So you gotta let me know. Should I stay or should I go?

Our voting papers arrived on Friday. That's a good start. Huntingdonshire District Council blithely denied me the right to vote in the last General Election when they failed to get the voting papers to me. "We send out a lot of overseas voting papers, some are forced to get lost", was their pathetic excuse.

Anyway I put the cross in the box, Maggie did likewise and the forms went in the post today.

Just an interesting thing about posting the ballot papers. You can see, if you look at the photo, that the envelope reads No Stamp Required yet, in the "Quick Guide to Postal Voting", which came with the ballot paper, it says, "Seal and post envelope B. If it's posted in the UK, this will be free." When I got to the Post Office I asked for stamps for the envelopes and the woman in the Post Office told me there was no need. I insisted and explained that the instructions were quite clear. I presume that she has said the same thing to lots of other Britons returning their ballot papers. Am I being oversuspicious if I sesnse a touch of skulduggery there?

I don't normally tell anyone how I voted. It's something between me and the ballot box, well me and the ballot box and probably some department that secretly compiles the records of who voted how in case they are ever needed. But in 1972, in 1975 and this time around I'm definitely pro European.

I'm sure that a Spaniard has asked me about the UK leaving the EU but I don't actually remember the conversation. It was certainly no more than a passing comment. There isn't that much interest in what the UK does or doesn't do amongst your average Spaniard as far as I can gauge. It gets reported of course so it's on the radio and TV every now and again. I have had the conversation with a few Britons. Usually in that conversation I get cross because it seems to me that one of the driving forces behind the anti EU movement in the UK is plain and simple racism or at least xenophobia. I've stopped trying to put together a cogent argument. I can't be bothered to argue with racists any more and I no longer hope they will have a road to Damascus moment. Nowadays I've adopted the Dame Helen Mirren approach, you know, the one where she says that she regrets not telling more people to “f*** off” though I usually restrict myself to refuting their idiotic remarks with the single word "bollocks".

It could be interesting times ahead if we Britons here had to do something like the nationality test that other non EU foreigners are submitted to. First of all there is a level test in Spanish, which a lot of us would fail, then there is the series of questions about the country. These are questions one and eighteen from a sample paper:

1. Según la Constitución española, la soberanía nacional reside en el pueblo, del que proceden...
a) las leyes orgánicas del Estado. b) los estatutos de autonomía. c) los poderes del Estado

18. ¿Cuál es la fiesta más famosa en Cádiz y Canarias?
a) El Carnaval. b) La Semana Santa. c) Los Sanfermines.

If you are a Briton living in Spain how did you do?

A place in the sun

At work I noticed that a co-worker had not parked her car in her usual spot. The one she has used for the last eight months. I asked why, expecting a story about people using her bonnet as a bench or somesuch. "It's because the shadow of the building falls across the car in the early evening so it's cooler when I drive away," she said.

I was reminded of the man who started to wave violently at me when I parked outside the building I then worked in in Fortuna. There had been a Circus close by on the waste ground and I presumed he was warning me of the dangers of the lorries bumping into my car as they manouvered away. In the end I parked where he suggested. "It's much better here", he said, "it'll be in the shade when you're finished."

It's been around 30ºC the last few days so, as we close in on summer, parking the motor in the shade makes sense. Like real Spaniards I would always choose a shady spot first but it would never cross my mind to start plotting the movement the sun across the sky as I chose a parking place.

Still a long way to go before I start thinking Spanish.

Hands against the wall and drop your trousers

In the 70s, when much of South and Central America were in political turmoil, I read an impressive book about the violation of human rights there. The book was full of torture stories. I was most impressed by the way that ordinary people didn't buckle under but I also pondered where the torturers came from. One Sunday you have a nice civilised country but by Monday morning there are people connecting electric wires to mens' testicles and stubbing out their fag ends on the soles of peoples' feet. What's the selection process, what skills and qualities are on the job description?

