They think it's all over

I spoke to my mum on the phone today. She said that she'd had a good Christmas and New Year but that she was glad to be back to normal. Later I popped in to town. I went to a cake shop that I've only ever been in once before, that time it was to order a birthday cake for Maggie, one with icing and a message and candles. This time it was to order a roscón. I can't remember whether I ordered the custard filling (crema) or the cream filling (nata) but either way I'm expecting better quality than the ones we usually buy from the supermarket. The last time we bought a baker's shop roscón was when we lived it Cartagena. I have a vague and nagging memory that I was shocked at the price then but, hey-ho, Christmas tradition and all that. The sensible eating can start when Christmas is over after the 6th.

I've written about Roscones before, the traditional Roscón de Reyes cake, a bit like a big doughnut that gets eaten on Kings, at Epiphany, on 6th January when the Three Wise Men have delivered the presents to the baby Jesus and to all the good boys and girls. The bad ones get coal so the Kings are obviously more generous than Santa who leaves nothing for bad children!

As I passed the lottery shop I did something else I don't usually do. I went in and bought a lottery ticket for el Niño draw, the Child, the second Christmas lottery. The prizes for el Niño are less than for el Gordo Christmas draw on 22nd December but, I think, there's a better chance of winning the big prize and excellent chances of, at least, getting your money back (1:3). I read that the chances of winning the 200,000€ top prize are something like 1:100,000 which is about the same as the chance of being stung to death by a bee or poisoned to death by a snake. They had a number that had obviously been spurned by Pinoseros in general, there was a caricature promoting the number, it was parodied as el Feo, the Ugly. Obviously enough that's the number I bought.

So, if the roscón does turn out to be really expensive when I pick it up on the 5th I can always hope that just getting the 20€ ticket money back from the draw on the 6th will at least pay for it. Or I can hope that the fine taste of the "home baked" version will be enough to make me forget this last gasp Christmas spending.

Starsky and Hutch and the like

Everybody knows that Italian men are cool. Everybody knows that Italian men don't wear socks. Before I came here I presumed that Spain was, probably, more or less like Italy - both have wine, olives, sun and the Mediterranean. So, just before I left the UK in 2004 I bought some Timberland loafers. All leather, no problems with sweaty feet. At least that was the hope.

I still have the Timberland shoes, I don't wear them often but they are still in excellent condition and they smell fine. I never have taken to going sockless. Spaniards wear flip flops in summer anyway. The cords that I bought from GAP, when it first opened in Cambridge, which is definitely a long, long time ago, are no longer a baggy fit but I still put them on from time to time. In fact there are lots of things I still wear that I brought from the UK in 2004 which makes them at least 13 years old. Some, like a big Marks ans Sparks Starsky and Hutch inspired cardigan, that I only now dare wear around the house, are much, much older. Some things, the inherited things, that we brought with us, tools for instance, are ancient.

When we were first setting up house in Culebrón we had to spend bucket loads of money. Obscene amounts of money.  Some things we'd brought with us but most of that was personal stuff, books and clothes, rather than household and we certainly didn't have settees, cookers, televisions or even drinks coasters. We had to buy beds too and although the sizes, in centimetres, were slightly different from their UK equivalents they were basically the same. Spanish pillows were usually long bolster type things but we managed to buy more normal, for us, individual pillows, locally. Over the years some of those things have been replaced but others soldier on. Pinned to the sofa by my laptop yesterday evening for a couple of hours I suddenly realised just how pain in the bottom uncomfortable our 12 year old couch has become. Even I am finally beginning to notice that lots of those original things are getting to be very long in the tooth.

The duvet we sleep under came from John Lewis in Peterborough. I bought it for the flat that I lived in there in the 1980s. It's a standard sized double bed duvet. Maybe six or seven years ago we were in IKEA in Murcia, when it first opened. I was quite taken with a duvet cover they had so I bought it, along with pillow cases. It didn't fit - far too big. They didn't fit - far too small. Obviously the Swedes have funny sized duvets and pillows. Primark sells ordinary size duvet covers - I've always thought the Irish were a sensible, level headed bunch -  and when they opened a shop, also in Murcia, we bought another cover. Once out of the packet it did not exude quality. It appeared to be made out of near transparent cloth and looked as though it cost exactly what we paid for it.

