History evenings

I went to a little bilingual talk last night about the history of the nearby village of La Romana. It wasn't at all bad. The local expert, Francesc Gallardo, did his stuff and answered, knowledgeably, the questions he was asked. He was ably assisted by a woman, Anabel, who handled the translation. She was the same woman who did the talk back in December.

I had no real trouble understanding nearly all of the Spanish part of the talk and my English was up to the English part though that didn't seem to be everyone's case. I'm not talking about the Spanish; I'm talking about the English. I thought we had some most amusing culture and translation problems.

In the Q&A session someone asked in English about a building that had a "big flat stone" inside, "probably" for processing grapes. The translator turned the English into Spanish and talked about grapes and wine to the Francesc, the speaker. He said he didn't know of any bodegas (wineries) but, in his answer, he mentioned almazaras, oil mills, places to press olives. The translator, missing the cultural confusion of what was being processed, didn't mention the oil mill reference at first. It was all sorted out in the end of course. The big flat stone was for crushing olives - oil not wine. Back in Elland we Britons didn't process a lot of wine or oil either.

Someone else asked about the history of some cave houses. They asked if it were true that the houses had originally been dug in Roman times so that people with leprosy had somewhere to live away from the village. As we'd just been told that basically there wasn't a village of la Romana until the turn of the 20th century and that no Roman artefacts had been found in the area the answer was going to be disappointing for the questioners. I could imagine the number of times that story had been told to visitors.

I don't know about you but I don't really have any trouble with American English. If someone talks about fawcets and car trunks I am not confused.  And if neither pronounced one way and neither pronounced the other are American and British English then I have no idea which is which. Although I may be dissimulating I think I remember being taken to see South Pacific and, if I do, I would have been four at the time. So I have been watching Hollywood movies (films) for a long time. I would suppose the true is same for almost any English speaker worldwide.

So, last night, there is a second question about cave houses in nearby Algueña. There is some initial confusion about which cave houses and where. There is a secondary question, in English, in the air, from an audience member, about whether these may be the cave houses behind the petrol station. The translator picks up this question and relays it to the speaker. The Spanish word gasolinera for petrol station, service station, comes back in the translator's American English. "Are these the caves behind ther gas station? The original question asker says she doesn't know anything about a gas station in Algueña and the whole question just sort of evaporates. I don't know Algueña well but the petrol station on the main road through the village is obvious. I'm sure the original questioner knows it too. So this time I think we have a linguistic problem related to gas, as in cookers, as against gas, as in gasoline.

The group that made me aware of this event - Spanish International Alicante - says that its aim is to promote friendship, integration and interchange of languages through social evenings, events and cultural activities. That was certainly going on last night.

Colloquial contractions, prepositions and phrasal verbs

When I was at university, a lifetime ago, I was asked how much say I thought students should have in the learning programme. My answer, then, was almost none. Nobody had yet persuaded me that participation was the way to go. Nobody had then persuaded me that it was the learning that was important.

It used to be that language teaching, English language teaching, in Spain was pretty straightforward. The teacher started with page one, went on to page two and so on. There was a lot of writing and copying and not much talking or listening. I'm sure it's no longer like that.

Having been brought up in another country it never struck me to teach in that traditional Spanish way. Even when we have a course book I tend to drift off the straight and narrow. I try to talk them through grammar. I don't think that a grammatical rule with one line of explanation followed by a page of exceptions is going to be very helpful to someone who has to juggle with vocabulary, structures, idioms, grammar, rhythm and pronunciation as they try to get something to eat in a café.

The other night I was having a bit of a discussion in a bar with someone who is doing an English course at the Official School of Languages. She had been told that unless she demonstrated her ability to use certain constructions, we talked about inversions, things like, "Not until I heard my name did I believe I had won the race" or "Hardly had I begun to speak when I was interrupted" would she be able to demonstrate that she had achieved a B2 level. What the B2 descriptor, of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, actually says is that someone at this level can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in their field of specialisation, can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers possible without strain for either party and can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.

Not much mention there of inversion. Obviously the text books have to try to build more complicated language into their various levels but the truth is that the CEFR is all about communication and not about grammar - the grammar is there to describe how the communication works. I saw a direct parallel between trudging through a text book as a way to teach English and a modern day student being told that the level of effectiveness in speaking English is in the complexity of the language.

