my Spanish were there in black on green for all the world to see. I always wonder why the errors only become obvious after pressing the send button. I did make it clear though that, in my opinion, it wasn't really on for a councillor to dictate meeting dates to us. Nobody took much notice. A meeting date was planned at a time when I couldn't go, because of work, which was a great relief. Spanish meetings often have a certain boisterous quality.

Tonight I sent a message around the group asking if we should suggest things for the agenda as the meeting is next Tuesday. As an aside I wrote that, for futures meetings, I hoped that the councillors would remember to give more notice, offer a range of days and times, give us a reasonable period to respond and contact the group members directly.

There were plenty of responses this time. Some people agreed and some didn't but it made me think back a bit. Once upon a time I was a professional meeting attender. Under circumstances I have been known to be a little obstreperous. At times I waxed lyrical, at times I was forceful. Often nobody agreed with me and, much more often, I was simply tolerated and then ignored. I suspect that if I ever do get to one of these Pinoso councillor and Culebrón meetings I will be at the very outer edge of the gathering hanging on to the gist of the conversation by the thinnest of threads.

Pine processionary caterpillars

Our visitors often ask us about snakes. We set their minds at rest. A few ask about scorpions and dangerous spiders. We reassure them about those too but nobody has ever asked us the much more pertinent question as to whether we have problems with caterpillars.

Caterpillars are not usually perceived as a threat but processionary ( the English word is actually processional but everyone uses the Spanish word adapted to sound English) caterpillars can cause problems to humans who tangle with them. Dogs, which tend to sniff and paw things they come across can get into big trouble. Cats don't usually have problems with the caterpillars because they are supremely indifferent to any life form that doesn't feed them.

The pine processionary moth usually flies around May to July and only lives for a day or so. On that day the moths have to get busy. They have to mate and the successful females then lay around three hundred tiny eggs usually in the foliage of  pine trees though some firs and cedars are also targets. Just so I don't have to keep repeating tree types we'll pretend they only live in pines. The eggs take about a month to hatch.

Once hatched, the tiny caterpillars start to eat the pine leaves. Over time they pass through five growth stages which are technically referred to as instars. The caterpillars strip the leaves or needles from the trees but usually the foliage grows back. At each instar the beasts moult a skin and increase in size. At the third moult these gregarious little caterpillars build a nest which looks a lot like spun white candyfloss in the branches of the pine trees. At the fifth and last instar, which is usually sometime between February and April, the caterpillars come out of the tree and search for a place to pupate. This year, with the much warmer winter, they are already on the move and there are more of them because fewer have been killed by cold and frost.

When they leave the tree they do so in a long line. A neighbour, who came to warn me that the caterpillars were on the move told me that she'd seen or heard of a line that was five metres long. There are lots of Internet photos of caterpillars which have been easily persuaded to form circles which just go round and round and round. In this processionary stage each caterpillar follows a scent produced in the stomach of the caterpillar in front. None of the websites I read explained what drives the caterpillar at the head of the line! To digress slightly I heard a news story recently which explained that the way the caterpillars maintain a constant speed can be taught to drivers as a way of stopping the formation of traffic jams.

Eventually, when the caterpillars find a good place to dig a burrow underground where they can pupate, the line will disperse. While the beasts are on the move they can be a danger to humans and other animals. It's the hairs on the caterpillars that cause the problems. If the caterpillar feels under threat they can eject both a tiny cloud of toxins and little toxin loaded hairs which are harpoon like and stick to flesh really well.

In humans this toxin usually leads to unpleasant and very painful rashes and eye irritation which can last for several weeks. Dogs sniff the caterpillars, maybe they bat them around with their paw. The frightened caterpillar releases hairs which stick to the dogs nose or tongue. The dog licks at its paw. In turn the dog's tongue will become irritated, sometimes so much so, that they have to be amputated to prevent sepsis and necrosis - infection and gangrene. Some dogs have such a severe reaction to the poisons that they die through kidney failure.

I know that most people around here go hunting for the nests on or near their land, cut them down and burn them. This advice was repeated on several websites but there were lots of warnings that this could go terribly wrong as tossing a nest onto a roaring fire can be an effective way to spread the little hairs around in the smoke and rising air. A couple of websites suggested drenching the nests with water first as even the loose hairs are loaded with the toxin.

There do seem to be lots of methods for dealing with the caterpillars at almost every stage but I suspect that many of them are not particularly effective. One I read about several times was to break the nests particularly in cold spells so that the caterpillars die of cold without the protection of the warming cocoon. Several of those websites suggested that for the out of reach nests a good blast of light shotgun pellets would do the job!

There are pheromone traps to attract the males - the lads go looking for a bit of hanky panky but end up trapped. The girls have to do without. Result no eggs. Then there are several "traditional" insecticides which have to be applied in the autumn. The treatment that seems to be most in line with current thinking and, apparently works well, involves using bacteria. There are a couple of effective processes. One interrupts the life cycle of the caterpillar whilst the other poisons their food.  Oh, I nearly forgot, there's another method that seems eminently sensible. That's to put a physical barrier in the way, the main basic design seems to be like a cone or envelope which the caterpillars walk into but then can't escape from (though I'm not sure why). Another one was simply to put a walled moat around the base of the affected trees using flexible plastic in which the caterpillars drown.

Blue tits and other tits apparently love to eat the caterpillars so a longer term solution my be to attract birds to breed nearby.

The information about who to turn to for help was very contradictory. It seems that some town halls will send people to remove the nests. There were also lots of adverts for commercial firms very happy to remove the nests and caterpillars for you - at a price. I saw it suggested several times that Seprona, the environmental arm of the Guardia Civil, has a statutory responsibility to destroy the nests but there was nothing on the Sepona website that I could find to confirm that. If you want to give it a try the Seprona number is 062.

Otherwise the best advice may be to stay away from pine trees for a while!