At the time when the IRA and UFF and everyone else in Northern Ireland was going at it I heard some bloke, who'd served in the British Army, describing a common technique for obtaining information from prisoners. They put a plastic bucket over their victim's head and then beat the bucket with a mop handle. It made me realise just how easy torture can be and I still, sometimes, think of that as I shop amongst the Addis stuff in the supermarket.

About a month ago a judge, talking in some conference here in Spain, said that he thought ETA (The Basque terrorist organisation) members had been routinely tortured by Spanish Security Forces. Now I have no idea whether he's right but in all probability he is. If I were a Guardia Civil member, who had just seen some mates blown to pieces by a bomb,  I might well become a little over zealous too. The Association of the Victims of Terrorism thought the judge should be sacked. They thought that it was outrageous that he should suggest that the Security Forces were other than on the side of the angels.

A couple of days ago a branch of Local Government in Madrid decided to ban a flag from a big football match final due to take part in the capital on Sunday. The flag is a version of the official Catalan flag with some adaptations. It has a nationlist significance and is a symbol often used by people who want an independent Catlonia. I was apalled, incensed and troubled by the decision in equal measure. The idea of trying to stop an opinion being expressed, in a democracy, by waving a flag seems akin to totalitarianism to me. I know that some Spaniards were of the same opinion but I got the feeling that for many Spaniards the equation was flag waving equals Catalan Separatists, Catalan Separatists bad, Stop them. Four legs good, two legs bad!

During the last twelve months a law has been enacted in Spain that fines or imprisons people for doing things that the Government thinks endangers citizens. It's not as though Spain is short of laws to deal with wrongdoers. You can get into trouble if you go burning and looting. Attacking people is also considered to be a bit beyond the pale. In fact if you can think of some bad thing I 'm pretty sure there is a Spanish law against doing it. There wasn't, though, a law to stop people posting videos to YouTube of police officers beating people with sticks for no obvious reason. The fines for scaling the fence at a nuclear power plant and hanging up a banner were related to trespass and damage to property. Organising a demonstration without a licence wasn't that big a deal either in the punishment afterwards sense. But the new law toughened that up. I forget, and I can't be bothered to look because it makes me seethe, but that banner might now cost 300,000 or 600,000€. Suck on that you Greenpeace types! The result? Someone was arrested in a town close to us when they posted a picture on Facebook of a police car parked in a disabled parking slot. It was considered a slur on the local police. Now I may just have an alternative view about that incident but it's perhaps better that I don't write it down or they may be knocking on my door.

So, suggesting that police officers may have been involved in torture or lazy parking, waving a flag or taking a video could, under certain circumstances, lead to people being sacked, fined or jailed. These things don't go unchallenged of course, the courts overturned the flag waving ban yesterday, but the concensus view  makes me wonder if Spaniards have quite got the hang of this democracy thing.

What seems blatantly obvious to me, that having a different opinion should not, generally, lead to legal action seems to slip by a lot of Spaniards. The judge's opinion that torture happened is confused with siding with the evil that was or is ETA. Supporting the right of anyone to wave a Nationalist flag is confused with supporting that Nationalism and exposing police officers for abusing their role is only a step away from robbing a bank.

Maybe it's just a case of old habits dying hard.

What that Franklin chappie said

I don't really mind taxes. That doesn't mean that I like handing over my hard earned but I approve of the idea. I'm much keener on the model where we pay the taxes and, with them, our governments attempt to provide healthcare, education, infraestructure and all the rest than I am on the model where everyone looks out for themselves and to hell with the rest.

Anyway. For the past six years or so I've been getting a pension from a final salary pension scheme that I paid into for most of my UK working life. Because that money comes from a quasi government source the agreement between Spain and the UK was that it was exempt of Spanish taxes but taxed, at source, in the UK. Normally Spanish residents have to pay tax on their worldwide income here. In reality my pension is so small that it has never exceeded the personal UK allowance so, although Customs and Revenue send me coding notices and I get P60s and what not, I don't actually pay any tax on it. I also have a pension top up from some secondary UK scheme that I paid in to. That produces about £360 a year. That money is declared and taxed in Spain.