At one of the places I work my boss said that a student had complained that we spent all the time talking and listening and reading stuff and suchlike in class and that what we should be doing was doing more exam papers, more filling in the gaps in grammar exercises. The complainer thought I should, certainly, be setting more homework rather than urging people to check those things they found difficult, to read things in English to help with structure and form and to consult grammar books to help them work out how to say the things they wanted to say or write.

Page one it is then.

Plans and plots

A while ago we got something from the Catastro, or Land Registry, saying that we needed to stump up 60€ to have our entry in the land registry updated. I did a fair bit of research at the time to find out what was happening and why. I came to the conclusion that the Catastro was doing two things at once - updating the rateable value of houses and checking that their details for each house were correct. If there was any discrepancy between their records and the actual state of the property they were systematically fining people a standard 60€ for regularising their records throughout Spain. I read somewhere that, in Pinoso, about 1,000 households had been charged the 60€. Considering that there are fewer than 8,000 people in Pinoso and presuming that more than one person lives in most houses it sounded as though a good percentage of the records were skew whiff in some way.

The system here is a lot like the old British Rates system. Each property has an assigned value calculated on the sort of land it occupies, what use the buildings or land are put to and the area it occupies. Basically then the Catastro says your property has such and such a value - a value that bears no relation whatsoever to the market value. Each local authority then sets a local multiplier. To give a completely fictitious example a 100 square metre house might have a notional value with the Land registry of 50,000€. The local council then sets its charge at, for instance, 0.5% of the value. In this case the rates would be 250€ per year. The last time our rateable value was updated was, I think, in 1987 so I expected a bill, a settling up.

Maggie picked up the new valuation and the updated bill from the Post Office the other day. It wasn't for a few euros extra it was for 1600 of the little blighters. It would take me about nine weeks work to earn that amount. By the time I got home Maggie had been investigating. She had been pretty sleuthlike and she'd discovered that, when they had updated our details, the Catastro had added in most of next door. So although it was bad we did, at least, have an obvious error. Well it's obvious to us and we just have to hope it's as obvious to the people at the Catastro.

Local taxes are collected, in most of Alicante, by an agency called SUMA on behalf of the local authorities. I went to the SUMA offices in Elda, about 25km from home, to see what I could do. The woman who dealt with me was pleasant, efficient and helpful. She told me that the bill had to be paid otherwise we'd find the bailiffs on our doormat or that our bank accounts had been embargoed. I asked if I could break the payment down into instalments and the answer was yes. She quickly sorted out the details. The good news is that, provided the Land Registry agrees that we are paying more than we should, they will pay us back. I asked the SUMA woman how long Catastro normally take to respond - well months, usually, she said, sometimes years - they're not quick.

And the process? Well, basically I needed to collect together a bunch of documents and write an explanatory begging letter. Literally. I used a verb at the end of the letter which is rogar a verb which translates as to beg or to plead. I used it because it's the sort of verb that I've seen in this sort of letter. Spanish letters from local and national government tend to an over complex and archaic language. I asked my friend Carlos, the author, to check the letter I had written and he didn't comment on the verb. I asked a work colleague to check the letter, she didn't comment on the verb. To beg, to plead is obviously an adequate verb when talking to the Catastro.

Today I handed in all the paperwork. The man I dealt with was a bit negative when I started, maybe he wasn't keen on dealing with another tongue tied Brit, but by the time I was getting ready to go he seemed to think it was a pretty simple and fixable error. Let's hope he's right and that it doesn't take months and months to get a reply.

White Lines (Don't Don't Do It)

When driving in Spain crossing solid white lines, in their many manifestations, is a bit of a no-no. I did it innocently in Cartagena in front of a passing police car once and got that crooked finger "come hither" symbol along with a sound telling off. On the telly the traffic cameras in the helicopters metaphorically click their tongues as lorries, cars and motorbikes, on completely deserted roads, take the direct line through the curves.

