Battening down the hatches

There's not much on Spanish telly on Friday night and so Maggie, who is much more telly aware than I am, often turns over to Gogglebox which I quite like as it doesn't feature baying crowds.

As I weeded the garden I was thinking about the Siddiqui family - well them and the remarkable resilience of weeds. I pondered the Siddiquis speaking English to each other. Without knowing anything about them I presume that they are the second and third or maybe third and fourth generation descendants of someone who would not claim Derby as home.

It is November so it's time for the meal and Annual General Meeting of the Culebrón Neighbourhood Association. It happened this afternoon, in fact it's probably still going on as, for the first time in years, I did a bunk from the AGM. I'm on, or maybe I was on, the management committee so skipping the meeting is probably a hanging, or maybe a garroting,  offence.

When we are complaining to people about our lack of Spanish they often suggest to us that Maggie and I should talk in Spanish at home. Grammatical considerations aside how self conscious and how foolish, do you think I'd feel speaking Spanish to Maggie? You are correct - somewhere off the top of the stupidity scale. A Tsunami of stupidity.

We've lived in Spain for twelve years on the trot now. Maggie can claim 15 years total because of her time in Madrid in the 90s. For me that's close enough to 20% of my life and for Maggie over 27%. Maybe, like the Siddiquis the home language should be the language we use to generally communicate and, like the Siddiquis, our home TV should be our home TV. But it isn't. Why else would I be watching Gogglebox?

I didn't really want to go to the Neighbourhood Association meal this afternoon. It isn't so much the Spanish anymore. I've sort of accepted that my Spanish is bad and always will be. The reason I didn't want to go is because the Association is probably the place where I feel most foreign. Paradoxically that's because, almost certainly, it's the place where I am most warmly greeted. At the last meal there was a lot of kerfuffle about where we were going to sit. We sat somewhere only to be told that such and such was going to sit there and, when we tried again, we got a similar story. Our final destination was the metaphorical seat behind the column. This looking out for your pals obviously happens everywhere, people hold seats and places in queues for latecomers. I suspect though, that if challenged, most seat holders would cede the right to the people who were physically present. Shift the German towel and the sunbed is yours isn't it?

After the Association meals the conversation is never just football, or the weather, or music. If we talk about music we compare and contrast Spanish and "English" music. If it's football, I'm conversationally buggered but, even if I weren't, the conversation would become an analysis of Man U and Barca or Aston Villa and Mallorca. I'm as guilty of this as the Spanish person alongside me but I am marked out as different (and incidentally inferior) because of my nationality. Just once it would be nice to have conversation, flawed as it may be, where we were talking about Stoke and Watford because we are talking English football or Numancia and Rayo Vallecano because were are in Spain or even about PSG, Manchester City and Sevilla because we are in Europe (just).

Out on the blowout

Last Saturday we joined some people from the language exchange group to go on the tapas trail. One of the participants was a bloke from Surrey who has partnered up with a young Spanish woman. He was saying to me that his perception is that whilst we Britons go out for a drink Spaniards go out for an eat. Obviously I agreed with him as it's true. Lots of Spanish life revolves around food.

It depends on your criteria but the Santa Catalina area of Pinoso has been described to me, by Spaniards, as the poorest bit of Pinoso, the most authentic bit of the town and the district with the strongest community identity. There's nothing to stop all three being true.

I've always known the area as Santa Catalina, named for the patron saint of the district, but there is a definite drift to calling it the Barrio de las cuevas - the cave district - where caves are the houses dug into the hillside. Either way I've been up there a couple of times this week to have a look at bits of their fiesta. On Sunday I went to see the first transfer of the image of Santa Catalina to her first overnight stop with a local family and, this evening, as a lead in to the actual Saint's day on the 25th, we popped up to have a look at the hogueras, the little bonfires that families, friends and other social groupings gather around.

We parked the car and walked towards the first little bonfire we saw. Maggie drew in breath through her nose and that was enough for someone to offer her a hunk of bread and one of the local longaniza sausages, cooked in the embers of the fire, with a drop of mulled wine to wash it down. I heard someone there describe me as the Culebrón photographer. I'm not sure whether I liked that or not.