This being taxed in the UK had an advantage. It gave me two lots of personal allowances - one for the UK and one in Spain. Of course the tax people realised this and for the 2015 tax year - the tax year in Spain is a normal calendar year - they closed this "loophole". We are now sorting out the 2015 tax bills. The amount of my UK pension now has to be added to my Spanish earnings. The principal of no double taxation is maintained because any tax paid in the UK would be deducted from my Spanish tax bill.

I had a slightly complicated tax year in 2015 because I was technically self employed for a while. I'm having to use an accountant to sort it out rather than just accepting or amending the online draft tax declaration that the Spanish revenue people sent me back in April.

The accountant I use sent me a WhatsApp the other day to say it looked like I owed a bit less than 400€. This is not good but it's not heartbreaking either. It did make me wonder about the people who have decent pensions from the UK though: the ex police, ex military, time served civil servants etc. I've just had a quick look and it seems that the UK personal allowance is around £11,000 so if that suddenly becomes taxable at a mixture of the starting Spanish rate of 19% plus the portion that goes into a higher bracket charged at 24% (and my arithmetic is correct) then they are going to be facing an extra tax bill of just short of 3,000€.

I suspect that could be a bit of a hammer blow for lots of the pensioners here.

White dresses and sailor suits

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

And in Spain there is a time for nearly everything.
A time to put away the winter clothes,
A time to get the summer house ready
and, of course,
A time for First Communion.

Last week, in Cieza, my school was closed on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday I asked my charges about the days off. Young or old the answer was as one; Communion. My students had worn the dress, eaten the cake, handed over the gift or taken the vows dependant on where they fitted within the cycle.

Driving in to town today there was an item on the local radio to say that Communion season was about to kick off in Pinoso. What follows is, more or less, a translation of the article that formed the basis for the radio piece.

This year 46 boys and girls will celebrate their First Communion in Pinoso.

This weekend, here in Pinoso, will see the First Communions of this year's cycle in the Parish Church of St Peter. There will be Communion Services, from midday, for the next three Sundays. There is just one exception. For family reasons one little girl will have her First Communion this Saturday.

For may years now Communions have moved far beyond the strictly religious. They are now a top tier social phenomenon, not only for the children who take the sacrament for the first time, but also for the carers and families who, nowadays, have to organise their social calendars around these events.

Before the special day, boys and girls will have attended catechism classes over a three year period and becoming involved in the daily life of the Church; the ritual of the mass, religious song and the reading of scripture.

Parish Priest Manuel Llopis pointed out that whilst the key participants are the celebrant children themselves the events also involve lots of other people from church choristers to the family members. "It's a lovely festival," he said, "so full of happiness and vitality that it would melt the heart of the most hardened cynic."

This year there are just forty six youngsters taking their First Communion in Pinoso which is one of the lowest figures in recent years. Father Manuel is quick to point out that next year there will be far more if the group of second year students in his catechism class is anything to go by.

May is traditionally the month for First Communions rounded off with the Corpus Christi festivities. Corpus, which is celebrated on the ninth Sunday after the first full moon in Spring, will fall early this year, on 29th May.

And, after such a generous write up it would be unkind of me to point out the rivalries that grow up around the most lavish frock, the biggest banquet, the most innovative photo shoot or the flashest limousine.

When it was time to go

Just down the road from us, about 5kms away, is a small village called Hondon. In May 1938 a group of Republican soldiers turned up in the village, requisitioned the house next door to the pine tree that gave the best shade and set about building a munitions dump, a couple of machine gun nests, a lookout tower and an aerodrome. Nearly a year later the reasons became clear.