Culebrón, our village, is split in half by the CV83 road - or more accurately split into something like a big bit and a little bit - and it's our part, the little bit, that is the cast aside orphan of the village. Our access road is made from dirt and it is criss crossed with rivulets carved by the occasional storms. Some of the gullies are suspension torturing deep. Our street lighting is vestigial and intermittent and about half the houses are just beyond the reach of the mains drainage.

But, more than that, we are marooned behind solid white lines. Getting in and out of our part of the village requires either long detours to stay legal or nerves of steel as you make that not strictly legal, well definitely 300€ worth of illegal, turn across those stubbornly solid white lines. If anyone were to make that illegal turn - which, of course none of us do - they would also worry about the outright safety of it all as the traffic on the main road whizzes past at a lot more than the 60 km/h speed limit.

We really need a roundabout but my guess is that roundabouts don't come cheap. As I took the legal route the other day I wondered if a bit of extra signing and some re-organisation of the white lines might do the trick.

On the Town Hall website there's a form - it's a form that smacks of quill pens and  "I remain your humble servant" despite its downloadability - that seems to be a catch all for any general petition to the local council. So I filled it in and popped it into the Council offices on the way to work. I got a bar code and everything. The Town Hall doesn't have jurisdiction over the main road but I asked if they might make an application to the regional Government for we badly done to Culebroneros.

I know what will happen. Absolutely nothing. I mean nothing. Nobody will turn me down or reply but the form will simply cease to exist. Nonetheless, as I walked away, checking the Spanish of my copy for the umpteenth time, I felt that, at least, I'd tried.

Old familiar ways

I do a Spanish class each Monday. I do it to make sure that I speak at least a little Spanish each week. Otherwise I probably wouldn't. One doesn't need much Spanish in a supermarket or a bar. In my job the expectation is that I speak English. At home Maggie's English is as good as mine and she makes sure that we watch English speaking TV.

Last week the young woman who teaches me Spanish had written a short piece about a local festival. I noticed that it was tagged as level B1. This is one of the levels of the Common European Framework for language learning. The description of level B1 says that someone at this level can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in everyday situations and can deal with most situations likely to arise in an area where the language is spoken. People who do level B1 English courses with me can, in reality, hardly string two words together.

Yesterday we went to see a film called Tarde para la ira which translates as something like Too Late for Anger which is a film that won lots of awards in the Spanish equivalent of the BAFTAs or Oscars. Without the pre film blurb and without the images on the screen I would have had no idea what was happening at all - it was far too hard for me to understand.

Today we went to the village restaurant, Restaurante Eduardo. Restaurants are easy. The language is easy but today I was lost for most of the time. Eduardo is usually a bit vague and the trick is to ask for what you want and see if he has it rather than expect him to tell you what he has. But today I had hardly any idea what he was talking about.

When I was young it would have been an experience that I would have described with the, then, very trendy adjective of surreal. Today, as I wondered what Eduardo was saying the adjective, in English, that sprang to mind after all this time here was pathetic.

Kiko makes me wonder about local honey

We've just been to the presentation of something called la Mostra de la Cuina which is a sort of gastronomic showcase  for the food local to Pinoso in a selection of local restaurants. The title is in Valencià and Google translate says it means Cooking Show which doesn't quite have the same ring as the original.

Pinoso, like all of Spain, is proud of its traditional food particularly the dishes based around local produce. The star of the show around here is a rice dish with rabbit and snails cooked over sheaves of twigs. Unlike the paella from a bit further North in Valencia, the local rice dish is much thinner, usually only a grain or two of thick, it's a lot drier, often verging on burned, and it's a muddy browny green colour instead of that saffron yellow and, of course, it doesn't have chicken or seafood or whatever it is that Valencia paella has in it. Locals often make the difference in the name, ours is just arroz, rice, and the Valencia dish is paella named for the pan that it's cooked in. I much prefer the Pinoso rice.

The idea of the Mostra de la Cuina is that participating restaurants cook a full meal built around the same main dish on the same day at a fixed price of 30€ - rice one day, the rabbit stew, gazpachos, on another, gachamiga (a garlic, oil and flour pancake), ajos pinoseros (rabbit and wild garlic) and fassegures (meatballs in broth) on the others. Each day there are a couple of common starters - local sausage and a pepper and fish dish called pipirrana - with each restaurant having free rein over the other starters on the different days. The puddings, including a typical cake called perusas, and the drink are included. It also looks like there is a strangely anachronistic  gin and tonic included in the line up this year.