We strolled on, we were offered wine served as a stream of red liquid from the wooden version of a wine skin. We bumped into, and chatted with, some Britons we know who were having a drink outside one of the district bar's. We walked on towards another little fire where I was invited into the patio of the house to take a snap of a small shrine to Santa Catalina. That, of course, led to the irresistible offer of food: first buñuelos which are a bit like doughnuts made with pumpkin, then variations on gachamigas, more longanizas, some unnamed bits of cold and very unpalatable fat and then some broad beans cooked in a ham stock. The wine I had to surreptitiously pass to Maggie as I was driving.

We had only popped in for a quick look see. Very pleasant way to pass a cool November evening; very hospitable and, as Maggie said, November is a great time for a fiesta to add a bit of cheer to the colder and darker nights.

All mod cons

My Auntie Lizzie used to take me to Blackpool when I was a lad. We stayed in B&Bs that advertised hot and cold running water. It was a long time before en suite bathrooms.

In Auntie Lizzie's day people used to say that houses had mod cons - modern conveniences. Our house, the one we live in now, has all those mod cons but they seem to be in open revolt. I told you about the water a while ago.

To sort our water supply we rang the Town Hall. Their people came in a Jeep, wielded a spanner or two, and told me it was all sorted. It wasn't though. Inside the house water flow was still a problem. I called a plumber. He changed a couple of valves and assured me that it was all hunky dory. It wasn't though. I rang our gas contract supplier and asked them to service the boiler. They did, they said it was as right as rain. It wasn't though. They are going to have another stab tomorrow.

A bulb blew. When I took the cover off the lamp I was surprised to find an incandescent bulb. That bulb must have been as old as the room. I thought we had low energy stuff everywhere but, when I checked, I found lots of old style bulbs. I spent a fortune on new ones with really impressive looking energy ratings. I set aside ten minutes, between other jobs, to change the lamps. Changing the light bulbs was a bit like those old shaggy dog jokes - it just went on and on for ever. I even had to replace a couple of fittings.

We have fluorescent tubes in the kitchen. There has always been a delay between flicking the switch, the starters popping and the tubes glowing but the wait had become interminable. It wasn't the first time we'd had the problem. I thought new tubes and starters would get us back to a reasonable response time. In the ironmongers, as I inspected the tubes, Olegario, the owner, interested himself in my purchase. He told me that the tube I had in my hand was LED. Being relatively good at reading I'd worked that out. I picked out a couple of tubes and told him I needed starters too. Olegario knew otherwise and explained that I needed to dump the ballast and starters for the LED tubes to work. Back in our kitchen, with instructions followed, the tubes wouldn't fire up. YouTube told me what Olegario hadn't. The replacement didn't go smoothly but, in the sanitised words of Gordon Hamnet, there was only one winner here and it wasn't the light fitting.

So, changing a few bulbs had taken me several hours.

Over the years we have used various devices to heat our house. Gas stoves - calor gas type heaters - have been our mainstay. After years of faithful service the original batch of three started to do things they shouldn't do. We feared for our lives in an explosion of metal shards from ruptured gas bottles. New gas stoves were purchased. In the meantime Maggie had invested real money in a pellet burner. With the pellet burner as the main heat source and the two newer gas heaters, and the rest, in reserve I thought we had everything covered. Except that the gas heaters have started to mysteriously turn themselves off. Obviously it's some form of safety cut out but our carbon monoxide meter has nothing to say on the matter. Valves and tubes have been changed. Why the heaters turn themselves off is something known only to the Taiwanese or Turks that built the things. Last night, as I got home, the living room radiated coolness. "I can't get either the gas stove or the pellet burner to light," said Maggie. The gas stove was no problem. Maggie just doesn't have the knack but the pellet burner took an hour to sort. Nothing seriously wrong but a pain in the proverbial.

Auntie Lizzie's house only had cold water in the scullery. Her outside toilet was a basically a big pit. The heating was by coal fires. I think she had electric but gas lighting hadn't completely disappeared in my youth so I may be wrong. I'm ever so pleased that things have moved on and we have modern conveniences nowadays.

