Vote early, vote often

Many years ago - strange how all my stories start like that - I was at a Conservative Club fundraiser in North Yorkshire. I have no defence, I was just there - no kidnapping, no drugs, nothing. I spent a long few minutes talking to a relatively powerful politician of the time, Baron Brittan of Spennithorne or Leon Brittan as he was called then. I was talking to him about voting and how it was a flawed tool. I argued that voting gives you one chance, every few years, to choose between a couple of, or if you're lucky a few, electable groupings with which you share some opinions. He argued that choosing a band and sticking by them was the mark of a strong democracy. We didn't come to an agreement but he did buy me a drink.

It's the only tool that democracy gives us though, not the drink, the vote. The only other thing that might work is getting out in the street with a banner or a Molotov cocktail depending on your preference.

I got a vote in the referendum about the UK leaving Europe. I was on the losing side. Here in Spain, as a resident and a European Citizen, I have been able to vote in two lots of local municipal elections. Neither Spain nor the UK allows me to vote at a regional level but the UK system allowed me a vote in the last couple of General Elections and in Europe. I'm about to lose that vote for having been absent from Britain for fifteen years. My country is about to leave the European Union anyway so it looked like I was going to lose my Spanish vote too. Disenfranchised everywhere.

Hope springs eternal though. We have elections here in May and, when I heard an advert on the radio, advising EU citizens to get themselves on the voting register, I went to the local Town Hall and checked I was still registered. The people behind the desk thought I was barmy but they rang the central register and confirmed I was on the electoral roll. Whether that would do me any good after March 29 was a moot point. Then, the other day, a rather ambiguous letter from Pinoso Town Hall said that EU citizens should signal their wish to be on the voting list by filling in a form. It had to be done before 30 January. We're still EU citizens at the moment so Maggie and I went to the Town Hall and signed the form yesterday. The same day I read that the UK had signed a bilateral agreement with Spain to maintain the voting rights of Spaniards in the UK and Brits in Spain.

So I'd like to thank Robin Walker and Marco Aguiriano for signing on the dotted line on behalf of their respective governments and so keeping me in the game.

No summer lawns to hiss

Both Maggie and I worked this Saturday morning so, by the time we got home and ate something, we considered the day a bit of a write off. As always, when we have nothing more exciting to do, I suggested the cinema. I wanted to see the French film El gran baño which I think is called Sink or Swim in English. The reviews I've seen, and particularly the cinema themed radio show I listen to, said it was a must see. I enjoyed it but of the five films I've seen, so far, in 2019 it was actually my least favourite. I much preferred (English titles) Vice and Life Itself and I probably preferred both Aquaman and the Memories of a Man in Pyjamas which is a cartoon! Vice we saw in English because the Yelmo cinema chain now has an original language showing of at least one film, and often several, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. It wouldn't have been much use going to the Tuesday showing of Le Grand Bain in its original language as my French only deals adequately with pens and aunts. The Spanish dubbed version was the one we'd left for today.

I've grown to quite like the radio show about the cinema. If they say a film is worth watching I've tended to enjoy the film. They were less than glowing in their report on Vice, the film about Dick Cheney. I thought it was a good film and I wondered if part of their problem with it might be that the version they would have seen wouldn't have had Christian Bale, Sam Rockwell or Steve Carell (or anyone else from the original cast) speaking. It was one of those films where the timing, the phrasing and the pronunciation of the specific word were all important to the plot. The radio critics would have heard dubbing actors trying to get the same meaning and intonation into a rewritten version of the screenplay. They heard different voices working to a different script written to maintain lip synch and Spanish meaning. So they were reviewing a film with different actors and a different script. We all know that Ingid Bergman didn't actually say "Play it again Sam," to Dooley Wilson in Casablanca but let's just pretend she did. For a Spanish audience, read Elsa Fábregas asking José María Caffarel to "Tócala otra vez, Sam." Immortal.

A couple of months ago we saw a really nice, but slight, film called A Family Recipe to use its translated Spanish title and with either Ramen Teh or Ramen Shop as its international title. It's a film from Singapore and it centred on food. Singaporeans eat noodles. Spanish dubbing artists seem to like overemphasising the slurping and sucking sounds associated with noodle eating. It was really noticeable and remarkably annoying.

Anyway, that wasn't the thing I meant to post about. I had a thought about our garden as I waited by the car, by the gate, for Maggie to lock up the house just before we set off for the cinema.

In our garden there are plenty of trees and shrubs and stuff, particularly around the edges, but the majority of the garden area is bare earth - bare, bare earth - soil. I have to be constant in my attempts to keep the weeds down but the low temperatures of the last few weeks have slowed down the growth and made my job easier. I get the same effect in high summer when the heat keeps the little treasures at bay. The lack of weeding left me time for pruning and one of my jobs yesterday was clearing some of the smaller twigs and what not left over from that process. While I was tidying I noticed the blossom coming out on the almond trees. I was pleased that my inept pruning seems not to have killed anything of note. As I waited my gaze wandered towards the trees with those first signs of blossom and it suddenly struck me how un-English the bare earth looked and yet how ordinary and everyday it is for us.

Corvera Airport

Years ago we very nearly bought a house in the Murcian town of Caravaca de la Cruz. It was a new flat and it looked nice. The last time I saw the building it looked decidedly scruffy. Our purchase was thwarted by a misspelled email address. The property had already been sold when we turned up in the agent's office.

One of the selling points of that flat was the new airport at Murcia. It was billed to be opening very soon and Caravaca would be only a short motorway journey away. I don't remember the year exactly but it was around 2002.

On Monday the last passenger flights used the airport at San Javier, near Cartagena, the one the airlines call Murcia. The day after the new Murcia airport, at Corvera, just over the Puerto de la Cadena from Murcia City, opened for business. The first flight was a Ryanair out of East Midlands.

We'd have had to wait quite a while for all the problems to be ironed out.

Beep Beep Lettuce

Our fridge went beep when the door was opened. It shouldn't. It still worked though. We could live with that. Then the handle came off in my hand. Not so good. A beeping handle-less fridge. I put it off. I tried the enquiry form on the repairer's website. They didn't answer. Nothing for it but a phone-call. I could procrastinate no more. It went alright really. The woman on the phone asked me for the model number. "RD-46," I began. "Sorry?" RD-46. "What?" I tried hard to roll the R. I was reduced to "R - like the capital of Italy, Roma". "Loma?" she went. No, Roberto, Robot, Real, Radio." "Ah, R," she said. D for Dinamarca was easier. The engineer came today. The conversation went well and the fridge is mute though I'm 110€ poorer.

The electrical goods in the kitchen are in open revolt. The kettle, bought eleven weeks ago, started to leak. I had the receipt. I took it back. "No, this isn't guaranteed," said the bloke in the shop. "It's the limescale that's done for it and improper use isn't guaranteed." I became very cross very quickly. "If you want me to ever buy anything, ever again, in this shop - I listed some of the several big things we've bought there - then you will take this back as part payment against a better make of kettle". He argued, I blustered. My Spanish held together remarkably well. I heard myself using a third conditional. I was impressed. We agreed the kettle was guaranteed and I came home with a shiny Bosch one.

As we drove across Castilla la Mancha I knew the sign said to watch out for otters crossing the road. Otter is not an everyday sort of word. I can watch a film in Spanish without too much trouble. I can read a novel in Spanish though I may miss the nuances. I can maintain a conversation - well sort of. Imagine if you can't. Imagine talking to an insurance company about the burst pipes in your house or opening a bank account or going to the doctor with a pain. What do you do when the instructions for the self service petrol pump make no sense to you and you need fuel and it's 2am. Having a conversation using Google Translate, with gestures, drawings, odd words and a lot of smiling is fine when you're on holiday but it's not so good if you need an O-ring for your pool pump and it won't help you decipher the letter from the bank.