So we went to the launch. It was due to start at 7.30. This is Spain, one expects things to start late and the late start is excused with something called courtesy time. I always bridle at the thought that something so discourteous, to the people who turn up on time, is called courtesy time. I think we were nearly half an hour late in starting. At least there was an apology for the "slight delay".

This time the local Town Hall has gone to town on the publicity. Being the 21st century and all, a bunch of social media pundits, bloggers and the like, were invited to come for a day out in Pinoso. They've been given the grand tour - the bodega, a sausage maker, a baker, the clock tower, the marble quarry, the local wine and marble museum and of course, they've been eating all day. They also got the front two rows at this evenings presentation. And the godfather, the padrino, for the launch was a two star Michelin chef Kiko Moya from the nearby town of Cocentaina. His restaurant is called L'Escaleta and he seemed like a very personable chap. He probably took less time to talk about his food philosophy, about the qualities of the food he'd seen today and about his restaurant than it did our Mayor to do the introductions. Kiko's video was nice too.

We'll be out for a couple of meals I'm sure. I fancied the ajos or the gachamiga but they are both on workdays so it will probably be fassegures and arroz. But which of the five restaurants we still have to decide.

14th to 19th and 24,25 and 26 February.

L'oratge

Writing the blog entry the other day about the two weather stations and the variations in a very short distance sent me looking for those weather reports I mentioned. I found both the January 2017 report and the full roundup for 2016.

Apparently in Pinoso in the whole of 2016 we had 54 rainy days, 12 days with sub zero temperatures, 165 days with dew, 23 foggy days, no snow, no hail, 4 days with electrical storms, 163 sunny days, 133 days with sun and clouds, 45 cloudy days and 25 days with complete cloud cover.

Some of those I'm not so sure about. First of all I don't quite know what it means. If the day starts with full cloud cover and then the clouds part and the sun shines through is that both complete cloud cover and sunny or is there some sort of generalisation made? If it's a combination then why were there 624 days in the year? There are other things I doubt too - OK we may not have had torrential rain and what not from more than four thunderstorms but I'm pretty sure there were a lot more storms than that flashing away in the sky. And no hail, really? I don't like hail, I don't like the idea of great lumps of ice falling from a great height and bouncing off my car; off the cats. I'm sure that I had hail on my head more than once in 2016 - we get a lot of hail, it smashes down crops, it breaks things.

The factual stuff is much easier to interpret and to agree with. Apparently the hottest day of the year was September 5th when we hit 41ºC and the coldest day was 17th February when we suffered -4.5ºC. We got 359 litres of water per square metre in the 366 days. When I was at school I'm sure that my Philip's Atlas used to show the average rainfall for Manchester as being around 40" per year but I've just looked now. Manchester 33", Cambridge 22" and the wettest place in the list is Dartmoor at 77". It turns out that 359 litres per square metre (which sounds like a lot) works out at about 14" per year (which doesn't). By the way if you lived in Mawsynram in India close to the Bay of Bengal then you would get 477" of rain in a year which is a lot. The highest wind speed recorded in Pinoso was 77k/h in February. We had 87 days, nearly three months, with maximum daytime temperatures over 30ºC (that's more than 86ºF mum - just a bit warmer than your living room).

For January 2017 from the same weather station in Pinoso: 4 days with rain, 15 days with temperatures below zero, 11 days with dew, 2 days with fog, no hail, 1 day with snow, 12 sunny days, 12 days with sunny spells, 4 cloudy days and 3 days with complete cloud cover.

The last two days of the month tied as the warmest days, though they weren't very warm, at a miserable 16.5ºC and the coldest was the 18th of January. with -5.5ºC. We got 63 litres per square metre over the month (2.48") and 54 litres of that came on the 19th as snow. Maximum wind speed was 54k/h.

And today it's very breezy, sheets of cloud but with occasional sun and occasional showers too. I wonder how Capito will list this one?

By the way I hope the title means "The weather" in Valencià but I may be wrong.

Weather report

Cars have thermometers nowadays. Cieza is lower than Culebrón so, as I drive to work, the temperature increases but it's interesting that there are lots of local variations all along the route.