Mossets it is

Mossets is, apparently, the Valencian language equivalent of tapa, or, in the plural, tapas. I presume that you know about tapas, it's one of those words that is now as English as coup or zeigeist. Tapas are little snacks.

Normally, around these parts we're not big on free tapas. You often get a handful of crisps, a few olives, or some nuts with your beer but it's an optional extra. It's not the same in Andalucia. The last time I was in Guadix I forgot that we had crossed a frontier and I made the typical foreigner abroad mistake of telling the waiter that I hadn't ordered the mini hamburger that he had just put down in front of me. In Andalucia substantial tapas alongside your drink are still dead common.

I think of the town I pay my rates to as being called Pinoso but, just to continue the Valenciano lesson, lots of people refer to it by its Valencian name of el Pinós. And the publicity says El Pinós a Mossets or something like Pinoso out for a bite to eat.

Tapas trails are a bit old hat nowadays. They've been around for ages. A bunch of bars and restaurants sign up to produce a tapa or two for the trail during a set period. Some organisation, like the local town hall or the chamber of trade, puts together a little leaflet or booklet which lists the participating establishments and what they have on offer. Usually it's a set price offer for a drink and a tapa. People do some or all of the route and usually vote for their favourite tapa with a prize draw included.

In my opinion Pinoso has never quite got this right. The first year of the route participants had to go to every bar if they wanted to vote and enter the prize draw. Not only did this make full participation relatively expensive and time consuming but it also meant that there was no real incentive for a bar to be innovative. Good for you if, as a bar, you mixed tastes and traditions in your tapa but punters still had to go to the bar offering a bit of ham on bread if they wanted to vote. It also took no account of personal likes and dislikes - you don't eat fish - tough luck, you're a vegetarian - forget it. A couple of the participating eateries were also out of town which was a bit of a snag if you didn't have transport. Actually living away from town is a disadvantage too. The set price is 2€ and includes a beer or a wine. If you want a soft drink it costs more. I'm sure though that the town hall has no interest in incentivizing drinking  and driving.

Despite my moaning we've been out of course. We've been to half a dozen places so far and one of the major improvements this time is that you "only" need to go to a dozen of the seventeen places participating. It's still too many but it is a step in the right direction.

Well we have a government

As I type I'm listening to the radio. They are voting for the investiture of the President of the Spanish Government.  The man who's up for President, Mariano Rajoy, is a right winger from the Partido Popular, the conservatives. The process involves reading out the name of each deputy who then says yes, for Rajoy, no against Rajoy or abstention. Rajoy needs a simple majority to be elected. The only way he can get his majority is if the PSOE, the socialists, don't vote against him and, in fact with the number of abstentions already recorded he's in.

The abstention of the socialists is either a tactical move to avoid a third general election or a complete betrayal of principal depending on your point of view. The socialist party has lost its leader during the in fighting about what to do. Even to the last minute there were two options. Abstention of all of the socialist ranks or just the minimum abstention to let Rajoy win. The latter option would have allowed the ideologically opposed an easy way out but the socialists went for party orders, general abstention. The ex socialist leader resigned rather than abstain or break ranks. The Catalan socialists are sticking to the no vote, against Rajoy, as they said they would. There was a moment when it sounded as though one of the socialist heavyweights, Patxi López, had broken with party orders and voted against his party line of abstaining but it was just a bit of a misunderstanding. Eight socialists couldn't bring themselves to support, or not oppose, Rajoy though and voted no.

There they go. He's elected. Months and months of a caretaker government and two general elections are now just a historical footnote.

The Third Age

You will, no doubt, remember that I joined the Pensioner's Club here in Pinoso last year.

A few days ago I got a letter, in the post, with a stamp and everything. It said that if I didn't hand over my 9€ annual membership fee the Club would, unhappily, have to strike me from their membership register. I haven't actually taken part in a single event or even been in the building since I signed up. They never send me any information and the only way I know to find out what the group is up to is to go to the building and ask someone. I do know though that it's an active club because I often read about their events, after the fact, in the local news. And, like Bellgrove from Gormenghast, as I prefer to be out of it in a group rather than out of it altogether, I hurried over to pay my debts.