I'm of a certain age. Lots of the Britons I know here are of a similar age. A friend, back in the UK, sent me a message minutes ago to say that someone I once worked with has cancer. We're getting to the time of life when death is not such an abstract idea. When chronic illness is probable as well as possible. Someone was talking to me about their concern that they may end up alone, lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by people they couldn't talk to and being subjected to processes they didn't understand. I know of lots of people who have decided that it's time to move from that rural house that looked so idyllic just a few years ago. Now the garden seems boundless. The drive in to town a real chore, and with failing sight and a gammy knee, a potential problem. Some have moved into Spanish towns, others have gone back to the UK.

I know that I write about language a lot but, as I look around me, I understand the British ghettoes, the low level of knowledge about the place we live, the effort that Britons make to find people to provide British television and doctors and plumbers who speak English. It wasn't just the fridge door that reminded me to write this same blog yet again. I am appalled at the lack of support for the boats cruising the Med looking to rescue refugees and migrants. Count the emergency vehicles for a derailed train and compare that to the lack of response to a boat load of people abandoned at sea. I am disgusted at the racist attitudes of far too many people. I heard some MP, on £77,000 a year plus expenses, asking why some refugees don't stop when they get to the first safe country. I wondered if he would have walked from Senegal to Morocco and then crossed the water in a boat from Toys“R”Us to get his job? He wouldn't get it anyway without speaking English.

The car forum

Manuela Carmena is the Mayor of Madrid. For most of her career she was a lawyer and then a judge but in 2015 she entered politics with the left leaning Ahora Madrid. She now leads the city council with the support of the Socialist party. I like Manuela and I think that lots of people, even those who disapprove of her politics, like or at least approve of her too. I wait to be corrected. Actually she broke her ankle a few days ago and she's still laid up so, all the best Manuela.

Each year in the Christmas run up the Madrid council has a bit of a junket for the press. This year one of the presenters was a comedian and media host David Broncano. The event became newsworthy because it ended up as a sort of improvised comedy double act between the two of them. I heard a bit of it. One of the comments from David was that the only script he had was from Forocoches. I had no idea what Forocoches was so I determined to find out.

The story goes that the founder of Forocoches, Alex Marín, bought a Renault Laguna in 2002 and couldn't find an Internet forum that talked about cars. So he decided to create one. He'd been making some money from a series of websites before then and this was just another. Except that it took off in a big way. The forum on car chat soon spread to other areas and it is now a hotbed of political incorrectness, countered with political correctness, with opinions of very colour and hue about anything and everything. It's also like that site which tried to get Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name to be the British Christmas number one or, and they nearly managed this, to get the Royal Navy to name its newest scientific research vessel after a Spanish admiral who defeated a British fleet.

I wasn't at all impressed when I first visited the forum. The site looks dead old fashioned and it is festooned with adverts and banners but that doesn't stop it being massively successful. It took me days to raise the enthusiasm go back for a second peek. I then realised that you needed to be invited to join the forum. You could also buy your way in with bitcoin and the like. There were lots of warnings about code scams. One journalist who'd used the forum to write an article about her online dating experiences paid 20€ for her invitation! Codes are also given away on some of the social media sites so I had a look there but the codes are all gobbled up within minutes of being published. I couldn't be bothered and with looking at the parts that anyone can read, without being a member, I realised that even if I could get in I'd probably not be able to understand what was going on. It is a sort of Internet version of one of those conversations that you see in a film between a bunch of Locs wearing rappers and gangstas dripping in gold and driving around in Cadillac Escalades or Maybach Exeleros. The forum is loaded with street talk, abbreviations, obscure social references. I couldn't even understand the invitations to codes on Twitter without paying attention..

But that wasn't the point. It was that Manuela knew what Forocoches was and the newspapers didn't feel that they needed to explain. The threads that she and Broncano talked about included "Manuela is going to make us walk", (She's introduced traffic and pollution reducing measures in Madrid and tightened up on electric scooters and the like), "Echenique likes Manuela", (Pablo Echenique is an Argentine-born Spanish physicist and left wing politician who rides around in a high tech wheelchair because of his spinal muscular atrophy) and "I spy Stalinism in Manuela", (Maybe because she's short or has webbed feet - it couldn't be because of her politics!)

So, yet another thing I didn't know about Spain despite all these years here.

Down on the coast

Tell someone that you live in Alicante and most people think coast, they think we live by the side of the sparkling Mediterranean. It may, in reality, be one of the most polluted stretches of water in the world, full of plastic, sewage, lead and agricultural chemicals to rival the dead patch in the Gulf of Mexico, but there's no denying that the Med can look lovely.

Actually we live inland, about 60 km from the coast. We also live up a hill so we are at about 600 metres which means, other climatic factors being equal, we are 5.8ºC cooler than at sea level. That difference is notable at this time of year. Very noticeable. As I type, Bohème like, my little hands are frozen.

So, one of the conversations between immigrant Britons is based on the major division between those who live on the coast and those who live inland. There are all sorts of perceptions about the Spanishness, or not, of the two locations. The probable truth is that the influence of immigrants is a product of population percentage. The 500 Britons in Pinoso make up 6 or 7% of the population so we make a significant difference to how the town looks and feels. In Abarán the 14 Britons pass unnoticed. I have no idea how many Britons live in Alicante City but even if it were a couple of thousand they would be under half a percent of the population lost amongst the tourists. There are other towns where the influence of Germans, Moroccans, Norwegians or whatever is pronounced. There are also perceptions of that influence which may or may not be true. When I think of Torrevieja, for instance, I think of Iceland and other English speaking shops but I remember that, for Spaniards in Santa Pola one of their initial comments in any conversation about the town would be the presence of the Russian Mafia.

Several people we know have chosen to move from Pinoso to the coast. Reasons vary from looking for more variety of food and entertainment to the weather and the ease of being able to do so many more things in English. A couple of pals moved from Pinoso to a spot between Torrevieja and San Miguel de Salinas a couple of months ago and we popped down to see them. They chose to downsize altogether and they moved onto a campsite but bought a sort of small wooden chalet. I have to say that I thought the site was remarkable. There is a huge variety of caravans, park homes and  motorhomes on numbered pitches and most of them have a variety of more or less permanent structures, awnings, sheds and adapted carports, to increase the living space. There is artificial grass and there are mountains of pot plants, sculptures and ornaments of every shape and size from wind chimes and mobiles to gnomes and fountains. The space was very organised and nicely landscaped with lots of greenery, with numbered pitches along streets, shower and toilet blocks on each street and a big communal pool. I'm told there is a restaurant and bar too. All of it with security and various systems for Wi-Fi, televisión etc. I saw vehicles with Belgian, British, Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, French, German and Spanish plates and I wasn't really looking. The nodding and "good afternoon" language was definitely English and the sun was shining.

I looked at the for sale sign on one of the plots - 8,950€ I think. Hmm? Warm and only 10 minutes to the beach.

There are snaps at the tail end of this December 2018 album

Sitting pretty

When I'm out, by myself, and I fancy a coffee, or a beer, I usually sit at the bar. That way I don't block up a table. It also saves the faff of the wait for whatever I've ordered to be delivered, asking to pay, waiting to pay and waiting for the change. Besides which there's usually something happening at the bar, something to watch or even to comment on. The bar is a public, not a private, space.

It's not comfy though and it's not good if you have lots of bags. Better then to use a table. If I'm going to sit at a table I usually order at the bar and then go and sit down.  I realise that's not the key principle of table service but it's both faster and more definite.