The temperature differences between the villages that surround Pinoso can be quite marked. It's usually one or two degrees colder in Culebrón than in Pinoso for instance. In fact the weather in general can be very different over short distances. Back in 2013 to give an extreme example a hailstorm caused havoc in Paredón. In Culebrón, at the same time, it rained a bit. The distance between the two places is just over 5km.

Pinoso has an official weather station, it's official in the sense that it contributes to the AEMET network with AEMET being the State Meterological Agency. As I understand it this is because a local teacher, always referred to as Capito, started a weather station as a school project which, slowly but surely, became more professional. From time to time I have used the monthly report from that weather station on this blog. At one point the Pinoso weather station stopped reporting to AEMET and I ended up in a bit of correspondence with a local blogger about what had happened. He told me that there was another weather station In Pinoso used by IVIA - the Valencian Institute of Agricultural Research.

Whilst Capito's station is in the centre of Pinoso the IVIA station is on the Yecla road: looking at the map on the IVIA website I'd say that means they are maybe 4km apart. Yesterday AEMET gave the temperature maximum and minimum as 12.9ºC and 1ºC whilst the IVIA site 12.61ºC and 5.05ºC. That's a pretty considerable difference on the minimum temperatures. And it's not just the temperature - all of the data such as wind speed and precipitation also differ, sometimes by significant amounts.

The last time I saw a weather station it consisted of some kit, like thermometers and rain gauges, inside a slatted white painted box. The little picture at the top of this post shows the IVIA station. No slatted box to be seen. I presume that it collects and transmits data automatically to somewhere or other.

One interesting little extra on the IVIA site is that it lists "representative" local crops as artichokes irrigated almonds, celery, aubergines, broccoli, onions, plums, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, asparagus, lettuce, peaches, melon, nectarines, olives to eat and olives for oil, potatoes, cucumbers, peppers, leeks, romanesque salad leaves, watermelons, tomatoes, grapes for eating and for wine and carrots. I would never have guessed that Pinoso was good for brussels.

Staying home and keeping warm

It's been a bit miserable for days, nay weeks, now. Tumble dryer rather than washing line, slightly moist bath towels. Dirty boot prints across the kitchen floor. I've been looking for something to do. What about popping up north for the weekend? I don't know why but I thought about Huesca or maybe Sigúenza. Some travel website says I'm talking about five or six hours. Well, if we set off after I finish work on Friday evening we could still be there for a nightcap around midnight. Paradors, Paradores, choose your plural, the upmarket hotel chain, constantly promote their offers. I had a bit of a look. None of it quite fits. Maybe it would work. Why not? Well, the truth is, it looks a bit dear actually. Madrid maybe, Madrid is always good. It always makes me feel less like a yokel when I'm in an art gallery and I'm not the only person there. That's not exactly free either and the deals on the super fast trains don't seem to be quite as stupendous and ubiquitous as the news stories would suggest. I suppose that I need to remember too that the house and car insurance are both due in the next few weeks.

Well then, if not now, I could, at least, think about something for the near or middle future. What about the festival in Benicassim? All the hotels within a ten mile radius seem to be booked already. A local festival then? SOS in Murcia maybe? Same thing. And I think about it, all that effort, all that upheaval. Anyway my back is hurting a lot at the moment and my feet feel funny.

It's not that I haven't had a very pleasant weekend. On Friday evening we went to Monóvar, just 12 km away, for a film in a series to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of a relatively famous local writer whose pen name was Azorín. It was an old black and white Billy Wilder film, dubbed into Spanish, with Jack Lemmon. The audience was pretty select and could have come back to ours for a cup of tea. Yesterday we had coffee with friends. In the evening, we did a Burns Night complete with haggis, piper and men with no underpants. Today we went for a meal as a sort of late birthday celebration with a couple of friends. Not a word of Spanish to worry about as we ate roast beef or sticky toffee pudding. In amongst all this I went to take some snaps of the delayed Saint Anthony, San Antón, festival in Pinoso where the priest blesses people's pets. Not an action packed weekend but a long way from gardening leave or pure catatonia.