By now our original UK duvet covers were definitely showing their age - split seams, missing press studs, old fashioned designs and faded colours. Maggie thought so too and she went Internet shopping. When her purchase turned up neither of us cared for it much - photos are one thing but the actual product is another. There was nothing for it we were going to have to pay Inditex prices. I went to Zara Home and searched through the covers and cases in their funny drawer like shelves.  Quilts are not uncommon in Spain but they're not as common as they are in the UK. I looked at the prices - there were some covers for 40 or 50€ but there were lots more at 60, 70 and 80€. Pillow cases were sometimes 30€+. None of the bed-wear seemed to be close to the 190x190 cm size of our duvet and although I wasn't keen to engage with anyone working in the shop, for fear of being bounced into buying one of the expensive ones, I had no option. The person I spoke to was convinced that I was a stupid foreigner who couldn't speak Spanish properly or at least couldn't measure in centimetres  - 220x220 cm was, she assured me, the size for a double bed cover. It seems that whilst Spanish beds may be more or less the same size as British ones the Spaniards prefer their covers to be bigger - more wiggle room, fewer feet sticking out, which is probably better but we won't think about that just now!

Time plodded on with no new duvet cover. I was on Amazon Spain looking for camera batteries or similar but some strange algorithm showed me duvet covers, at the bottom of the page, as - relacionado con productos que has mirado - related to the products you've looked at. All I can surmise is that Amazon has me completely pegged - either that or they are spying on me in some more traditional way. The duvet covers were a reasonable price, they seemed to be the right sort of size, pillow cases were the right size and price too and everything was in plain colours so that the chance of the photo and the real thing being miles apart were slim. I was so overwhelmed that I even bought the matching colour fitted sheet. And guess what? It was all fine.

But it just goes to show. Things are similar here -no socks-  but different -flip flops not stylish loafers.

Without news

I've just been scanning through a number of other English language blogs looking for inspiration. It's time to write a blog entry and I can't think of anything to write about.

I could do New Year of course but I must have done cava (which is not, by the way, pronounced carver - but more like kavva), red underwear and the twelve grapes about as many years as I've lived here. I've already done a bit of a Christmas piece so I can't do that again even though it's still in full swing with the shopping centres clogged with cars and the telly full of perfume adverts. It's still a week to Kings and I've done Kings so many times that regular readers must be able to imagine what a Roscón tastes like. We haven't done many non British Christmas events but, even if we had, there's not a lot of mileage in living nativity scenes, carol concerts or Christmas story telling. I didn't get caught by any jokes yesterday on "Day of the Innocents" (think of it as Spanish April 1st) nor did I make the well trodden journey to see the egg, flour, fire extinguisher and firework fight in Ibi. 

I wondered if I could do something on the Valenciano language or yet another entry on speaking, or not speaking, Spanish. The thought came to me when I remembered the bit of a language triumph I had in the KFC in Elche the other day dealing with the bastardised Spanish pronunciation of isolated English words. I didn't hesitate once in the twenty question interrogation that is now the routine for ordering the simplest thing from the Good Colonel. Then I remembered that, only a few moments before, it had been exactly the opposite in asking for tickets for Wonder Wheel (the latest and shockingly boring Woody Allen) when I had to resort to mispronouncing the old man's name - Gwuddy Al-in - because my versions of gwanda weal, wander weyl and anything else, all the way back to a well modulated English pronunciation of Wonder Wheel, just left the ticket seller looking blank. I'm still a long way from writing that handy little booklet - "How to pronounce English words like a Spaniard."

The weather is always a good mainstay - Spain has had its second borrasca, or big storm, over the last few days since the new naming regime came into being. Storms of a certain intensity, it seems, now get named alphabetically - like hurricanes. This one was Bruno, we had Ana a while ago. It killed a couple of people across Spain and the snow and coastal storms looked really impressive on the telly. Here in sunny Culebrón though the worst that happened was that I had to get out of bed at 6.25am to secure a few things because the wind was blowing pots and chairs around. Hardly the stuff of a riveting blog.

Something with the students then or something from the news, the television, the radio; a second hand tale? My bosses have a Christmas play-scheme so they've laid me off for a couple of weeks leaving me with no students to talk to. No students, no stories. At home, with it being Christmas, the British TV companies have spent lots of money and Maggie has been watching their special offerings. Nothing there then either. Without the structure of work the routine has gone out of the window so I've not been keeping up with the news as well as usual. Anyway half the journalists are taking a few days off. And in Cataluña, which has more or less monopolised the news for months, it's all very quiet because all the politicians are horse trading, some of them via Skype, after the inconclusive elections. No blog fodder.

No. Another lifetime ago, I was in Saudi Arabia one Christmas. Lots of people I worked with went back to the UK to eat turkey and snooze on the sofa and, when they got back to Wadi Al-Batin, we asked for their Christmas reports. They were like José Moscardó, the bloke in charge of the fascist defence of the Alcázar in Toledo during the Spanish Civil War. The fortress was under siege, Franco sent troops to relieve it and, when they got there the siege was lifted. Moscardó was asked for his report. He said "Nothing new in the Alcázar." I know the feeling.  Nothing new in Culebrón.