Maggie and I went down to Granada for Christmas. We were sitting at the bar in the hotel because there were no tables left. The bar stool was a bit rocky and my bottom overhung a lot. The innards of the stool were also palpably recognisable to my buttocks. A couple of youngsters were tormenting the automatic doors but it was a busy hotel anyway and the cold night air assaulted our position every few seconds. It was not a comfortable experience. I was reminded.

Years ago we were house hunting in Caravaca de la Cruz one February. I'd been a bit ill and I was hardly on top form. It was cold and damp outside and I remember wearing my overcoat and gloves as I perched on a wooden bar stool. The floor of the bar was as damp as the pavements outside and the street door was open. To all intents and purposes I was outside despite being inside. It was miserable.

Nowadays, in winter, most Spanish bars are reasonably well heated but there is not a lot of thought in the interior design. It's all a bit industrial. I can't remember the last time I sat on a sofa or even on a padded chair in a bar. Wood and plastic. Now I'm sure if I thought hard about it I could prove myself wrong but even when we visit places where there are traffic jams, and credit card payments are the norm, most bars are still pretty basic.

Fat chance

As usual we won nothing. Twitter was alive with complaints about the state broadcaster's presenters talking over the numbers and full of praise for the coverage on the commercial channel la Sexta. On the telly the little girl who called the winning number was joyfully sobbing her eyes out whilst her mother, in the stalls of the same theatre, grinned all over her face. In Almansa, in the hairdresser's where the owner had handed out fractions of the ticket to her regulars, they were celebrating, in the old people's home where nearly everyone had won a woman said she was going to go and find a boyfriend and all over Spain people popped the corks on sparkling wine, toasted their good luck and danced for the TV cameras.  The usual crop of Christmas Lottery stories.

The first event of the Spanish Christmas, el Gordo, the one that hands out lots and lots of money in relatively small packages all over Spain has come and gone.

I thought I couldn't do yet another blog about the lottery until I had a look back at the December posts. All I could find are the entries from 2007  and 2006. The draw does get a mention in other years but only as a partial entry amongst talk of mince pies and polvorones. It would have been a good thing to write about but it's just after eleven in the evening now. We went out to Murcia and, to be honest, I don't feel like writing a full entry from scratch.

The 2007 post though is still pretty accurate. The boys and girls from San Ildefonso school, who sing the numbers and prizes, have different uniforms and the top prize is now 400,000€ or 323,000€ (I think) after tax but the lottery hasn't changed that much in 11 years.

I was thinking about what I'd do with my winnings just before I got up this morning. Pretty basic stuff, a new motor, a bit of driving around Spain and probably back to Cartagena. Not a sausage though, as I said. I suppose I could buy a ticket for el Niño in January. Different but similar. Still enough for a new car.

Down the Social

This is a quickish update on the post The Headlong Dash - the one about having to claim the old age pension from the Spanish rather than the British authorities. It's even drier and dustier than usual as it's aimed at anyone trying to use this blog for information rather than for it's charming whimsy.

When I first started to think about the pension I did a bit of information gathering. One chap, on one of the expat forums said that I needed to take a copy of my "vida laboral," my work history, and my British National Insurance Number to a Spanish Social Security Office. Once there, through the wonders of information technology, the Spanish Office would have access to my UK history and everything would be sorted in a jiffy.

Using my Spanish digital signature, I booked an appointment at the Social Security Office (INSS) in Elda and applied online for my work history which was posted to me as hard copy. From my British Personal Tax Account I was able to get my UK pension start date and an official looking National Insurance number.

The Social Security Office was a haven of peace and tranquillity at 10am in the morning. As I tapped my appointment code into the machine by the entrance I noticed there were just two people working. Each had a customer. Otherwise there was me and the security guard in view. I clutched my deli counter type number and watched the screen. I only waited a few minutes. The man who interviewed me was wearing a snood.

I told him I was coming up on 65 and that my UK pension was due a few months after that. Once we'd established who I was and that I'd worked in Spain as well as the UK he turned to his computer. He didn't need my Spanish work history as he had it on his screen. He confirmed that I would get a pension paid proportionately by each government - 30 plus full years in the UK and  a bit over 6 full years in Spain so the ratio would be one to five or thereabouts but paid through the Spanish system. He seemed to suggest that I'd get the full pension.

Now that he was reasonably sure I was in the right place at the right time he gave me a long, long form to fill in and sent me off to a table in the foyer to do it. Most of the form was about my dependents, other allowances that I may want to claim, about my partners income (but, as we are living o'er brush, that doesn't count!), how much money I had stashed away in offshore accounts and the like. I'm a simple man with a simple lifestyle so all I really had to give were name and address type information, full bank account details (down to things like BIC and IBAN codes) and a detailed work history. Even then it took me about forty minutes to complete the form, maybe longer. Like all official forms I wasn't sure what it all meant and some of my answers were guesswork - who remembers how many months they were unemployed forty plus years ago? There were some technical words that were a bit tricky to translate on the form too but not many. Just an aside. Spanish funcionarios, local government workers and civil servants, are notorious for having two hour long breakfast breaks. The chap who was interviewing me put on his coat and went out while I was wrestling with the form; fifteen to twenty minutes later he was back. Just enough time for a quick coffee.

The form completed there was a short wait before I got back to the original desk. Generally I just sat there while my man copied the information from my hand written form onto his computer. I told him some of it was guesswork but he said that was fine. After quite a lot of tap tap tapping he printed out a copy of what I'd completed and told me that was it. If anyone needs anything they'll get in touch he said but he added that it all looked pretty straightforward. He also confirmed that, having worked in Spain, my healthcare entitlement was good to the day I die without any reference to my UK history.

Retirement date 30th April 2019.

Apparently Bob Geldof never said "Give us your f***ing money!"

My mum says that the adverts on the telly, the ones where dogs are tied to lamp posts on roundabouts and left to die and suchlike really upset her.

I don't see those sorts of adverts on the main commercial channels here. They may be on but, if they are, they keep them away from prime time. I do see the ads from time to time on the lesser watched channels - the ones that show endless reruns of CSI and Elementary, Mexican soaps or that one which follows a giant road train as it trundles across Australia. I suspect that the TV chains aren't that keen on replacing the glossy bodies of lucrative perfume adverts with others that shows real people in distress or it could be a simple price thing. Either way the charity ads turn up on the channels with less audience.

I have a lot of time for the doctors of Médicos Sin Fronteras going head to head with the Ebola in the Congo, for Open Arms plucking people from toy boats adrift in the Mediterranean and for the Red Cross turning up with blankets and food wherever people are cold and hungry. But there are only so many times I feel able to say yes to the people in the street who want you to sign up with a direct debit to support their charity. So those adverts on the telly allow me an easy way to salve my conscience with the occasional tiny donation - send a text message with the word MÉDICO to 28033 and donate 1.20€ to help provide vaccine in some lost and forsaken hellhole - says the ad - and I think I should.

When I changed my mobile phone package a little while ago the text message for a donation thing stopped working. I talked to my phone provider and they said they would fix it. The next time I tried it it didn't work again. This time the conversation with my provider was a little more tense. It's a premium number, we block it for your safety. How dare you presume to take decisions for me. We'll unblock it. Damn right you will.

I'm not that generous though, or maybe I don't watch the Divinity channel very often. I saw an ad the other day and texted ALIMENTO to the number. Haití, Syria, Philippines, Thailand? - I forget. It bounced back. I went back to the phone provider the next day, in person, in their office. Sorry, SMS is such an old technology that we don't have much control over it here and the people who provide the service won't allow us to unblock 28033 because it's a threat to their security. It may or may not be true but it seems a shame that such a simple way of assuaging my guilt is blocked to me.