First a bit more background. On July 18th 1936 the Army rebelled against the elected Republican Government of Spain and so the Spanish Civil War began. At first it was a pretty equal contest but slowly but surely the rebels gained territory. On 30th March 1939 Alicante City fell to the rebels and a day later rebel troops entered Murcia, Cartagena and Almeria. The war was officially won, or lost, on 1st April 1939. So the area where we live was the last bit of Spain to fall to, what were by then, Franco's troops. Franco ruled, as a dictator, in Spain until November 1975.

Alicante province was loyal, right to the end, and for that reason the last headquarters of the legitimate government of the day, given the codename Posición Yuste, was in Elda/Petrer which is only about 20km from Culebrón. That must have been one possible contingency plan from the time those troops were sent to Hondon.

Elda/Petrer fell on the 29th March. At the very end there was infighting within the Republican Government as the situation became hopeless. The recently promoted Colonel Casado raised a revolt with the intention of doing a deal with Franco to end the war. In the event the Official Government fled Spain in the early morning of 5th March. Doctor Negrín the President, Dolores Ibarruri or La Pasionaria a Communist Party leader, Rafael Alberti a famous writer of the time, Enrique Lister one of the Republic's top military commanders and several others were among the group that left in two twin engined Douglas planes heading for Oran in Algeria from the aerodrome at Hondon.

I knew most of this before today. I knew about the house that had been used by Republican big wigs near the turn down towards Salinas off the Monóvar road. I knew about the flight from the aerodrome. However, it wasn't until the 85th anniversary of the birth of the Republic the other day that I realised that there were air raid shelters in Hondon. So today I went looking for them.

Whilst I was searching for information on the Internet I came across a walker's itinerary. The particular group had been to Hondon to see the shelter and then walked on to a place called Las Casas de Collado Azorín where the, one time famous, writer Azorín used to spend his summers. Azorín was born in Monóvar, another local town, and was one of several Spanish writers known as the Generation of '98 - the year in which Spain lost the last remnants of its once mighty empire. That turned out to be an interesting little spot too. I can't find out whether the hamlet takes its name from the writer or if the writer, José Augusto Trinidad Martínez Ruiz, took his pen name from the place. The latter seems more likely.

Good to know that there are still new things to be discovered so close to home.

Confused

The Post Office sends me a text message when there is something that needs signing for waiting in our post box. This is often good. If we have an order on the way from Amazon or Decathlon it means it's parcel opening time. But it can be bad too. It's the way that the local police make sure that you have the notification of the parking fine and it's the way the tax office tells you that you've been fiddling your tax and you're in trouble.

The one today was a Model 990 form from the Catastro, the Land Registry. My reading of Spanish isn't too bad. For instance I just knocked off a novel by Carmen Martín Gaite of about 260 pages in under a week with the usual few pages a day workday reading. But official Spanish is something else. The tax man and the local government woman don't see why they should use a common word when there is a long and unknown one available in the thicker versions of the dictionary.

I got the gist though. The Registry said that our house deeds were not up to date and they wanted 60€ for sorting out the paperwork. If we chose to fight them with lawyers we could but, otherwise, cough up in the next fifteen days. I didn't hesitate. I went to a bank in Pinoso and paid.

I've just had a more detailed re-read of the letter. There is a lengthy explanation of each section of the form. It made me snigger and snort as the terminology varies between the explanatory notes and the real form. So on the explanatory notes it may say multiplier - the figure by which we multiply the rateable value of your property to arrive at nominal value but, on the actual form, it says co-efficient of multiplication.

The upshot is plain. The rateable value of the house has increased. The local taxes we pay are based on that nominal value of the house. If the supposed value of the house increases then our tax burden increases with it. I presume that the next stage will be an arrears demand for the difference between the taxes we have paid and the taxes we should have paid.