To the best of my knowledge the only way to pay is in cash in the club building. I asked if I could pay for next year too whilst I remembered. "No," said the woman who does the group's clerical work. She added, without any prompt from me, that there was no reason as to why I couldn't except that I couldn't.

My membership card is in a fetching fawn colour and it is made of cardboard. In the left hand corner there is a glued on photo. It's a real Polaroid, not a digital photo and it was produced by one of the town's professional photographers. The administrator took the card out of its plastic wallet and used a rubber stamp to print 16 in one of the little boxes on the back. She then found the card's twin stored in a small wooden drawer in a mini filing cabinet and did the same to that. Next she ticked my name off on a printed list. She took my proffered tenner and gave me the change. A fully paid up member once again.

It was so sweet. So brown paper and string. Not much chance of their records being hacked or someone's card being cloned.

Fiesta del cine

I like going to the flicks. I know it's dead old fashioned. I know I should be streaming Netflix from the mobile phone to the telly screen or watching a film on my tablet or something but I quite approve of a four metre head shot and the thirty metre wide panning shot. The faces on my computer screen might get to be 15 centimetres high which isn't quite so impressive. It's good to get off the couch once in a while too.

I think there is a tradition of cinema going amongst Spaniards - it is often grandly referred to as the Seventh Art, but like most places cinema attendances here have been dwindling for years. 

The main reason that Spaniards always give for not going to the pictures is the price. It didn't help when the conservative government moved theatre tickets, and other arty products, on to a higher VAT tariff.

In Madrid, if you go to the wrong cinema at the wrong time, you might pay as much as 9.30€ for a ticket but, even in the capital, it's easy to find a show for 6€. With the Brexit decreased value of the pound making that seem more expensive we're talking less than £8.50 for a couple of hours of entertainment. Back here in Alicante we sometimes go to the outrageously expensive ABC in Elche where, I think, it's 8.10€ but, more usually, we go to a cinema in Petrer where we pay 5.50€. If we go on Wednesday, Spectator's Day, it's even cheaper.

I suppose if you have a bus load of kids it can add up but, then again, if you have a bus load of kids going anywhere, except the park, costs a fortune. The overpriced popcorn and fizzy drinks don't help either. But, per se, I don't see how anyone can class the cinema as being overpriced.

I'm obviously wrong though. Today was the last day of this year's first Fiesta del Cine campaign. During the promotion the cinema entry price drops to just 2.90€ for the three quiet days of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I think this is the fourth such event since 2014. On Monday, the first day of the campaign, over 600,000 people turned out to watch a film. That's nearly five times as many people in the cinemas as against the equivalent Monday, the year before, when there was no promotion.

I'm off to Walk the Dog

Booze and fags are pretty cheap in Spain. At least I think they are. I haven't bought either in the UK for quite a while now so I'm just going on what visitors tell me. Certainly booze, in the form of home produced, Spanish, brandy is endangering my already weakened liver and my lungs are as claggy as those pits that trapped the woolly mammoths. That's thanks to ten cigars for the princely sum of 6€. To be fair I haven't actually smoked a cigar for a couple of weeks but my guess is the damage is done and that death by asphyxiation is round the corner.

When I was young pubs were tied houses, The Savile was Websters, The Wellington Bass, the New Inn was Ramsden's or maybe Bentley's Yorkshire Beers. Of course in time all the little breweries became part of huge conglomerates so it was Watney's or Ind Coope or Tetley's who owned the boozers. The last time I was in the UK that system seemed to have largely disappeared and pubs sold a variety of beers with improbable names. In Tesco's and Sainsbury's I presume there are still shelves and shelves of bottled beer from around the world.

Generally, in Spain, beer is beer. Obviously there are taste differences between the brands but, almost without exception, it's a light, alcoholic and fizzy pilsener type lager. Each region tends towards a particular manufacturer though the big brands are always available somewhere. Individual drinkers may have a preference for Mahou or Cruzcampo or Alhambra but, in general, brand is nowhere near as important as temperature. Beer has to be cold. On the two occasions when I have attempted to interest Spaniards in drinking British bitter they have complained loudly about the temperature - it's like broth - without mention of the taste.