Twitching

I have pals who are very knowledgeable about birds. Those same people are likely to know about plants and trees too. If I know a few birds, a handful of trees and a couple of constellations, they can wax lyrical.

I've wondered about this in the past but it was a conversation about robins that reminded me. I was talking to a couple of students about Christmas cards. Cards are not a standard thing here. I mentioned that there were robins on Christmas cards. I translated robins to petirrojos. Nothing, not a glimmer. You know, like mirlos, gorriones, tordos, alondras, lavanderas. I was just digging a bigger hole; blackbirds, sparrows, thrushes, larks and wagtails were nothing to them. They just presumed my Spanish was as crap as it is. And these were a couple of professional, well travelled students who live in a small town surrounded by countryside.

I think that it's true to say that most Britons can recognise a big handful of birds. We know that we can mitigate the bad luck of seeing a single magpie with a friendly greeting. We know that those dusk time clouds of birds that settle on city centre buildings are starlings. I have no idea why but most of us can tell a crow from a kestrel. Sparrows, wrens, geese, gulls, cormorants, swallows and jays are known to us. This doesn't seem to be a city versus country thing. Country folk might better know which finch is which and whether it's a common or arctic tern but even if city dwellers are a bit unsure about the differences between swallows, swifts and martins they know that it's not a wagtail. And  even if we don't know the birds we know the names. If somebody were to tell us that's a such and such kite as against a such and such harrier we'd believe them because we know that harriers and kites are birds.

Now, obviously, some Spaniards know birds just as well as the most clued up of Britons. They know the difference between a bullinch and a chaffinch between a goldfinch and a greenfinch or between a sparrowhawk and a hen harrier but, for the majority of the Spaniards that I have ever spoken to about this, hunters apart, birds fall into three classes.

There are birds that float - these are ducks, patos. Even swans can be ducks. Then there are little birds. Sparrow sized birds. Theses are pajaritos which has no better translation than little birds. Finally there are pajaros; birds. and that includes everything that isn't a duck or a little bird.

Nice and simple at least.

Suavina

The other week I was driving around, enjoying the sun, when I heard an interview on the radio. The interviewee was called Vicente Calduch and he was talking about Suavina, a lip balm.

Back in 1880, in the town of Vila-real in Castellón, the local pharmacist, Vicente's great great grandad or maybe it was great great great grandad, spookily also called Vicente Calduch, created an ointment. He called it Ungüent de Vila-real. His target market were the local citrus farmers who got cracked and chapped lips as they worked on their crops.

That first Vicente had four sons, all of them became pharmacists and all of them sold the lip balm. One of them settled in Castellón and, in 1916 he opened a small laboratory to manufacture the ointment and gave it the more catchy name of Dermo-Suavina.

Laboratorios Calduch still make the balm. The formula is unchanged from the original but the packaging changed from wood to metal in 1940 and then from metal to plastic in 1965.

The packaging looks pretty retro. The little plastic tub is inside a small box and the typeface on both is sweet. I know that because I was in a chemist the other day and I suddenly remembered the story. I asked if they sold Suavina; they did. Very traditional, very vintage said the person serving me. And quite an interesting way to spend 2.20€.

And all things nice

I think, in my youth, I was misled about treacle and cocoa. Treacle, in a Heinz treacle pudding, isn't the same treacle as the bonfire night Parkin. Cocoa, rather than drinking chocolate, is the pipe and slippers staple that goes with the "You've been a long way away, thank you for coming back to me," of Brief Encounter, rather than the stuff I drank from the machine at Halifax Baths. This came to mind as Maggie and I sipped on a hot chocolate at the Christmas light turning on ceremony in Pinoso the other day.

Hot chocolate, the sort that is made either with proper cocoa powder or, more usually here in Spain, by dissolving low grade chocolate in hot milk or a hot water and milk mix, is thick enough to stand a spoon in and usually sweet enough to dissolve teeth on contact. In these here parts the chocolate is usually served with a sweet bread, called toña. Toña tastes like the doughy part of the French buns sold in the Yorkshire of my youth but Maggie seems to think it's more like the iced buns of Liverpool. Iced buns and French buns sound substantially similar to me. Chocolate y toña is served at lots of events. There is sometimes a pretence that it's for the children but the people at the front of the queue, with the sharpest elbows, are the grandpas and grandmas rather than their generationally removed descendants.

I wondered if there was a blog here. About the local food. Not the impressive stuff, not the main courses, like gazpacho, the rabbit stew loaded with a naan bread like pancake, or the local paella made with rice, rabbit and snails or even the made from nothing gachasmigas. I set about Google and came up with an insurmountable problem. Put something like coca amb oli into the search and Google finds, at least for the first 50 pages, things which are almost exclusively Catalan in origin. That's because Valenciano and Catalan are, linguistically, related.

My cooking skills are limited but they far exceed my skill in telling what I am eating. If I had to do that MasterChef tasting thing and to say what was in the food I'd just tasted I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between beef and pork never mind the flummoxing subtleties of herbs and spices. So, just because I've eaten various cocas, doesn't mean I tell you much about them. Maggie describes coca amb oli as fat pie (I think it's a flat bread made with lots of olive oil) but I always think of cocas as being the local equivalent of pizzas, something bready with a topping usually including tomatoes, peppers or aubergines and, often, something fishy. I could well be wrong though.

I thought about it more. There are rollitos, doughnut shaped hard biscuits often flavoured with orange or wine or anis  a sort of pernod or ouzo type drink. I think rollitos have a lot of lard, a lot of olive oil and a lot of flour in them. I like them. Maggie says they are boring but she thinks digestive biscuits are boring too so she's not the best judge. I'm pretty sure they are typically Pinoso though.

Then I remembered perusas. Perusas are what you get at the end of the meal in Pinoso when you have just eaten something traditional like rice. They usually come along with some of the local sweet wine called mistela. Just like the rollitos I like perusas and Maggie doesn't but we both describe them as dust cakes to visitors. They literally melt away once you've bitten into them. Google had no trouble with perusas. The first few search pages had the word Pinoso in the heading. The ingredients are similar, flour, sugar, oil, lots of eggs, anis and icing sugar to dust them off.

So, in the end, I decided there wasn't enough hard information for me to do a blog on the bits and pieces of the local cuisine.

Fiestas de la Virgen in Yecla

You may have seen my snaps of blokes in bicorne hats shooting off arquebuses (old fashioned musket type rifles) in the streets of Yecla. If you haven't, and you want to, there is a tab at the top of this page for my photo albums. The one you want is December 2018. You may wonder why.

Well, basically, in 1642 during The War of Cataluña 61 soldiers from Yecla, under the command of a Captain Soriano Zaplana, went off to fight in line with some treaty signed with a Catalan noble. The Yeclanos were in Cataluña for six months but they were never called on to fight. They all got back to Yecla safe and sound. They were well pleased so they went up to the Castle in Yecla, did a lot of praying and suchlike and then took a picture of Our Lady of the Incarnation, known as the Virgin of the Castle, down  to the town where she stayed in a church for a few days so that people could do even more praying and genuflecting. As the soldiers carried the picture down the hill to the town they shot off their guns Hezbollah or Hamas style. That was the start of the tradition. The Virgin in procession with lots of men shooting off guns. That's what you can still see today.

The celebrations were a bit of a movable feast at first but in 1691 a group called the Brotherhood of the Immaculate Conception was formed and, as a result, the town adopted that particular version of the Virgin Mary as their patron saint. The brotherhood commissioned a statue and when she was finished, in 1695, she replaced the original picture, from the castle, in the processions.

