Freedom, justice, equality and political pluralism

It's Constitution Day today. We're celebrating the 39th anniversary of the document that formalised the new order and the end of the dictatorship. 

In Pinoso Town Hall yesterday there was a reading of some of the articles of the Constitution by members of the community. Obviously it couldn't be today. Today is a holiday and the Town Hall wouldn't be open on a holiday.

I thought I'd go and have a look. I got there nearly at the beginning, the Mayor was doing the opening spiel but I couldn't get into the room where the reading was taking place because the door was blocked by the throng of people waiting to read their bit of the document. I'm not sure if there were people inside the room, an audience, or not. Peering in all I could see was someone standing behind a tripod videoing the whole thing. When I said hello to Colin, there to read his bit and presumably a representative of my clan, someone shushed me so I decided to give it up as a spectator sport.

I did listen to the reading on the local radio. Colin did OK and I recognised lots of other local people from their voices. The Constitution sounded good - all those rights to fair and equal pay, to work, to holidays, to a decent home, to a justice system. Someone got to read Article 155 which is the one that was used in Cataluña, the one that says that the Government, with the approval of the Senate, can take over a region which is not fulfilling its obligations. Interesting choice I thought.

It wasn't the only time I saw the mayor yesterday. In the evening there was a "Musicalised wine tasting" to celebrate the third anniversary of the local wine and marble museum. Marble and wine are two of the pillars of the local economy. The wine tasting was accompanied by music some of which was played on wine bottles and lumps of marble. Ingenious I thought.

Not typical

I was listening to a learn Spanish podcast called Notes in Spanish today. The podcast is produced by an Anglo Spanish couple Ben and Marina. They plan what they're going to talk about but the actual conversation is unscripted so that it's more spontaneous. Until this new series, which has just reached its third week, it's been a few years since they've produced any podcasts. I hadn't cared for the content of the first couple of these latest recordings but this one was much better. They were responding to the question as to whether Spain could still claim to be different from other European countries or whether it has been "globalized".

They talked about how some of the symbols of everyday Spain are disappearing - for instance the way that family restaurants are being taken over by corporate hotel and catering groups. They chatted about the new transport solutions like Cabify (a company that uses chauffeured cars to provide an alternative to conventional taxis) or the shared car schemes where users hire vehicles for a few hours at a time. One of the points they made was that whilst these initiatives might be new to Madrid they were probably old hat in large chunks of the world. They also mentioned that things were probably unchanged in España profunda - Deep Spain. I've been told that neither Pinoso, nor even Culebrón, can claim to be Deep Spain but we're hardly at the cutting edge of the latest trends either.

Family restaurants are still the norm around here, small family shops too and the few times that I've wondered about any of those services that work via a mobile phone app - like home food delivery, car sharing or chauffeured cars - I've always drawn a blank. No Just Eat, no Uber and no Bla Bla Car - I don't even seem to be able to get online supermarket orders delivered. My mum lives in St Ives, in rural Huntingdonshire, and she can do online supermarket shopping and order take away from Just Eat even though most of the shops on the High Street are local businesses. This discussion about "The Real Spain" the idea that some particular type of city, town or village best represents the essence of Spain reminds me of some spoof I saw on British telly when I still lived in the UK. In it a group of friends were in the after pub Indian knocking back pints of Kingfisher. Their conversation centred on the argument that the real India could only be found in the villages. Ben was comparing now to a time at the end of the 1990s. What makes that Spain any more or less Spanish than the Spain of Cabify and Car2go? It's something I always think about when I see "traditional costume" - why does some clothing style, frozen at some particular time in the past, represent "traditional" any more than the flip flops that have been the standard Spanish summer wear for years and years? Personally I think that the excesses and brashness of Benidorm and the style of the Alhambra both represent the real Spain as does some remote hamlet in Teruel, a fishing village in Cantabria or the trendiest bar in Chueca or Lavapiés.