There have always been a few, readily available, Spanish beers that have been out of the ordinary though the only two I can instantly bring to mind are Yuste and Voll Damm. Yuste is a beer with its roots back in the time when Spain ruled the Low Countries and is a dark Belgian type ale whilst the Voll Damm is a dark double malt lager. But suddenly, on the counter tops of bars all over Spain, there are lots of bottles of different beers on display. They don't seem to get drunk much but there they are.

Just to prove it to myself I had a look at the Cruzcampo site where there is Cruzcampo Cruzial with 100% selected hops (so the hops in their other beer aren't selected?), Cruzcampo Fresca (the authentic taste of recently brewed beer). On the San Miguel site they have a fresca too: it looks as though it may taste like the Mexican Corona or Sol whilst San Miguel Especial has toasted barley and overtones of licorice which is more or less the same description as San Miguel 1516. At least San Miguel Blu is different because it comes in a blue bottle and includes a touch of vodka. Actually the San Miguel site gives the year when each of these beers were introduced and lots of them have apparently been around for ages. I musn't have been looking! Even the local Murcia brewer, Estrella de Levante, has a beer called Punta Este on their website though there's no description of it, just a photo. Amstel Extra is for the bloke with strong emotions (really, that's how the blog translates) whilst Amstel Oro has the ingredients to be pretentious but prefers to be careful (and I thought education jargon was rubbish). Again, it seems that Amstel Oro, Amstel Gold, was introduced in 1956 so it's nearly as old as me.

And, alongside these bottles with different labels and differently coloured beer inside there are now, reasonably frequently, some local beers brewed in somebody's shed - artisan or craft beers. It's true that the outlet for most of them seems to be in the Mediaeval Markets and other street fairs but some bars do have them. Strangely one of the Spaniards who disliked English Bitter was also my drinking partner for some wheat beer and a pale ale tried over the summer at a Mediaeval Market in Teruel. He said he preferred proper, "industrial," beer.

One of the bodegas that Maggie uses for her wine tours, Casa de la Ermita, now does beer too under the name of Yakka. The last time I visited I tried their IPA. It wasn't that great to be honest but it was a nice change. I'm pretty sure that Yakka was actually started here in Pinoso, in the satellite village of Ubeda, because I tried their stout one cold November evening a couple of years ago at the Mediaeval Fair in Santa Catalina. A beer I sometimes drank when I lived in Cartagena, Icue, still looks to be alive and well too.

Who knows, give it another twenty years or so and it may be dead easy to get something other than industrially produced lager in Spanish bars.

October and nothing to say

Nothing much to write. It's October, you may well have noticed, and the weather is a bit changeable. The usual weather pattern here is blue skies and sunny days all year round with a few days rain particularly in winter and spring. In summer the difference is that it just gets hotter and stays hotter longer. At the moment the maximum temperatures are only getting up to around 26/27ºC and overnight we get down to somewhere below 10ºC. Difficult weather to deal with. You put on a sweater and you swelter. You wear a T shirt and, in the shade, it's a bit nippy. At night it's cool. Only the Northern Europeans are still in shorts. Inside, in front of the telly, our house is distinctly chilly. We've had the gas fires on but not yet wound up the mighty roaring pellet burner. We've had some rain too. The sort of British rain that makes the soil claggy and leaves muddy footprints on the kitchen floor.

There's still a fair bit going on round and about in the fiesta line - hence the photo - but we haven't ventured very far recently. Bit short of cash to be honest. I haven't had any work or any pay for four months. The Brexit vote has destroyed the value of the pound against the euro and, with it, my pension income. If you consider that, as a very broad generalisation, over the last couple of years it has cost about £770 to buy 1,000€ one now needs £910 to do the same. I'm sure you can guess what that means to someone living here and paid their UK pension in sterling.