There was a bit of a blip in the celebrations in the late 1700s because of a fifteen year nationwide ban on the use of gunpowder. The Yeclanos kept asking for their fietas to be exempt and in 1786, Carlos III granted that concession. The guns, silenced for 15 years, took to the streets of Yecla again. The regulations for the revitalised fiestas, written in that year, remained in use right through to 1986. I presume that the style of the suits worn by the soldiers date from that time too.

There was another blip in 1936 when the Republicans set fire to lots of churches and burned lots of religious statues amongst them the 1695 Virgin. The one that gets an outing nowadays is a copy of the original. It was carved by Miguel Torregrosa in the 1950s and given a Papal blessing in 1954.

To be honest I'm not quite sure about all the details of the celebrations. It's a very male festival, and women are notable by their absence. Things like flag kissing and even flag waving are reasonably obvious but there are also children, referred to as pages, who have some part in the festival which I don't quite understand. The web in general and Wikipedia in particular has not helped. The key part though is that there are sixteen groups of soldiers (plus a couple on non aligned groups), each led by a Mayordomo, which dress up in those 18th Century clothes and process through the streets of Yecla shooting off their guns as they escort the Virgin from one place to another.

Should you ever decide to go you will need ear plugs. It is very, very loud.

Pale blue dot

Shortest day of the year, ages old festival. Rural Spain smells of wood smoke from the open fires and wood burners. Burning things is big here. Valencianos have a reputation for fireworks. The Fallas festivals in Valencia are about burning the old as the new life of Spring appears. There are bonfires at San Juan for the longest day of the year and bonfires in Santa Catalina just a couple of weeks ago, maybe full of symbolism, but also good for cooking sausage.

Back in the UK, when we lived there, one of our Christmas treats was to do a bit of a tour around those houses, beloved of the electricity generators, covered in myriad light bulbs. The light to chase away the darkness. I'm not sure how that plays any more. LEDs mean less power but the UK seems to be quite puritan, quite serious, from the odd titbits I hear. There's probably something bad about lighting up your house. If  the principal talking point of a 1977 video of John Noakes climbing up Nelson's Column is the scant regard for Health and Safety then it's probably basically wrong to bedeck your house with lights.

Here in Pinoso they turned on the town's Christmas lights on Thursday, on Constitution Day. The nativity scene was opened up too and there was singing opposite the church. We got cake and hot chocolate down where they set off the fireworks near the municipal tree - though of course it's not a tree it's one of those soulless traffic cone LED things. Good lights though and the weather has been lovely so the turnout was good.

Time to get cracking on joining in. We've had a star - guiding the three wise men, the magic kings - to the West on the front of the house for years now with a long sparkling tail. This year I've added another rope light, a curtain of twinkling LEDs and a light up reindeer on the garage roof. Not much by some standards but it took me ages to drill all those new holes for all those new hooks.

And this year we have company too. Generally Spaniards aren't big on lights in their homes. The countryside is not peppered with decorated homes. Our next door neighbour never bothers but there are new Brits a couple of doors up and they have strung some lights along the front of their roofline. Our homes shine, as beacons of foreignness, into the night sky warding off the evil spirits of the approaching winter solstice.

Number two of two

Chinese buffets are an example. The first time you go to one it's all a bit confusing. The second time, less so, and by the third time you actually get what you want and in the order you want it. I've heard that crows learn quickly but I think we humans are faster.

I've been helping a friend in his meetings with the medical staff at the hospital. If you've read this blog before you will know that I mumble and groan about my Spanish speaking ability all the time. I do speak Spanish though. I gurgle and trip over words, my Yorkshire accent becomes more pronounced and I abandon any clever constructions I may think I know, especially during the first few words, but I usually muddle through.

Hospitals are much less easy to understand than Chinese buffets but, crow like, I suspect we'll soon pick it up. Spanish hospitals speak Spanish which adds a layer of difficulty for non Spanish speakers. Not only do you not know which door to wait outside or knock on but it's not so easy, Blanche DuBois like, to rely on the the kindness of strangers. That's why I've been involved. The first time my friend, his wife and I traipse, en masse, into a new to us doctor's office the doctor asks if I'm the translator. I usually say that I'm a pal who speaks a little Spanish. That generally suffices though it possibly undersells my abilities. Most of we old Britons don't handle Spanish particularly well. When we say "A little" to the question "Do you speak Spanish?" some Britons actually mean they have no more than hello, goodbye, I'd like a pint of lager please and my postillion has been struck by lightning. Their economy with the truth can make my truth sound like an untruth.

I suspect that uncertainty about my abilities may be why one doctor gave us a bit of a drubbing. Her argument was that she needed a translator who could convey the nuances of what she was saying, someone who knew the hospital procedures and, basically, someone more clued up than me. She didn't say that last thing but I understood it anyway. I tend to agree with her. If I can't say dexamethasone and it's a word I need to know then it's not so good. There is also something in my personality that makes me unhappy about talking to strangers and I suggested to my pals that I may be a bad choice as a go between. I told them how, before Google Maps, I would buy a street plan rather than ask someone for directions. My friends though have decided that they prefer dealing with someone they know over someone more technically competent.

They were in the hospital the other day without me. They were working on the assumption that they were there for a procedure. Patients are pretty passive during lots of procedures from a CAT scan to a blood pressure check. Nobody needs to say much as they are strapped into an x-ray machine, they just need to go where directed. But the friends got scolded again. "What happens if there is some problem and you can't tell us about it?

When I keeled over last year and woke up in an ambulance I was able to talk to the paramedics, the next few days in hospital there were no real communication problems. I forget that for other Britons that isn't necessarily the case. The other day, on a forum, I directed a bloke who is having trouble with marketing phone calls to one of the "Robinson List" sites. It wasn't much use to him as it was in Spanish. I don't think that had even registered with me. Crap as I think my Spanish is it's perfectly useable for most situations and it's difficult to remember that for some people even the small things, like knowing what's in a can on a supermarket shelf, is a constant and repetitive daily problem.

Number one of two

I think it would be true to say that the majority of Britons who settle in Spain intend to learn Spanish. The general view seems to be that, after a year or so, we should be getting by followed by a general and constant improvement until we are fluent after maybe four or five years. A longish term project but with immediate gains. That's a vast generalisation. Some people never have any intention of learning Spanish. Others, particularly those who maintain regular and constant relationships with Spaniards through living, working or studying together, may expect to, and actually do, learn the language much faster.

There are as many opinions on learning Spanish amongst Britons living here as there are Britons. I often think that a chap who runs a famous English language learning organisation here in Spain has it right. He was talking about English but the idea holds good for Spanish. He maintains that most people learning English get to whatever level they want or need and then falter or stop. That expertise may be sufficient to get a beer or it may be enough to maintain a detailed conversation about the functioning of the House of Lords. It's a level that suits the individual. Job done, now to rebuild the outbuildings.

Most Britons find it hard to learn Spanish. The sounds are different, there are thousands of words and phrases to memorise, there are structures and formulas to grasp, copy and use and English keeps getting in the way. It's just one huge memory task. People blame their teachers, they maintain that they are too old to learn, they say they get by alright with a few words. As I said, as many opinions as there are Britons living here.