Colder than a well-digger's ass

I have a morning cat feeding routine. The kettle goes on as I run water to wash the cats' bowls. I fire up the portable gas heater. When the water has boiled I put a little of it into our tea mugs and then put the mugs on top of the heater. It's to warm the cups. If we don't warm the cups we end up with lukewarm tea. The kitchen temperature is such that crockery and cutlery come out of the cupboards icy cold.

The minimum temperatures recorded at the Pinoso weather station over the last week are -1.5ºC, -2ºC, -1.1ºC. -2ºC, +1.3ºC, -7.2ºC and -5.3ºC. It's not that they're arctic or anything but neither are they tropical. It has been colder. We had a couple of days last month when there was no morning water because of frozen pipes. Lots of shop and office workers in Pinoso work at their computers wearing coats. Several of our friends wear fleeces inside their houses. We're not for that. We're for banging on the heating. Maggie was so fed up of being cold a couple of years ago that she spent serious money on installing a pellet burner which now blasts 10kw of heat into our living room. We have portable 4kw gas heaters in the kitchen and as a back up in the living room too and there are electric heaters here and there. Since the temperatures began to drop we've bought ten 12kg gas bottles, twenty odd 15kg sacks of pellets and our December electric bill is 50% higher than the one in November.

The problem is that the heat is not background heat. It isn't on all the time. The insulation in our house, and in the majority of the Spanish houses that we know in this area, is so minimal that basically as heat is poured in it flies out. As soon as we turn off the heating the cold re-invades the house and, even when the heating is on in any one room the icy cold chill is waiting behind the door.

We don't leave heating on in the bedroom. The goose down duvet we use is really a set of a thinner and a thicker quilt. The two will fasten together and that's what we do in the depths of winter. It means that we can stay warm in bed. In fact it's a bit too hot and the duvet is uncomfortably heavy. I think we both follow the same routine. We wake up at something a.m. dripping in sweat, far too hot, we stick an arm or a leg out from under the covers till the exposed limb goes numb with cold and then we retreat under the covers and hope that the balance of body temperatures will allow us to get back to sleep.

Outside the daytime temperature is generally quite pleasant. I've thought that it has been colder recently than usual although I have no data to back up that. I'm just going on things like the feeling that I might die of cold as I rode the bike into work the other morning! If I were describing a typical winter's day around here I would describe a sunny day with a bright blue sky so the recent crop of grey days has been a bit out of character.

As I pick up a freezing cold knife from the cutlery drawer or as I gasp with cold on opening the door to the unheated office it's hard to recall those endlessly hot summer days when the cicadas sang all night long. But, what keeps me going is that I know they'll be back!

Winter solstice

They're voting in Cataluña today.

Today, at 5.28 in the afternoon, Winter begins in Spain.

It's not usual for Spaniards, or even Catalans, to vote on a Thursday - it's usually Sunday, a non working day. There are rules, though, about the timings of elections in Spain. Today was the first possible day for the vote after the central Government dissolved the Catalan Parliament by using Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution following the Independence vote in October.

Although I don't like winter I always think of the solstice as the turning point. I know it's not technically true but I always think that, from today, we start to gain, rather than lose light. Winter may be on the point of starting but, at least, in one sense we've started back on the route towards the better, warmer weather.

And don't forget yesterday's post.

Jingle bells

There's an advert on the telly at the moment for el Corte Inglés, the big Spanish department store, which uses lots of Christmassy images. There are turkeys, there are Christmas trees, there are Santa Claus hats and there's lots of snow. Well I think of them as Christmassy images but that may not be the same for lots and lots of Spaniards.

I can only generalise here but I think that Christmas is an incredibly important time for Britons. Even if it isn't, in fact, much more than a couple of days of family arguments, overeating and snoozing in front of the telly the build up to it, the folklore around it, the customs associated with it, are deeply entrenched in British culture. Put a picture of a robin, in the snow, on the front of a greetings card and it's a Christmas card and Christmas cards are one of the symbols, the rites, of Christmas even if you're going to do it all on Facebook this year. Although Britons eat chocolates all year round most British houses don't have tins of Quality Street and the like except at Christmas time. You may be vegan, you may be going to have Indian food this year, but, if I were to ask Britons what the traditional Christmas lunch consists of, the answer would be turkey with all the trimmings. Holly, mistletoe, houses lit up with lights, the works do, Salvation Army bands, carol concerts, Christmas trees and all the rest are obvious and persistent Christmas symbols.

As we approach Christmas I usually do a bit of English language Christmas vocabulary with my students through songs, stories or quizzes. I wouldn't expect them to know mince pies just as I wouldn't expect most Britons to know about traditional Spanish fare like turrón, mantecados or polvorones. But I'm always surprised when I ask students what colour Santa's clothes are and the answer doesn't appear to be obvious to them. I find it strange that I need to explain that Papá Noel - which is the most common name for Santa here and which I presume comes from the French - is also known as Father Christmas or Santa Claus or Santa. Surely, just like me, they have seen hundreds of soppy Hollywood films loaded with this imagery? I never understand why the question about which animal pulls Santa's sleigh, or what a sleigh is, are more problematic than simply knowing the vocabulary for reno (reindeer) or trineo (sleigh). Explain as I might that the sound that a bell makes is called jingling there is no link, for the majority of Spaniards that I've ever taught, between bells, jingling or not, and Christmas. Even the Christian type questions - why was Jesus born in a stable?, what did the Wise Men follow? - don't seem to have the pat responses learned from an arsenal of memorised Christmas songs.