I'm back at work now though and counting the days to the pay check. Things are a bit different. I'm still with the bunch based in Murcia who sell my work to a state assisted school in Cieza. This year though I'm just working two longish days with them. In the morning I work in the school, with full classes of youngsters doing their compulsory secondary school education and, in the afternoon, I do classes with any age group willing to pay for English classes. My bit, with the school, is to try to make sure the teenagers hear some real English and actually get to speak a bit. It's fair enough. The youngsters are noisy but generally they are nice enough and they don't give me too much grief. They don't like to speak English though. In the afternoon I do the classes for the language school in the same building, in the same rooms but with a mixture of age groups. Fortunately this year I have more adults and fewer children.

A biggish change is that I also have some work with another business, Academia10, based here in Pinoso. I do three adult two hour classes with them. It's nice to be working close to home and with people who are keen to learn. You'd have to ask the learners, rather than me, but I think the classes have been going OK.

Spanish wise, the language side, things go along. I still do a class, in fact I do it at the place I teach myself now. I also go to a language exchange that happens in a local bar. My Spanish isn't bad at some levels but it still drives me to distraction and is the major fly in the ointment of my existence here. I make stacks of mistakes but I can generally maintain a conversation. Then again I sometimes can't speak at all. In one bar last week they brought me a coca cola when I asked for a coffee. Twelve years and I can't get a coffee!

Last night I was surprised when, as I drove up our track, a car followed me right to our gate. It turned out to be some friends who had spotted a couple of sheep wandering on the minor road to their house. They wondered if I knew who the owner might be. I didn't but I said I would call the police on their behalf. I was shocked when the local police number was answered by the emergency 112 call centre. I stumbled and stuttered confusing verb tenses, mispronouncing words etc. I had the usual excuses - poor mobile phone coverage, not being quite sure what the answers were to lots of the questions. If it had been in English though it would have been much easier. The sheep are now safe and sound though.

Just in case you're interested the political stalemate is still completely unresolved. In fact a couple of weekends ago a palace coup saw the leader of the Socialist party unseated. You may remember that the PP, the conservative bunch, won more parliamentary seats than anyone else but they cannot find a partner or partners to give them the majority to form a government. The unseating of the socialist leader was because he has refused, point blank, to support the conservatives. With him out of the way the socialists could now abstain in a parliamentary vote in which case the conservatives get to form a government, albeit a minority one. As you might expect this is causing furore amongst socialist ranks. Three hundred days without a government today. If they don't cobble together something the third general election will be in December.

I'm going to stop there. This is boring even me but it's written, so it's going to get published. I'll be back when I have something interesting to say so, Oates like, that may be some time.

Coming over all nostalgic

I still take a Spanish class. In fact, because of the Spanish class, I have just started to work in the same academy as an English teacher. This week our homework was to write an essay using lots of past tenses. I chose to write about my first ever trip to Spain, to Barcelona, back at the beginning of the eighties.

Writing that essay I was reminded of the places we stayed and the things we did. I remembered the hostel, just off the Rambla in Barcelona that cost 500 pesetas, maybe a couple of quid, per night. There was only cold water in the room and the beds were like cots - they squeaked, they were simple but the sheets were shiny white. To have a hot shower I had to ask for a key and pay a small supplement. The Spain I encountered was a step back in time. The shops were shops where you had to ask for things from the person behind the counter. In the restaurants lots of the food was the sort of cheap, peasant food made from knuckles and offal. If you bought something safer, like a pork chop, you got a pork chop and nothing else on the plate. Puddings were restricted to a sort of custard, a creme caramel or fruit. There were people on every street corner with tiny stalls selling sweets or packets of cigarettes. Lots of the streets were narrow alleyways and, as well as the more modern cars and vans, there were still lots of strange three wheeled put put vehicles and small, smoke belching, lorries.

I was just talking to Maggie about this. She thought I was exaggerating a bit but she agreed that when she got to Spain, in the early nineties, it was still very old fashioned. She mentioned seeing an old woman, in Madrid, dressed in the rigorous black of a widow, pulling a small cart behind her loaded with cardboard and negotiating the city traffic. She remembered Extremadura as a place lost in the past. I remembered Extremadura too, particularly a row of colonnaded shops in Caceres blackened with age, though, as Maggie pointed out, that's a bit unlikely as Extremadura didn't ever really industrialise in the dark satanic mills mode. That journey to Extremadura started, for me, in a bus station in Seville where a couple of nuns shouldered me to one side as I hesitated over which bus to catch when the one I wanted was full. The ticket office was a squalid building with a long queue in front of the tiny ticket office window. My first time in Galicia, as part of some youth worker exchange programme, introduced me to a part of Spain where donkey carts were still a common sight.