As an aside Ben speaks pretty good Spanish. He sounds very British though, his cadence, as well as his accent, are British. One of the things I like about his podcasts is that he makes errors of the sort I make. He puts most of them right himself but sometimes Marina has to correct him. Ben wasn't the only recorded or broadcast Briton I listened to today. I also heard a radio programme, done on Spanish Radio 3 Extra, by another Spanish speaking Briton called Nicolas Jackson. His programme is aimed at a Spanish audience and is about new British music. Like Ben, Nicolas speaks cracking Spanish but, again, with a very obvious British accent. I've never noticed any mistakes in his scripted commentary but Spaniards tell me, that whilst what he says may be grammatically correct, at times it sounds a bit clumsy to a native speaker - in plan Guiri as they say - like a foreigner. Simon Manley, the British Ambassador to Spain, was on the radio a couple of times today talking about Brexit. He makes plenty of mistakes and sounds very British too. Maybe that's a part of his job description and I suppose media interviews are harder than either prepared scripts or a natter with your partner. I wish I spoke Spanish as well as the worst of them.

Hearing so many Britons speaking Spanish in one day I got to comparing my own linguistic capability with theirs. To be honest I thought very little of what they said was beyond me - at least with a following wind. Then someone phoned from my credit card company trying to get me to change my card. I have a suspicious mind and guessed that the new card would not be to my advantage. I tried to tell the woman that but as I spluttered and fumbled with the most basic pronunciation or structure I realised just how far there is to go.

Pooh!

The health people send you a little packet through the post. Inside there's a sort of flat tube with some liquid in it with a cap that incorporates a stick. You collect a sample of your own faeces (I decided not to use the simpler, better word). You open the tube to reveal the stick and then you stick the stick into the faeces sample a few times before sticking the stick back into the tube and sealing it all up. That provides whoever it is who deals with these things a sample to check to see if you possibly have gut cancer.

Once you have your sample you take it to the collection point, in my case the local health centre, and leave it in the "assigned urn" between designated hours. The sample gets analysed and they send you a letter if it's an all clear or make an appointment to see you if it's not.

Now there are certain Spanish words or phrases that just won't stick (sic). For instance there's a phrase that is to do with changing the subject that uses the name of the river that flows through Valladolid, the Pisuerga. Try as I might I can never remember the name of that damned river. Certain words become fashionable for a while - I still remember farrago of lies being used over and over again in a story about Harold Wilson and Marcia Falkender. I'd never heard the word before and I haven't heard it since but, at the time, it was everywhere. At the moment a verb that is being used regularly to do with the Catalan politicians in prison is acatar which means to respect, observe, comply with or defer to. I must have looked acatar up at least ten times and so far I still haven't internalised the meaning. On a much simpler scale the word for a notice or a sign - the written or printed announcement sort of notice/sign - is not a simple translation in Spanish - there are three or four words that are used to describe specific sorts of signs and there is a similar sort of sounding Spanish word - noticia - which has nothing at all to do with notices which is dead easy to trot out mistakenly.

So I go to the health centre with my pooh stick and I see no designated urn. I wander around a while sort of waving the green tube thing in the hope that someone will point me in the right direction. Nobody does so I queue at the reception desk. There are only a couple of people in front of me but the bloke on the computer takes an age to process anything - he must have trained in a Spanish bank. I stand and wait. It's frustrating because the answer will take two to three seconds. I see two other people, Spaniards, with their green tubes and I tell them I'm waiting to ask where the urn is. Eventually it's my turn, I ask and the receptionist nods his head at a yellow plastic container that's tucked behind the reception desk. It has no notice/sign on it. The receptionist is brusque in the extreme with his nodding and I'm not happy. I can't remember exactly what I said but the gist of it was that if somebody had the gumption to put a notice on the stupid yellow box then three people would not be standing around wasting their and his time. Except of course that I couldn't remember the right word for a notice and the whole righteous indignation thing fell apart.

Minor celebrity, cycling and house visiting

Another couple of personal tales. If you're looking for stories of Spain skip this one.

Thrashing around on a supermarket floor must attract quite a reasonable sized crowd - something for any balloon sculpting street artists among you to bear in mind. At least two people have told me they were personally responsible for picking me up and several more seem to have been interested onlookers. Even the local police chief asked me today how I was getting on. Lots of people know about the incident and they seem to know it was me. In fact, at times, I've felt like a bit of a minor celebrity. It's a celebrity I would rather have avoided but, every cloud, as they say.

There is medical advice that I shouldn't drive. So now I can feel virtuous cycling from Culebrón to Pinoso. It's not very far, it's more or less level and yet the effort makes me breathe like an steam train. Nonetheless, as I take my first unsteady steps on reaching my destination I feel righteous. Ecologically sound, part of that group that goes into sports shops to buy things other than shoes.