It's easy to see that Spaniards find English just as odd as Britons find Spanish. I'm reading a book at a moment and the character goes for a walk from one Battery Park at the bottom of Manhattan up through Harlem and across to the Bronx. He follows Fordham Road. Now Fordham Road has a certain sound Britons but either the Spanish author, the Spanish proof readers or the Spanish editors don't share that sensibility. Fordham Road is also spelled as Frodham Rd. (possible but wrong) and Fhordam Rd. (impossible in my opinion). The point is not the misspelling but that it seems possible or even correct to Spaniards and my guess is that most Spanish readers won't even notice the error. I'm often Christopher Jhon on documents and there's something similar with the Pinoso Christmas programme. A local theatre group is doing Oliver Tweest, I presumed this was a spoof on Oliver Twist but no, it's a simple typo.

How people choose to learn is as diverse as the methods. Some take classes to try to learn - some want native speakers, others look for people from their own country with a good grasp of the language. Some sign up for miracle courses while others use applications on their mobile phone, watch films, listen to songs and podcasts, there are those who make vocabulary lists and there are even some unreformed types who buy books with CDs in the back cover. Methods and tips are a regular topic of conversation amongst the immigrant British population here. Some of those things come at no extra cost, some, like classes, cost money. Obviously enough most of the same things could be said about Spaniards who want to learn English except that the ones here are not living in a foreign milieu. They're home.

Comings and goings

We were going to try out the new Indian restaurant in Pinoso yesterday lunchtime. Maggie works till three and getting lunch around that time in Spain is absolutely standard. Nonetheless, on a slow day in a small town it's just possible that the kitchen will close if a restaurant is short of custom. I put my head around the door, to check. I was greeted in English. Open till six he said. It turned out that we'd had a bit of a communication problem. In fact they opened at six, not closed, presumably for we early dining Britons.

I knew about the Taj Mahal from simply passing by. The other day though, when I was quizzing, as one does, a student about toppings on pizza, they told me that they preferred pizzas from el Punto to the ones from Riquelme. According to the student the shop was about 300 metres from where I work. I'd never heard of them, I'd never seen their soiled napkins dancing in the swirling leaves, never seen their pizza boxes abandoned on the floor. Their Facebook page was created in July 2016 which suggests I've had plenty of time to notice them. Their takeaway offer seems to be traditional Spanish food as well as burgers and pizzas. I made a short detour from work and, right enough, there they were. They don't open Thursday lunchtime though.

Indian and takeaway denied us then. I wondered about La Picaeta. We went in there a couple of weeks ago. They gave us a business card with a new name and a new address. I'd heard an advert on the local radio to say that the restaurant was under new management but I think their launch day was today which wasn't much good yesterday lunchtime.

Maggie came up with a cunning plan. The dining room at Mañan has been putting out a blackboard advertising their lunchtime set meal for months now. Despite our thirteen year residence in Pinoso we'd never been there before today. We finally righted that wrong. Perfectly acceptable; nothing fancy but good and obviously well established - salad, starter, barbecued meat, pudding, coffee and a drink for a massive 9€.

So we've still got the Indian and the takeaway and the new Picaeta to try whilst the old Picaeta management, according to their card, are now running, los Coves. Ages ago we went to a bar/restaurant with that name up in Santa Catalina so I presume it's the same place. We need to check. Actually talking about Santa Catalina, we were up there last Friday and we found a bar with live music that we didn't know about - we knew the bar but not about singer - we must go back. At least we did manage to get into Estem Ací - the name for the new restaurant being run by the Uruguayan twins who formerly ran Oasis - shortly after it opened back in October. And, the other day I hesitated outside the bar in Rodriguillo, one of the outlying villages of Pinoso. I last went there in about 2006, shortly after that it closed for a long time but I'd heard it had re-opened. The hissing of the coffee machine and the chatter of voices emanating from inside the bar bore that out as I dithered on the threshold.

We're not exactly stay at home types so it seems just remarkable to me that there can be so many restaurants or bars that we haven't spent money in. After all the town, nay village, of Pinoso has only just over seven and a half thousand people!

Just get the form, fill it in and get it notarised

I still look at various expat forums every now and then. On one of the forums, the administrators try to rouse the troops a little with something they consider to be potential conversation starters. One of the questions that's cropped up a couple of times is about cultural differences. I maintain, and I still maintain that the differences between Spain and the UK are minimal. I don't mean that the two countries are the same but the basic premises on which they run are very similar and lead to similar ways of doing things.

In Spain traffic is organised and regulated, doctors wait, stethoscope poised, in health centres, dustbin lorries come with monotonous frequency, I can take photos of more or less what I want, I don't have to join a particular political party to prosper, health and safety laws are strong, you are unlikely to be slaughtered in a gunfight, slavery and human trafficking are not tolerated, the state doesn't kill people, there are laws to protect animals and consumers, entering and leaving the country is a reasonably simple process, I, and more particularly women, can dress as we wish, my internet access is not controlled or censored, people are not persecuted for their ethnicity, corruption is punished, bribery is not endemic, people pay their taxes and a long etcetera. Now that doesn't mean that everything is fine but, without needing to look at a map or consult Google, we are not talking about the problems you might encounter in countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Myanmar, China, Nigeria, South Africa, The United States, Mauritania, Tibet, North Korea, Equatorial Guinea, Uzbekistan or Cuba.

I'm not saying that everything is hunky dory. Gitanos, gypsies (and I've never heard anyone suggest Romany People) get treated badly in tens of ways, there are racists here as there are everywhere, rich people find life much easier than poor people, transexuals get a rough time at school, children are abused by adults, the legal system seems to work better for the rich than the poor, dogs are abandoned in the streets and some donkeys, and sometimes trades unionists, get beaten with sticks. There are prostitutes controlled by evil pimps, there are laws which can be used to limit what I consider to be basic freedoms and builders will sit atop scaffolding dressed in shorts and flip flops and then suggest you pay in cash without the need for VAT. At times the process for getting planning permission or an insurance claim sorted out can seem interminable. I could go on.

I can't pretend that I don't notice the differences. But differences have a way of becoming normal. It's ages since we had to deal with the skein of bureaucracy that we had to deal with when we first got here. Residence documents, identity documents, registering with town halls, this and that piece of paper, new bank accounts, new insurance policies, cars to be bought, phone contracts to be sorted, new power suppliers to be compared, builders to be hired and a hundred more things, right down to recognising bleach in the supermarket, were a challenge at first. Those things came in an avalanche of activity. Nowadays they come along one at a time. It's just as much of a pain in the backside getting a new passport from the British as it is exchanging a driving licence with the Spanish. I'm helping somebody get a document we all call a residencia at the moment. The paperwork isn't particularly complicated but there is lots of detail that's a bit tricky. Just dealing with that one thing reminded me of that deluge of paper at the beginning. It's a miracle anyone survives it. It must be exactly the same for anyone heading for the UK from elsewhere.

Of course I actually keep a weather eye out for the differences because they give me to something to blog about. Visitors are good for reminding you just how many things have become ordinary that aren't that ordinary to a British sensibility. We have visitors at the moment. We popped out last night to see the statue of Santa Catalina get moved from one house to another during the fiesta in her honour, had a look at the mediaeval market and just strolled around. The people milling all over the place, the apparent disorganisation of it all, the actual idea of shifting a statue around escorted by a brass band, the unshaven priest, the mayor mixed up in the crowd, the number of police officers on hand, the odd looking buildings, children on the street quite late in the evening, not paying at a bar until you're about to go, bonfires set up in the middle of the road and complete strangers offering you glasses of wine or barbecued sausage were all just a bit different. And we were only out for a couple of hours.

Mind you it's not all whimsical drollness. I had to work this morning so Maggie has taken our guests off to a bodega and restaurant after. Whilst they've been away, I've been talking to a pal who appears to have been swindled over the sale of the kit to heat her pool. She's bumping into something else that is just as normal a part of everyday life in Spain. The difficulty of complaining when something does go wrong. Again I'm not so sure that's all that different from the UK but it can seem like a very uphill process when you are faced with the intransigence of a company, a company that doesn't answer your phone calls or return your emails, a company that speaks a different language and a company that knows its way around whatever legislation there is much better than you do.