It just feels to be passing by though. The last time we were in Sigüenza I'd wished we were staying in that converted castle. Just trogging up a motorway or riding the train makes me feel like we actually live in Spain. It's the same when I hand over the money to see whatever they have on at the Thyssen or think about the free tapas in Guadix. Somehow doing things locally isn't just the same. Maybe when the weather improves in Spring life will pep up a bit? Winter here is just as depressing as it is in Billingham, Brighouse or Bearsden.

Snow

My guess is that you know that it snowed here yesterday. A good thick layer of snow in Culebrón. I missed most of it. In fact I must be the only person in Culebrón who doesn't have a photo of somewhere looking very Christmas card. I took a few snaps today but by then the thaw was well under way.

There was 33mm of precipitation in Pinoso which, Google tells me, normally bulks up to about 33cm of snow. I'd have said it was less than that, maybe 15cm, but I wasn't here to see the snow at its height so I am not a reliable source.

I drove to work through reasonably heavy falling snow but, by the time I got to work, the snow was nasty wet rain instead. Cieza is nearly 400 metres lower than Culebrón. By the time I came home the ploughs had done their stuff and I followed the car width wet tarmac ribbon, hemmed in by snow, occasionally hitting big compacted lumps, all the way home. It wasn't easy getting up the slope to the house though and I had to dig the snow away to actually get the car into our yard. It's been melting like mad today. Water pouring off buildings and roads looking very picturesque in the bright sunlight.

At the height of the snowfall Maggie was persuaded by friends to take the lift offered in a four wheel drive and leave her car in town. She probably couldn't have got home anyway as the main road that passes our house was closed. Apparently the closure was because so many cars were sliding off the road that the Guardia Civil thought it the best move.

Lots of the comments against the photos that Britons living around here posted on Facebook were from friends surprised that it had snowed in Spain. Actually Spanish snow isn't at all unusual.

For a long time now Spain has often claimed to be the second most mountainous country in Europe after Switzerland. Again, with the help of Google, I understand that the criteria for that claim are not clear and that places like Norway, Slovenia, Greece, Austria and Italy beat it on most of the obvious measures. Nonetheless it is a pretty high country in general and it can, authentically, claim to have the highest percentage of its population living in high areas in Europe. Everybody knows you get snow on top of mountains. Any photo of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania proves that. So lots of Spaniards who live in the Pyrenees, up the Sierra Nevada or in the Picos de Europa have to live with plenty of snow every year. Spain has stacks of ski resorts.

The Spanish word for Hell is infierno. The Spanish word for winter is invierno. An old joke about Madrid says nine months of winter and three months of Hell. It's droller in Spanish.

We originally considered living in Burgos. Some Spanish chums warned us off by saying it was like Siberia in winter. We had a couple of different pals who lived there. One of them told the story of entertaining a group of Muscovites on some sort of International Exchange. The Muscovites complained that Burgos was too cold.

One of the WhatsApp jokes that I got yesterday about the weather was a temperature scale. It argued that when the temperature dropped below 24ºC people from Seville put an extra blanket on the bed. The mentions of Burgos suggested that its people would button up their shirts, as they drank ice cold beer and ate ice cream on the cafe terraces, as temperatures sank to -8ºC and that they would only actually go inside the bar when temperature dropped to absolute zero.

Whenever there is a description of the Spanish Civil War Battle of the Ebro, fought around the area that includes the city of Teruel in Aragon, there is always mention of the number of soldiers who froze to death because of the low, low temperatures. Figures vary but it seems that they were regularly below -20ºC

Maggie and I were trying to decide if it's the third or fourth time it's snowed on us whilst we've been here. My photo albums seem to suggest that it has been two reasonably heavy snowfalls, with another that barely counted, before this one. This weeks fall is definitely the heaviest we've experienced here. So, it may be relatively unusual that it snowed in Alicante and Murcia this week but it's not at all odd for it to snow in Spain.

And, whilst we're on the topic of sunny Spain I'd just warn you that should you ever decide to go to Galicia or any bit of Green Spain, up Asturias and Cantabria way, whenever those places are on the news for whatever reason it always seems to be raining.

Wrap up warm.