Getting to town or back home on the loaned road bike is already a relatively quick and only mildly painful process. I expect it to get better as my muscles adapt to something more strenuous than pushing the brake or clutch pedals. The bike is useless for transporting anything other than me of course. I've already had a couple of logistical failures with my lessons when the attempt to keep the weight and angularity of my backpack down has meant that I've forgotten some key bits of paper. My lunchtime menu planning/food buying now also takes account of the weight and bulk of foodstuffs. Night time cycling is out (though much against my better judgement I rode home after nightfall yesterday). I was not and I am not at all keen on mixing with 100km/h traffic after dark but it was actually the oncoming traffic, on the narrow lanes, that caused me most problem as I lost sight of the edge of the road.

As a driver I think those flashing red rear bike lights are great but, as a cyclist, I've had a couple of eye to eye conversations with drivers in broad daylight where there has been no doubt that each of us is aware of the presence of the other. They've cut me up anyway. They are  presumably working on the assumption that, even if I persist, I will hardly mark their paintwork. I am certain that even the flashiest of flashing rear LEDs and the most fluorescent of fluorescent jackets will offer very little protection against just the slightest tap from a vehicle driven by someone much more engrossed in their WhatsApp message than spotting that unexpected night time bike.

When I rode in a couple of days ago I was heading for the bank to talk mortgages and I thought we were just about to buy a house. I was quite taken with the idea. Culebrón is great with space and trees and stuff but it's a pain getting a gas cylinder or a bread stick. And, as the years pass, more things will become a nuisance or worse. So, living in town and being able to leave the gas cylinder outside the door to be replaced or only having to walk around the corner to the bakery sounded good. Pinoso is hardly the big city after all and Friday evening's jaunt to Santa Catalina, where we talked to Spaniard after Spaniard, was also a reminder of the pleasures of living with neighbours in a community.

Maggie knew the house or, in fact, the bunch of houses we were going to see. I reckoned that if she thought they were good then they would be. The houses are owned by a bank, collected as part of a bad debt, probably from a bankrupt builder, and sold through the bank's real estate arm. The prices are low, and similar houses are usually really good value for money. Typically they are "sold as seen" and most of them need a bit of tweaking in one way or another. We're not really rich enough to take on a mortgage but figures can be remarkably elastic when you want them to be and the bank seemed to be as flexible in their sums as we were in ours.

I was ready to having to fit a kitchen from scratch, I knew about that, but, try as I might I couldn't like the house. I looked at the cupboards, described as rooms, and wondered how anybody had decided to make the only suitable length for a bed run from under the window directly into the door. I looked at the toilet absolutely flush to the wall, wondered why, and tried to calculate if there was sufficient leg space between the stool and the bidet without actually squatting down to check. I balanced everything against the price and decided that sometimes being cheap just isn't enough.

Do you think I need to take a brolly?

I mentioned a few posts ago that it hasn't rained a lot recently around here. Whenever if does rain someone always says -"Well, we need it," and that is about as true a truism as anyone could want. Spain is in the middle of a prolonged drought.

Drought occurs when, over an extended period, rainfall is lower than normal. Eventually, despite reservoirs, desalination plants, water recovery and the like, this results in a hydrological drought or lack of water resources. When this water scarcity affects agricultural, industrial and other economic activity we get to a socio-economic drought which is when your average Joe starts to notice. That's about where we are.

For some reason, presumably to do with the normal pattern of rainfall in Spain, the hydrographic year here runs from the start of October to the end of September. Between 1980 and 2010 the average rainfall in Spain was about 650 litres on every square metre. In the last hydrographic year the figure was 550 litres or some 16% down. There have been bad years in the past, in 2004 for instance it was just 430 litres, but the problem is that it's been drier than usual for four years in a row and that means that the amount of water stored in reservoirs has been steadily falling, we're in a hydrological drought.