One for the road?

I know it's perverse but I was pondering on the romanticism of the drunk the other day. Actually it was probably whilst I was in the HiperBer supermarket trying to decide whether to buy whisky or brandy. That pondering led me down Memory Lane - what was the name of that journalist? The one with the byline "so and so is unwell". The phrase appeared when there was no column because the man was too far gone to write. As I vainly struggled, synapses and neurons not doing what they should, that Mike Figgis film, the one with Elisabeth Shue and a Nicolas Cage bent on self destruction, came to mind. I liked the Cage character and I enjoyed the film. I occasionally wonder whether my own days will end in an alcoholic stupor.

That's where this post ground to a halt. I couldn't remember the name and I'd forgotten what the point of the post was going to be so I went to bed. When I awoke in the morning I was thinking Geoffrey. In fact it's Jeffrey, Google remembered, Jeffrey Bernard and it was the Spectator not the Evening Standard.

It's dead easy to drink too much in Spain. It's one of the stereotypes that exists about British  immigrants and Britons in Spain in general. Pint in hand and probably shouting. Not that Spaniards don't drink. Whenever I suggest to Spaniards that other Spaniards are pretty abstemious I often get reminded of botellones - when Spaniards gather together in a public place to socialise and drink alcohol. The participants are typically young people with a carrier bag laden with bottles and cartons full of booze, mixers and snacks. It didn't use to be at all unusual to see workers drinking a brandy or an anis alongside their coffee though, thinking about it, it's a while since I've seen that. What I've never seen is Spaniards drinking as though the stuff is going out of fashion.

The last litre bottle of brandy I bought was Terry, Spanish produced but perfectly palatable. It cost 8.69€ or about £7.70, J&B whisky was 11.65€ or about £10.32 though that was for the smaller 70cl bottle. Have a shot, un chupito, alongside your coffee and it will cost 1€ or about 88p for what would be a traditional double in a UK pub. I forget how much a 5 litre container of perfectly nice wine is from our local bodega but it's under 6€ - so the equivalent of a bit under 7 bottles of wine for not much over five of your British pounds.

Now imagine the situation. You are British. You're retired or you're not working. You are generally reasonably well off, comfortable cash wise. The weather is good, you can sit outside for a lot of the year. You're a little bit bored, not bored bored, but with plenty of time on your hands, you're a bit cut off from the world around you because you haven't quite mastered the local language and so what can you do with your time?

The headlong dash

In the olden days, when we British men reached 65 we could retire. Before I left the Sceptred Isle I checked with the pension people. Yes, I was OK, I'd paid enough into the system to be entitled to a full state pension when the time came. That's not true any more. Thank goodness for that Y chromosome though. Back in those same olden days women got their pensions at 60. As a man my first payment has only been pushed back a few months, not five years. Like the British scheme the Spanish pension system is creaking. Can you imagine the scenes at the government Christmas party when the health people are ostracised by the pension people? Are you the the idiots who are keeping all those old people alive?

I was reading the news last night and there was an article about pensions. It mentioned that the process of claiming is very long winded and it suddenly struck me that maybe I should be getting started. After all I've worked for most of the time that I've been here. I'm not sure what my entitlement is to a Spanish pension. I know that, as an EU citizen any pension earned in one country is added to any pension earned in another EU country. Now, exactly as in the UK, the Spanish Government is pushing up the retirement age. It was headline news  a few years back but if I ever knew the detail I've forgotten it. Fortunately Google knows everything. Since 2013 the date has been moving upwards, a month for a year. The start point was 65 so, this year it's got to 65 years and 6 months. Next year the move upwards will gain momentum and go up by two months a year until it will supposedly stabilise at 67. My pension year is 2019 with a birthday in January so I'll be able to claim a Spanish pension at 65 years and 8 months. I should get the British one at 65 years and 4 months.

To get a full Spanish pension you have to work 35 years and you have to do at least 15 years to get even a percentage of the pension. With a first, cursory, read of the pension information on the web I think that Spanish definition means the sum of my European Union working life. So I presume that I'll be well over the 35 years because I did nearly that in the UK and I've been here now for 14 years. It may be, of course, that as I don't have 15 years in Spain I'll get nothing here but I don't think that's how it works.

Whatever happens I presume my UK pension is relatively safe but it may not be. My Spanish work history may be the problem. I've never worked long hours and I've never had a decent salary here. On top of that most of the time my employers have fiddled the Social Security to reduce their payments. It's just possible that the aggregate of my British and Spanish pensions may be dragged down by my pathetic Spanish earnings. And, of course, there is always the uncertainty added in by Brexit.

To claim either or both pensions I, currently, have to go to the pension office in the country I last worked in and that's here, in Spain. So, even though the majority of my payments were made in the UK my pension will be paid in Spain through the Spanish system or at least that's what my very cursory late night reading, last night, suggests. I'm not quite sure how the mechanics of that will work, in the sense of who actually stumps up the cash but, to be honest, I don't really care so long as someone does. What I'll have to do is to read some stuff on the Internet so I have some clue about the theory of how it works and than I'll have to go and talk to some real people in an office to see how it actually works.

I'm having a bit of a trough Spanish language wise at the moment and the thought of ploughing through turgid government websites and dealing with lots of government offices does not exactly fill me with joy. There's money at stake though so, time to get reading I suppose.

Let justice be done

I don't usually know what your average Spaniard is talking about as they chat with the neighbours, keys in hand outside their house or have a drink after work in the bar. It's easy enough for me to ask real Spanish people real questions but asking for answers isn't the same as knowing what people talk about spontaneously. Of course the traditional media, newspapers, television, radio and the social media probably reflect what's going on in the street but not necessarily so.

There has been one constant in the news for months. Cataluña. Every morning as I do those things that you do in the morning in the bathroom listening to the radio and as I move to the kitchen for my breakfast tea and toast I hear the pundits sounding off about Cataluña. There are lots of other things in and on the news but Cataluña just keeps coming back and back. Maybe they should start to have a section for Cataluña similar to the sports slot or the stock market updates. I have no idea about Cataluña; it's a political quagmire which causes apparently intelligent people to behave like children. I watched a Netflix documentary called Two Catalonias (it  was in a number of languages but the subtitles that held it all together were in Castellano so I suppose that if you watched it in the UK the subs would be in English). Every time someone made a point pro or anti independence the next section would have someone making exactly the opposite point using the same facts or events. I have never seen a documentary like it. I've never heard a debate like it. What seems to be happening is that people choose their viewpoint and then select facts to support that opinion.

But for the past few days Cataluña hasn't got much of a look in. Back in mid October the Supreme Court ruled that a tax on mortgages, called the actos jurídicos documentados, a sort of stamp duty collected by the banks and passed on to the Regional Governments, should be paid by the banks and not by the people taking out the mortgage. The duty varies from region to region; for instance it's twice as high where we live as in Madrid. Looking for an illustrative figure it seems that in Alicante you would pay around  2,250€ on a 150,000€ mortgage. There were lots of arguments about the sums but the loss to the banks was reckoned to be about 5.5 billion euros and it didn't do their share prices any good at all.

The day after the court decision a senior judge provisionally halted the judgement from taking effect and two days after that the top judge in the Supreme Court decided to call all the Supreme Court judges together to decide what to do. In the meantime nobody wanted to sign off on their mortgage and everyone with a mortgage was looking forward to getting money back. The judges meeting, which lasted two days, finished a couple of days ago and their worships decided by 15 votes to 13 to continue the system where the person taking out the mortgage paid the duty and not the banks. The headlines were all along the lines "Banks 15 The People 13" or "The Banks win". The Social Media exploded with indignation and I didn't need to go anywhere other than the supermarket queue to know what the trending topic in the street is today.