I thought the word was plurilingual

There is a local language in the Valencian Community which is called Valencian in English, Valenciano in the worldwide version of Spanish sometimes called Castellano and Valencià in, well in Valencià. Most people seem to think that it's not the same language as Catalan but the academic body that looks after the the rules and vocabulary of the language says they are wrong and that Catalan and Valenciano are the same with local variations.

As you would expect, and as I've reported before, there is a fairly strong local movement to promote Valenciano as a cultural heritage. Maggie keeps saying she's going to have a go at learning some. Rather her than me; I have enough problem with standard Spanish. Lots of people speak Valenciano as their principal language but there are lots of areas in this region where Valenciano is hardly spoken. Apparently about 50% of the population in the Valencian Community can speak the language and 85% can understand it.

Yesterday, over my work days lunchtime sandwich, I was reading the magazine produced by the communications team from the Pinoso Town Hall. The magazine's name, Cabeço, comes from a local hill. You will notice it is a Valenciano word with one of those French type cedillas. Our local council has a socialist majority and, as you would expect from a team directly employed by them, the reports in the magazine tend to highlight all the good things that are going on in the town. Most of it is pretty anodyne stuff anyway; new park benches here, a bit of tarmac there, what's on at the local theatre but, if you want to, you can argue about anything - wooden park benches - in this climate? Money on park benches when people are out of work?

There is some space in the magazine for the opposition political parties. Not much space but some. I always enjoy reading that because it means I find out where the local frictions are. I nearly always find something I didn't know because the Spaniards I talk to don't talk to me about that sort of thing and most of the Britons I talk to know even less about local controversy than me.

So, in the magazine, the conservative bunch were having a bit of a dig at the local budget - how much of it goes on staff, why rent office space instead of using council property etc. Then I got to a bit about education and about the use of Valenciano in the local schools. I read it twice, then a third time. I understood most of the words, I understood the sentiment but I didn't really understand what it was talking about although the gist was obviously that Valenciano was being pushed in all the schools in the Valencian Community, as a result of a Regional Government policy, which was bad for people who mainly spoke Castellano and would mean they'd have to pay for English classes. How did English come into this?

For years parents in the Valencian Community have been able to decide whether their children do the majority of the subjects in Castellano or in Valenciano. Currently seven of every ten youngsters are taught in Castellano. The Regional Government, which is ruled by a coalition of socialists and nationalists, has decided to change this twin path for a multilingual option. Now state and state assisted schools have to decide whether to slot into one of three levels - basic, intermediate or advanced - depending on how much of their basic teaching is done in Valenciano and how much English they offer. If the school teaches mainly in Castellano they end up in the basic level, and those which teach principally in Valenciano go into intermediate or advanced.

I should mention here that a very common model in Spain is for a bilingual school. Outside of the communities with a local language this usually means that the school teaches in Spanish and English though I'm sure that there are some which teach in Spanish and French or Spanish and German. Murcia, the community next to Alicante, the one in which I teach, has tens and tens of bilingual schools. Maggie used to work in one where she taught English in English, Art in English and a subject, Conocimiento del Medio, which is a sort of mix of natural and social sciences, in English. Personally I'm glad that I'm not a Spanish youngster having to struggle with a foreign language as well as the intricacies of the subjects themselves but it seems to be an accepted idea here.

Oddly it's English that is the incentive in this change from teaching in Castellano to Valenciano. Schools which teach half of the curriculum in Valenciano can up the percentage of the curriculum that they teach in English to 30%. This means that at the end of their school secondary career students will automatically get a B1, lower intermediate qualification in English, and a C1, lower advanced, qualification in Valenciano. It also cuts the amount of Castellano to the bare minimum allowed by Central Government legislation.

The Regional Government argument is that Valenciano and English are minority languages with Castellano being way out in front, so this change gives youngsters the opportunity for good levels in three languages whilst also helping to preserve a local cultural heritage. The detractors say that schools which cater to Castellano speakers are basically being punished by denying them increased access to English which, in the long run, is likely to be more useful. That's where the link was to English. The argument I had read in the magazine was saying that by denying Castellano speaking schools as much English for free, in the schools, the good parents would feel obliged to send their children for private classes.

What I found really odd about this was that I didn't know. After all I live here. I read the news most days, I listen to radio news and I even sometimes watch news on the telly but this policy had passed me by all together.