In fact the reservoirs are well below 40% of their storage capacity. To be honest this figure seems a strange way to report water capacity. Spain has the highest per capita reservoir capacity in the world. To say that the reservoirs are at 37% of capacity means nothing - do we have a lot of capacity, so there's plenty left for me to drink and for the farmers to pour onto their crops, or are we down to the last few cupfuls? The mug I drink tea from is pretty big, about half a litre, plenty of tea to wash down my breakfast toast but if I needed to drink a bucket of tea every morning, and presuming that the blue 15 litre bucket in our garage is typical, that mug would represent just over 3% of my tea habit needs.

Hydrologically Spain is divided into river basin areas. The one that affects us, in sunny Culebrón is the Jucar and the one next door, the Segura. They're at around 25% and 14% of capacity - the lowest figures in the whole of Spain. Again though that percentage figure has to be analysed rather than taken at face value. Up in Galicia for instance, where it normally rains a lot, there is not, usually, the need to store so much water because the stuff falls out of the sky pretty regularly. The storage figure for the Miño-Sil basin in that region is just over 42% but that represents much more of a supply problem than the 32% capacity for the Guadalquivir basin in Andalucia.  That's because it's often pretty dry in Andalucia so they have lots of reservoirs to store the water when it does come. In fact some restrictions on water use have been put into place in some of the traditionally wetter parts of Spain like Galicia and Castilla y León. Apparently they haven't had any rain at all in Valladolid, not a drop, in over 100 days for instance.

Last year at this time there were just short of 28,000 cubic hectares of water stored in reservoirs. This year it's about 22,000 cubic hectares, some 22% down. The water stored has three principal uses. For agriculture, for the urban centres and for hydroelectric generation. Agriculture uses about 85% of the water and the urban centres about 15%. The hydroelectric generation just borrows it for a moment or two. It's been a bad year for agriculture. The sector has had trouble with frosts, with hailstone damage (I've told you about the horrible hailstorms before) and the drought. Farmers reckon they've lost about 2,500,000,000€ of retail sales because of those three things. Mind you it's not all one way traffic. Farmers are allegedly responsible for an estimated half a million illegal water wells which use about the same amount of water as 58 million people in a year. Hydroelectric generation is down about 50% this year because the dams don't have the flows to drive the turbines. This means that other, non renewable and more costly, forms of energy, like gas and coal, have to be used to fill the gap and that, in turn, means more greenhouse gases - up 37% for this year over 2016.

I wondered how much rainfall would be needed to turn this situation around. None of the articles I read had a figure. It took me a long time to work out why. The answer is that nobody can really say without lots of ifs and buts. For instance Spain has systems for moving water from one river basin to another. Water is often moved from the Tajo to the Segura for instance so, I suppose, if the drought persisted in Murcia but it poured down in the Tajo basin then Murcia would be fine. Also you would need to establish what's normal in the way of full and empty reservoirs and whether the reservoirs or aquifers are the main source of supply. The highest figure I can see for reservoir capacity seems to be 70% in 2013, just before the dry spell started. If you were one of those half empty people, rather than half full people, then I suppose you could, quite rightly, point out that even in the fattest years the reservoirs were 30% below full. I'm pretty sure though that, a few years ago, one of the complaints in the North was that they had run out of storage capacity because all the reservoirs were full. That ties in with the point above about the Miño-Sil river basin. Full to overflowing in the lusher parts, still only at 50% in the drier parts but, in fact, all well and good. Actually I did find an article that said in Galicia it needed to start raining now and not stop until they had about 600 litres per square metre or about half a years average rainfall to bring things back to normal. That doesn't sound good.

But not to worry the Government has said that no cuts in supply are envisaged until 2018 - hang on isn't that just a bit short of 40 days away?

18 grammes of sweetness

One of those things you "have to do" when you're a visitor to Spain is to try chocolate y churros - a hot fried sweet dough stick served with a hot chocolate drink. The hot chocolate is basically melted chocolate thinned out with milk. I just checked and the Valor version, for instance, has nearly 40% chocolate along with sugar, rice flour and milk powder. So Spaniards expect drinking chocolate to be spoon standingly thick.

We Britons drink cocoa or hot chocolate too. I seem to remember that, when I was a lad, I had to be precise about the name or I got real cocoa which was much darker and bitterer than the Cadbury's drinking chocolate I preferred. I may well be wrong but I think that cocoa solids is the name for the powder left after cocoa butter has been extracted from cocoa beans and that the cocoa solids dissolved in milk were the traditional British bedtime drink of cocoa. Somewhere between the 1950s and 70s cocoa was slowly ousted by a sweeter, thicker chocolately drink, drinking chocolate, which was much easier to prepare.