You are supposed to get permission from the local town hall to do almost any work on your house. Generally people do this when it's somethng obvious - changing windows - or something that changes the footprint of the house - building an extension for instance. Technically though you are supposed to do it for nearly everything. When I heard someone explaining this on the radio she used the example of replacing the bathroom tiles. Apparently, every time we get any work done on the house, as well as getting permission to do it from the town hall, we are supposed to tell the Land Registry. Whilst people do usually or at least sometimes get the town hall licences I suspect that nobody does the Registry bit and I further suspect that the Government knows this. So they came up with a wheeze of a plan. Rather than actually try to fine everyone they simply regularise the records for a nominal 60€. Almost nobody is going to fight a 60€ charge as it would cost nearly as much to ask a lawyer whether it was worth fighting. So, by getting someone to check town hall licences against catastral records the Government has a nice little earner.

Eine Kleine Nachtwanderung

Cabeço towers above Pinoso. It's a salt dome. There are traces of human habitation there in pre-history and people still live on its slopes today. Plonked right on the top are a series of masts which people refer to as the repetidor, the repeater. It's a while since I've been up there but I think there is a mobile phone mast and I know that the local radio station uses one of the masts too.

Apparently it's become a bit of a local tradition to take a night-time stroll up the 893 metre high hill on one of the days during a week dedicated to promoting sport and a healthy lifestyle in Pinoso. Personally it's the first time I'm ever heard of it so the promotion must be spot on but there you go. This year all the walkers were being asked to contribute a euro with the cash going towards research into rare diseases.

I thought I'd go and see if there were any potential snaps. I had this idea of a really wide angle shot with someone looking suitably rugged putting a large sporty looking trainer in the bottom left of the image with the group behind picked out in the unforgiving light of the flash whilst the repeater twinkled away in the background. I never quite got around to putting the wide angle on the camera and the few snaps I did take are out of focus, boring and blasted with flash light. I have to say though that the whole thing was, and now a word I haven't used often since the 1980s, surreal.

We have quite a flash looking sports centre in Pinoso. Well it looks flash to me though I've no significant experience of sports installations to guarantee that my perception is accurate. I did my best to embrace the digital era but I simply didn't have the capacity to take on all those high tech sports clothes too. It's not even a part of the town I go to often.

When I arrived, just a bit before the 10pm start, there were little knots of people standing around the main entrance to the sports centre but, apart from the local police lounging by the two patrol cars, there was nothing official looking at all. So I followed a group of youngsters who were going up and behind the main building. It would have been a logical place to start a race - on the hillward side of the sports area. I wasn't going to ask anyone what was going on of course. That would have involved Spanish.

As I walked a little farther from the town I was surprised to find that there were quite a lot of houses. Where the small scale football stadium ended so did the town houses and the olive trees and almonds took over. The urban street became a single track rural road but there was still street lighting alongside the agricultural water hydrants. An odd mix. I realised it was quiet too. Quiet like it is near our house surrounded by open land. Not much traffic noise but the damned yap, yap yapping of myriad dogs and, just for tonight, occasional shouts and torch beams shining out from a little up the hill where a few spectators were gathering. There were also occasional voices from somewhere nearer the sports centre. The light was a mix of those yellow and orange and pink shades that various forms of street lighting give off. All this within a five minute walk of one of the main thoroughfares in Pinoso. I was wearing a light jacket and a T shirt and I was over-warm. Just in case you're worried I had shoes and trousers and other stuff on too.

A few people passed me, indeed some people I know vaguely said hello, then the Police car pointed its headlights up the track, turned on the blues and twos and crawled up the road. Behind came 400 people who looked perfectly normal but who had the intention of hiking up a biggish hill on a Thursday evening in the dark. It didn't seem to be a race. I don't know why I'd expected one. I took a few snaps. The people were gone and I walked back to the motor. About a hundred yards from the car park a bloke and a young lad were hurrying up the road. Obviously, despite the start being about fifteen minutes behind time, they'd arrived late. I'm already knackered said the man to the boy.

As I drove away from the town I could see the blue flashing lights crawling up the side of Cabeço. Distinctly odd.