This week I celebrated the twelfth anniversary of being here. I drove away from Huntingdon with the last few possessions packed into the MG and Mary the cat besides me on 7^th October 2004. We overnighted in France so I must have arrived in Santa Pola on the 8th

As we settled in to our new home most things were just bureaucratic hurdles to be overcome but I do remember other steps which seemed to be from some sort of Kafka novel. Getting a gas cylinder required so much paperwork that it seemed like an affront to personal freedom.

When I first started to write this blog we had just moved from dial up to an ADSL Internet connection. I often used to rail against the useless Spanish websites and the paucity of easily accessible information. It's not the same nowadays. Some Spanish websites still don't work well but, in general, most do. Shops are usually browse and self serve rather than having to ask for things. Last night as we had a few tapas there were concoctions with curry sauce drizzle, skewered, battered prawns in a sauce and puddings made from mango and white chocolate. The cars, the clothes, the biscuits and the cinemas are much like everywhere else. There may still be narrow streets in places and not all the donkeys are gone but now they are no longer anachronistic, they're a reminder of the past.

I wonder when it all changed?

Doctor, doctor

I know that the NHS, the British healthcare system, is a politically hot topic nowadays and I suspect there have been several changes to it since I left but, for someone who lived in the UK till 2004, the Spanish healthcare system and the British ones are basically similar.

The main difference is that you have to have paid into the Social Security system, or be the dependant of someone who has, if you are to get anything out of the Spanish system. Emergencies are always treated - though I'm not sure whether there might be a corresponding bill afterwards if you haven't contributed. Pensioners from any EU country are covered by the system here but the payment actually comes from the home country.

Dentistry is not included in the Social Security cover and there is a system of charging for prescriptions with various discounts which take account of your age, any disabilities and income but, in general, get sick and paramedics, nurses, doctors and an impressive array of medical hardware will come to your aid.

I've not been a big user of the system. An infection here and an injury there but the last time I spent any time at a doctor was in Cartagena four or five years ago. I have this idea that I can tell when it's something serious and when it isn't so, most times, I just wait for the malady to disappear and, touch wood, up to now there has been nothing serious.

Pinoso, as you know, is a really a village, rather than a town. A few souls short of 8,000. Nonetheless, it has 24 hour emergency medical cover. Our health centre is modern and operates at full swing on weekday mornings and early afternoons and then has a quieter afternoon/evening session. I don't actually know the opening hours but I know the principle well enough.

The last time I went to the doctor was on a Saturday afternoon when there is a just a skeleton, out of hours, staff on call. My stomach had been painful for a long time and the pain didn't seem to be going away and I didn't like it. Finally I was persuaded to go to the doctor in "emergency" hours. The doctor laughed, gave me something akin to imodium and sent me on my way. I felt suitably foolish.

Regular readers will know we have a couple of newish house cats and a visiting street cat  - a big white job. Having tried to scare him away we have now taken to trying to feed him so much that he leaves our two alone. A risky strategy I know. He is grateful for the food though. He goes into a frenzy as the food approaches and chows down in a noisy and very animated way. Tonight as I gave him a handful of the dried food he bit me. Nothing serious, he just mistook me for chicken flavoured biscuits, but he got a clout on his backside in retaliation.

An hour later and my hand was feeling very strange, A sort of pins and needles. I've heard about cat bites. A friend was very close to losing his finger after a bite from the family pet. Once again I rang on the out of hours bell at the health centre. Once again I was treated as a sort of idiotic time waster. They gave me a tetanus jab and told me to go back tomorrow if my hand swells up but basically they were miffed that I'd interrupted whatever it was that they were watching on the telly.

It's excellent that we have the emergency service though. Even if they do laugh at me.