A little more sex please, we're Spanish.

This morning Spanish radio was quoting from an article in the Times. The original impetus for the Times story came from a scientific paper in the Lancet which predicted that Spaniards, by 2040, will be the longest lived nation in the World, overtaking the Japanese. It's not much of a predicted difference - 85.8 years for the Spanish and 85.7 for the Japanese. If RNE 1 can pinch an idea from the Times. which pinched it from the Lancet, I don't see why I shouldn't join in by appropriating information from the freebie newspaper 20 minutos. The prediction for the UK is 83.3 years by the way.

The 20 minutos title was "They drink, they smoke; why do Spaniards live so long?" In the piece it says that more Spaniards than Brits smoke, 23% versus 16%, the alcohol intake is more or less the same and both nations sleep, on average, the same number of hours.

The Times suggested a few key differences. Apparently Spaniards walk more, not in a strenuous way but in the idea of using their feet to get somewhere. To the shops, to school or just the leg stretching evening stroll to greet friends and make sure that nothing has happened to the neighbourhood without them being aware.

The journalist also noted that despite longer working hours in Spain the Spaniards still tend to get in a midday nap if they can. I've never found any working Spaniards who get the siesta, except maybe in the summer holidays, but if the Times says it's true maybe it is.

Then, of course, there's the famous Mediterranean diet with lots of fruit, veg, olive oil and red wine. Well, again, if that's what the journalists say I suppose it must be true but, to be honest, I don't see much of that diet in restaurants or in the answers I get from my language students. On the other hand the British newspaper reports that Spaniards don't eat the ultra-processed foods that we Britons do and that I go along with 100%. Anytime I go to an "English" supermarket here in Spain I'm overcome by the number of things you can buy in packets. Compare the goods at the checkout in any "normal" Spanish supermarket and you will see the raw materials of food making rather than the finished product.

The last of the lifestyle differences was that Spaniards have more sex than Britons - 2.1 times a week instead of 1.7 times.

And one last thing, not really a lifestyle difference but flagged as relevant. Some researchers in Vermont did a study of the ten most spoken languages in the world looking for lexical differences. Apparently it's Spanish that has the highest number of happy, positive words but, as the research was done in the USA, it's likely that their language sample was as Mexican, Guatemalan, Peruvian and so on rather than just Spaniards.

One volunteer is worth ten pressed men

I'm working on Saturdays at the moment. It's ages since I worked weekends on a regular basis. If you don't know I supplement my pension with a few hours of English teaching each week. I don't much care for work of any sort, either paid or unpaid, but, taking that as a given, I find the face to face time of teaching and learning English with the students surprisingly enjoyable.

My Saturday morning group are a nice bunch. Eight young people, from teenagers to twenty somethings trying to get a B1 English qualification. B1 is what my sister, an eminently sensible person, would call intermediate level. It's not an easy qualification; the B1 indicator contains the idea of being confident in speaking, reading, writing and listening to English at a sort of familiar level - about things you know, concrete things, things you may be interested in and things you may encounter when faced with real English speakers in everyday situations. The exam strikes me as a reasonable test of those capabilities.

At the moment I have a couple of groups and a few individuals at this B1 level. I also have one group at the slightly more abstract, less predictable, B2 level. Anyone who is truly B2 level would have very little problem getting by in an all English language situation.

Whenever I start a new course I always ask the people why they want to learn English. Most don't. Amongst the youngsters, the teenagers, the most usual answer is that they're doing it because their family wants them to. In the University student and early on in their career group the most usual answer is that they need a qualification. I understand that. I know, for instance, that teachers need an English qualification to get ahead. I have no idea why. Fair enough if a teacher is going to specialise in English it's a good idea that they have at least a smattering of the language but I have no idea why a primary teacher or a secondary science or PE teacher needs English unless they are working in a bilingual school where one of the languages is English. I think it would be a hard world where astronomers needed a grade 5 in piano or clarinet to be let loose on their computers or where cooks needed a Yachtmaster Offshore qualification before being allowed to handle a skillet. But, then again, what do I know?

So the hunt for qualifications is not my preferred answer. Much better if someone tells me they want to learn English because they have an English boyfriend or girlfriend or because they have been inspired by the film performances of  Tilda Swinton. That person is much more likely to put in the sheer hard graft needed to speak better English than, say, an already employed nurse who needs a B2 to improve their promotion prospects.

I once did a course about the industrial archaeology of West Yorkshire. I've forgotten it all now but, for ages, I would remember some small detail from the classes as I drove past a lavish church on a barren Pennine hillside or a gabled house with tripartite windows. I joined the course because I hoped it would be interestings and I was receptive to the information because it was. I've also done a couple of food handling courses and a handful of first aid courses. They were well delivered by good teachers but I did them because I needed the qualification or, more accurately, because someone else required me to have that qualification. I don't remember the first thing about them. I am, on the other hand, eternally grateful to the YMCA training department for giving me the time and money to learn an extra, practical skill as part of my staff development programme. My typing may still be very two fingered but, without them, it would be even more hunt and peck!

Night glow

Sometime, at the beginning of last month, I fired up one of the butane gas heaters in the living room for the first time this season and, a couple of days ago, the pellet burner roared into life after a rest of  at least six months.

We're closing in on the time of year I really dislike in Spain. The time of year when you can't be sure that the washing on the line will dry, when it's colder inside than out. The time of the year when the water in the shower takes ages to run hot, when the bathroom mirror drips with condensation, when it's best to choose today's outfit the night before when the room is still heated. It's the time of year when I can't hear the telly for the roar of the pellet burner.

Since we turned the clocks back we've had a couple of nasty, cold, wet, windy days but winter hasn't really arrived in inland Alicante yet. The mounds of leaves in the garden still say autumnal but winter is very nearly here.

Over the years we've owned six of the butane gas heaters. We were down to three and one of them wasn't working as it should - the fibreglass type matting was shredded and the gas was burning incompletely and unevenly. I whizzed it in the bin and did a bit of research. Whether we should buy blue flame as against catalytic or radiant heaters; which manufacturers were to be trusted and which not. I settled on a radiant type with 4.2kw output from a firm in Murcia and I was pleased when it was available at two different prices in two local shops. I could support local businesses and still feel like a wise shopper without going online.

I set up the heater pretty quickly. I know about hot water to soften the rubber pipes to make connecting the pipes easier, I know about the "sell by date" on the tubing, I know about the different pressures on the regulators and I had all I needed in the garage. But the stupid thing wouldn't fire up. Next day back in the shop the man didn't really believe me but I'd taken a gas cylinder with me. He couldn't make it work either. They got me another for the next day. The new one works.

It was Maggie who turned on the pellet burner. It fired up OK and I went out to work. I expected a toasty living room when I got home. No though. Cool, cold, miserable in the living room with Maggie in a thick cardigan. The pellet burner had given up the ghost. I sorted it out the next day.

The pellets in the heater were the last we had, leftovers from last season. I was sent to buy more. We've had trouble with the quality of pellets over the years and we now get them from a shop about fifteen kilometres from Culebrón. When I got there the shop was obviously open but the door was locked. I've seen this before. It's not an ironmongers that is overwhelmed with customers and the owner is quick to pop out to their warehouse. I waited, and waited. Two other people waited with me for a while. Half an hour. I got the pellets though and yesterday the living room was bathed in that reassuring orangey light.