Bar library nexus

On Friday afternoons, in Cartagena, Maggie and I used to go to a Spanish language group organised by one of the local language schools. We paid a couple of euros and the language centre sent a teacher or two to moderate the session. The group was made up of lots of us foreigners - principally Brits and Dutch but with the occasional Czech and Zimbabwean thrown in - and the idea was that we all spoke Spanish to each other. It was organised into largish discussion groups dependant on the number of attendees with some chosen topic of conversation. The numbers dwindled when the language school upped the price to five euros and, eventually, so few people attended that it was knocked on the head.

Maggie wondered about doing something similar between Spaniards and English speakers in Pinoso but somebody else beat her to it. Every Wednesday one of the local bars, Cafe Coliseum, acts as the venue. The organiser is an efficient young woman, who I'm sure introduced herself to me but whose name I forget. She divvies us up into little knots for conversation. I usually end up with two or three Spanish speakers to talk to. I drink a couple of non alcoholic beers whilst I'm doing it and vainly try to eat the nut mix that comes free with the beer flavoured pop.

I have no idea why the group exists. I suppose it could be an act of altruism on the part of the nameless young woman but it's more likely that the bar saw it as a way to increase trade during the early part of a quiet evening, Early Wednesday can't be a big night for a bar in a village of fewer than 8,000 people! I've never thought to ask and I don't really care too much. The outcome though is that I'm meeting more locals and getting a bit of Spanish practice too.

An odd side effect has to do with the library. I joined Pinoso library when we first moved here. The library was in a different building then. I was quite an active borrower until life got in the way. Work kept us away from Pinoso for long periods so I joined other libraries, in other towns. Then the world went digital and Maggie bought me a Kindle which offered cheap books and the major advantage, for reading in a language that isn't my own, of a built in dictionary.

The language thing in the bar meets more or less opposite the super modern library that we now have in Pinoso. I have a bit of free time between the start of the language group and the time that I reach Pinoso after leaving work. Each evening I have to record what I did with the classes I taught and, for the majority of those classes, share that information with one of my teaching colleagues. Rather than sitting in the car with the laptop to do the recording I took to going into the library. As well as lights and desks they have free WiFi too so I asked about the process for getting a password. It revolved around me being a member of the library. The amazing thing is that I am. Despite my library card saying, very clearly, that it expired in 2007 the library people have constantly renewed my membership.

Nice to see a performance indicator working for me for a change.

Ho, ho! Sigh.

My draft tax declaration became available online the other day. Because I was self employed for a while in the 2015 tax year I'm going to need an accountant to sort it out but I'm putting off ringing him till my UK tax documentation turns up. Curiosity got the better of me though and I thought I would have a look at the online version to see what the tax office's initial assessment was. Rebate or more to pay?

On the first page, more or less in the first line, I noticed that my name was wrong. Although the effect on the printed form looks fine, which is presumably why I've missed it for the past ten years as have various tax offices and accountants, in fact the surnames and first names are mixed up. So they have my name as Jo and my surname as Christopher Thompson. The Jo is because, when I first registered at the Social Security, their database only had room for a forename fourteen characters long so the Christopher John had to be pruned. Heaven knows what Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso - that's Pablo Picasso to you and me - would have done. I quietly closed down the webpage. I'll let the accountant sort that out too.

The firm I work for sent me an email yesterday afternoon telling me that new legislation is coming into force which means that I will need to do something like the very first police record checks that we did in the UK. There is a pretty obvious question as to why anyone is allowed to work with children without being checked but we'll pass that by. The police, or in this case the Justice Ministry, will produce a form to say whether I have a criminal record or not. I asked my employer when this legislation would come into force. The end of the month was the reply. Good to get plenty of notice. Good that my employer is helping me with the process too.