Some things are the same in both countries, for instance most towns have Christmas lights in their main streets and families get together to eat. Other things are completely different in Spain to the UK but equally widespread. For example nearly all the Spanish bars have raffles for Christmas baskets loaded with food and drink and the big Christmas lottery moves millions of euros. Other things are variations on a similar theme. Santa isn't particularly Spanish for instance, he's a recentish import, but the Spanish do have gift givers, the Three Kings, (Three Wise Men to you and me) and they turn up to hand over their gifts on the evening of the 5th January in big parades the length and breadth of Spain.

As an outsider, an outsider who has seen a lot of Spanish Christmases now, I'd say that there are plenty of Christmassy Spanish things but that they are nowhere near as standardised as they are in the UK. Ask Spaniards what they are going to have for Christmas lunch and the answer will vary from suckling pig or lamb to sea bream and local dishes such as pine nut flavoured meat balls. Putting up the Nativity Scene is a big thing in some Spanish homes and in others it's simply another little seasonal routine. Plenty of houses have trees and many have lights too but if your Christmas house is no lighter and just as treeless as at any other time of the year then nobody would see that as being bah, humbug! In fact, so far as I know, there are no literary equivalents to that Dickensian story. Gift giving, gift exchanging, is nowhere near as widespread here as it is in the UK and if there are Secret Santa type things at work I've never come across them. The expectations of Spanish children for Christmas gifts seem to be far less demanding than their British peers. On the couple of occasions that someone has given me a Christmas gift, associated with my teaching, I've been really surprised. Charitable organisations, like the Red Cross, do produce Christmas cards and, if you know where to look, you can buy them. One year, when Corte Inglés didn't have any cards and I couldn't afford the UNICEF ones at the Post Office, I had the bright spark idea of going to the local office of the Red Cross to buy some. I kept about half a dozen bemused people mildly amused for about five minutes as I tried, in my variation of Spanish, to explain why I might want to buy Christmas cards as a way of donating to their organisation.

Finally, and almost incomprehensibly for most of the Britons I know, Christmas isn't really celebrated at the same time. For Spaniards the evening of Christmas Eve is big - the family gets together and eats. Christmas Day is Christmas Day and the family gets together and eats. The 26th is non event - Boxing Day is only the very routine St Stephen's Day. New Year's Eve is New Year's Eve with grapes and underwear and fizzy wine. Probably the liveliest day of Christmas is the evening of the 5th January when the Three Magic Kings deliver their gifts. The parades and the last minute shopping frenzy give it a feel very similar to Christmas Eve for we Anglos.

Not a dry eye in the house

I was sitting beside an emergency exit, near the stairs to backstage. There was coming and going all the time. Babies were crying, a little girl sitting with her grandad to my left seemed to be practising crossing herself, mobile phones were alight everywhere to video the son or daughter, grandson or granddaughter maybe even the uncle or grandma doing his or her bit. The woman behind me suddenly burst into annoying conversation but I forgave her when a few minutes later she cursed slightly before going on stage to the accolade of the crowd as one of the moving forces behind the event - pre-show nerves I suppose. I was sitting next to a bloke who owns a bar I go in from time to time and I think the singer who sat in front of me when she was done performing was the woman who runs the tobacconist. Everywhere there were pristine frocks, new shoes and shirts with the creases still in them from the packets. I recognised tens of people in the audience or onstage. There were false starts with the same, wrong, music for three different performances and the number of times mics weren't on when they should be or had to be moved, adjusted and adjusted again was legion. The attempts to find the join in the curtains was very Morecambe and Wise. At times the singing left something to be desired but, what it lacked in professionalism, it more than made up for in heart.

But that's what you'd expect from a small town Christmas concert. Proceeds to a local Alzheimer group. I think nearly all of the musical groups from the town were there and both of the primary schools too with their music teachers just hoping that this time it would go as it should.

I used to work for an organisation that had community in its title. If I am ever required to say what I used to do in the UK I talk about work with communities but what was happening around me this evening, in the Teatro Auditorio Emilio Martinez Sáez, in Pinoso, was about as community as community can be. And as the Mayor said, as he did his little bit of wind up at the end, we have a pretty nice little town - a town that does well at being safe yet lively, good at looking after and supporting its people. It was almost like an advert for Christmas - very good will and peace on Earth.