Spaniards drink something very much like British drinking chocolate (I suppose thinking of Cadbury as British now that it is owned by Montelez is like saying Nessels instead of Nestley for Nestlé and pretending they're not Swiss - but you know what I mean) with the main brands being Cola Cao and Nesquik. As much as anything these chocolatey flavoured powders are drunk, both hot and cold, by children at breakfast time. Unlike the thicker liquid chocolate that goes with churros Cola Cao and Nesquik are not a favourite tipple among Spanish adults.

It's surprising how difficult this makes the conversation with my Spanish learners of English when we're talking about what they might drink as a warming beverage in a London café.

The individual packs of Cola Cao contain 18 grammes by the way.

Roast saddle of venison, tortilla and beans

I'm not much of a cook though I can usually produce something that is, at least, edible. That's not always the case; new recipes tend to turn out badly and, recently, I have had a series of culinary disasters. I did some beef, tomato and olive thing that tasted of salt and nothing else. There was another concoction that I ended up tipping directly into the bin, something with lots of cream and garlic. I'm safer when I cook up the lentils or one of the student favourites (well favourite with the one time students who are now beginning to draw their pensions or die) like spag bol and chilli con carne. Nonetheless my version of kebabs with chorizo is OK and that spaghetti with yoghurt and mushrooms and bacon isn't bad either. My shepherd's pie's perfectly tasty and there are plenty more in my repertoire that, whilst they may not exactly thrill the palette, do, at least, maintain the calorie input without hardship.

The stuff that goes into my meals comes from the shops in the form of veg and pulses and meat and cheese and eggs and stuff like that. The food may come in packets and boxes. It may have been grown under hectares of plastic, sprayed with hideous chemicals, never have felt the soil on its roots or the sun on its seed-pod but it still looks like a carrot, a lettuce or a chickpea. If it's an animal product then I wouldn't like to speculate as to whether the beast spent it's life confined in a tiny feeding station eating high protein feed made from fracked oil or recycled fish. Nonetheless, basically, whatever the food and however it got produced, it would still be recognisable as food to my forebears. The raw material of a meal rather than the finished product.

There have been prepared foods in Spanish supermarket freezers as long as I have lived here and somebody must buy them because they are still on sale. In fact I've noticed that much of the extra space in the newer larger store of a local supermarket has been taken up by new lines of pre-prepared stuff. I still don't see a lot of people buying it though. Usually the stuff on the supermarket belt in front of mine looks much like my stuff except that they have always remembered something that I've forgotten. I think it would be fair to say that most of the Spaniards around here do not buy things that come ready prepared. It's a sweeping generalisation and there are plenty of exceptions from pizzas to ready shaped meatballs. It may well be different in the bigger cities too but I think that most people in most homes still cook their food from scratch rather than heat up something they have bought.

Now I saw an advert on Spanish TV today for C&A. It's the first ad that I've noticed with a Christmas theme. This reminded me that we'll be due our annual trip to the coast to the Overseas Supermarket/Iceland store. It's not that I often wake up thinking of Piccalilli and Bombay mix or Melton Mowbray pies and Quality Street but, confronted with shelves full of products that were staples with me for forty years, there is always lot of gratuitous overspending. We usually go to buy something specific that's either expensive or unavailable locally - gammon, pork and mustard sausages, twiglets - but we nearly always end up buying lots of things that sound great but turn out to be soggy, tasteless or otherwise disappointing. This year I really must remember to say no to the pre-prepared stuff however good the photo on the box looks.

By the way I apologise if I've done this blog before. Checking the blog is a bit like watching the photos, my own photos, that pop up randomly on my laptop as a screen saver. I sometimes find myself watching the slide-show of half remembered photos and thinking that some of them aren't so bad. Then one of the many blurred pictures pops up and my hubris evaporates. When I thought of blogging on pre-prepared versus fresh food I popped some search clues into the blog and I found myself re-reading long forgotten blog posts, sometimes from years ago. I thought they were OK until I bumped into two in a row which were the literary equivalent of those blurred snaps. I gave up, ashamed of my prose and the out of date information. Mind you if I've forgotten the chances are that you have too.