I had a look online. Amazingly the process can be completed via the Internet. Even more amazingly I have an electronic signature which the Ministry site recognised. The form couldn't have been simpler: name and address type information, place of birth and bank payment details. I filled in the form and pushed send. Please fill in the phone number in the approved format it said. It took me four attempts to get that right. There was no suggested format but the international dialling code, with a plus, not two zeros, did the trick. This time it said that the information on my Foreigners Identification Number (NIE) form didn't match what I'd typed in. That's true because, as it turns out, the NIE, which I have used since 2005, is riddled with errors. It has me living in a street in Pinoso, instead of Culebrón, and the postcode is for Sax, a town about 30kms away. I won't bore you with the detail of the reason behind the particular errors but the underlying fault is quite bizarre.

To use a British example. Let's say I lived at 8 Oak Fold, the fold being an alternative to street or drive or avenue. The person who designed the database had never heard of fold as a street name so they left it out of their drop down lists. They didn't think to include a box for free text entry either. They did, however, make it essential that one of the street type names from the drop down list was included in the address. So, the person who is trying to register me on their database, let's say it's Council Tax, does the best that they can and uses Drove as a near equivalent. The form gets processed. The next time, at Vehicle Registration, the fold option is missing again. This time the form filler in chooses Street because that's the most frequent option. No problem to me. I get registered for Council Tax and Vehicle Registration. The problem arises ten years later when I think I live at 8 Oak Fold but Vehicles think I live at Oak Street and Council Tax think I live at Oak Drove and neither can find me.

I was just having a root around the Justice Ministry website. Google told me that its security certificate couldn 't be trusted but I ploughed ahead anyway. Apparently I can download the form, fill it in with a biro and post it to someone. This is quite an unusual Spanish option but it's a good one from my point of view. Actually, as I typed that I wondered if it were true. Lots of times the forms that require payment are triplicate forms which mean that they have to be picked up in person, filled in, paid for over a bank counter and then taken back to the office. Bit of a problem though. The website tells me that there is an intervención técnica - i.e. the site is being fiddled with - and that I have to wait till midnight which was 51 minutes ago as I type.

Ho, ho! Sigh.

Lost in the mist

I seem to have lost the Pinoso weather station and, like my mini loud speaker, I can't find it.

The state weather service here is called AEMET, La Agencia Estatal de Meteorología. The service uses all sorts of mechanisms, including data collected from a series of traditional weather stations dotted around Spain, to build up its records and to make weather predictions. One of the weather stations is, or at least was, in Pinoso. From what I can make out this is because a local teacher, whose nickname is Capito, started to collect basic weather information as a classroom project. With time the project, and the equipment, developed to the point when his data formed a part of the AEMET network.

There was an event in February 2015 to celebrate 25 years of Capito's weather recording in Pinoso.

I check the website on an almost daily basis but, for the past few weeks, the Pinoso data has been missing. I presumed it was a technical problem. Then, a couple of days ago the Pinoso name disappeared from the list of Valencian weather stations.

Something else that has not been in its habitual place for a while is the monthly weather round up. This was a regular feature on the Town Hall website for nearly three years with a monthly round up appearing a few days into each new month. That stopped in June 2015.

So, when the AEMET site changed I went looking for the explanation. The first thing I found was the missing monthly round ups on another local news site. So that wasn't really a mystery at all. Just the Town Hall website not being indexed as before. But I could find no information anywhere on the missing weather station. So, if anyone knows please let me know.

Meanwhile here is the report for March 2016. The highest temperature was 25.5ºC on the 30th March and the lowest temperature was -1.5ºC on the 9th. Although we have a minus figure there is a little note, on the round up, to say that the temperature was below freezing for just two hours during the whole month. We did have 12 days with dew though. The mean temperature in March was a high of 17.6ºC and a low of 4.6ºC. We had 37.7 litres of rainfall per square metre over the month though 15.5 litres of that fell on one day, the 21st, which is probably the one day we had a thunderstorm. In total we had four rainy days against 25 days when the sun shone though 17 of those included cloudy spells. We had just six days where we didn't see the sun because the cloud didn't break.