Blood, fuet and tears

What goes into a paella is a bit of a moot point. Valencian paella usually contains white rice, meat (usually chicken or rabbit) garrofó (a sort of bean), saffron and rosemary and, of course, olive oil. There are plenty of variations but most of them replace or add to the meat with, say, snails, seafood or fish and the beans with maybe artichokes or cauliflower. You may remember that, a couple of years ago, Jamie Oliver the British chef, suggested a paella made with onions, carrots, parsley, red pepper, tomato puree, chicken stock, frozen peas chicken thighs and chorizo. He received death threats from enraged Spaniards. They were appalled by the recipe in general but especially about the inclusion of chorizo. I suppose it is a bit like calling something made from quorn and onions in a soy  sauce gravy topped off with mashed yams a Shepherd's Pie. I doubt though that the British newspapers would be able to mine the rich seam of national outrage in defence of the Shepherd's Pie.

Unless I'm very much mistaken chorizo is now commonplace in the UK. So popular, so common, that the pronunciation is no longer the chorritso of a few years ago to something much closer to the Spanish - Choreetho. Chorizo is made by coarsely mincing pork meat, adding seasoning and paprika before pushing the mix into sausage skins which are hung to cure in a nice dry place. Apparently this type of curing without smoke and without salt and where the meat sort of gently rots down is called fermentation curing. Anyway, however it's made chorizo is plentiful in Spain. Any supermarket will have it in a variety of shapes and forms. Some is cheap and some isn't, some is spicy and some isn't, some is obviously produced in huge factories and delivered in articulated lorries and some is made carefully by someone who would be happy to do a radio interview about it.

Stick with me whilst I drift.

In choosing a book I generally work from reviews and lists published somewhere - "Our top ten picks for the beach this summer", "Fifteen new Spanish writers you should get to know" and so on. It is remarkable how many of these books seem to be set in Catalonia or to include Catalan themes. I read the latest Isabel Allende the other day. Nowadays she's a US citizen but I still think of her as Chilean. Her story, about Spanish Civil War refugees taken in by Chile, was full of Catalan words and characters. The book I've just finished was going to be about Catalonia because it was originally published in Catalan. The story is set amongst country folk in the High Pyrenees. There was lots of description in the book and I noticed that in amongst the myriad food references several places smelled of cheese and fuet.

Fuet is a thin, dry cured, solid, pork meat sausage flavoured with black pepper, garlic and, sometimes, aniseed. It has a white appearance, as though it has been sprinkled with flower, though the white is actually a fungus. I'd never particularly associated fuet with Catalonia though, when I thought about it, the name is obviously Catalan. So chorizo is a sausage and fuet is a sausage.

Spain has lots and lots of sausages. If I were to buy chorizo I know there are choices to be made. Any old pig or the little Iberian black jobs? Fed on commercial feed or raised free range on acorns? Basically the cheap stuff or the quality product? On the other hand I just buy fuet. In the same way as I would never associate hot dog sausages, Wieners, with quality meat I've always presumed that fuet was in the same sort of class, made from the the scrag ends. If I were to think about, and I never had till I read Irene Solà Saez's book, I would imagine fuet being produced in an enormous factory stacked with giant killing machines where all the workers wear hairnets and white wellies and smoke a quick ciggy at break time. The sort of place that, every now and then, is infiltrated by undercover journalists who film heartless workers laughing as they do something disgustingly barbaric to terrified blood spattered pigs standing in their own excrement. But, maybe not. If the Pyrenean houses named Matavaques and Can Prim smell of fuet and cheese there must be quality stuff to be had.

Practical research is called for.

Benicàssim

Spain is full of "pop" festivals. I think the biggest is now the Mad Cool Festival in Madrid but the one we were at over the weekend, the Festival Internacional de Benicàssim or FIB, certainly used to be the biggest. There are lots more - Primavera Sound, The Barcelona Beach Festival, Bilbao BBK Live, the Rototom Sunsplash Festival, Low Festival, Sonorama, Arenal Sound and many more.

We were last at Benicàssim in 2008. That time we were in a very small tent and we slept on stones. Although we still tell stories about seeing Enrique Morente, Calvin Harris, Leonard Cohen, Morrissey or La Casa Azul we decided that we would never do it again. At least we would never camp again. We were too old, too bone breaky. So now, with me drawing my pension, Maggie decided we would go back and we'd stay in a tent. She called it glamping. I didn't argue. I like festivals. I have to be honest that I much prefer the first bands on. I like them because everything is more comfortable - no moshing, the dope smoke comes in wisps rather than clouds, beer spilling and glass throwing is at a minimum, the bars are empty and the toilets are passable but, even better, the bands try really hard in the hope that they may become enormously rich and famous. There may be only be a few score people watching them but, maybe, one is an A&R scout. And, for the audience, there is always the possibility that as someone in that elite audience years later you will be able to say -"Ah, yes, we saw Bowie (or Beyonce, U2, Rihanna, Bob Marley, the Fugees, Elton John, Madonna etc.) in the back room of a boozer in Scunthorpe in 1965", changing the names, places and dates as appropriate.

We've looked at going to Sonorama, in Burgos, and BBK a couple of times but, by the time we look the hotels are already full. With sharp rocks to the forefront of our minds we've generally gone to just one day of a festival and chosen local events or ones where we have found somewhere more sybaritic to stay. The Low Festival has been a favourite and I used to enjoy SOS 4.8 till it disintegrated but we've also done much smaller festivals like EMDIV and The B side because they are local.

So, back in Benicàssim, near Castellón, about 250 kms from home. Maggie likened the glamping to life in a refugee camp. Living under canvas, cramped, very public with rubbish everywhere and an inadequate infrastructure. I think I'd prefer to be at the worst festival than, say, at Bidi Bidi in Northwestern Uganda but the comparison was solid. Obviously she didn't really mean it and I wouldn't want to trivialise the human suffering that refugee camps represent but I could see the parallels even if we had nothing but good weather, we were unencumbered with dependants and our washing machine was waiting for us back home. On the other hand it is true that, if you are used to an en suite bathroom and you need a toilet at 6am then having to slide onto the floor, pull on some shoes, unzip the front door of your tent, go ouch!ouch! with the sharp stones, weave between the disgusting detritus on the ground, say hello to the all night drinkers and walk hundreds of metres to get to the toilets that have had a more or less endless stream of backsides parked on them for 96 hours and which, despite the best efforts of a couple of cleaners, are less than spotless and come with a sort of toilet paper laden impromptu paddling pool on the floor, can feel like a bit of an effort. At least at 6am there is no twenty minute queue.

Showering was an even more public spectacle. Most, though not all, did it dressed in swimwear. There were plenty of showers, maybe a hundred, all fed by cold water but with a lot of abandoned shampoo bottles and toothpaste and fag packets floating in the gutters. Some of the showers dribbled onto the concrete floor constantly whilst others didn't work at all. I was impressed with the unerring accuracy of the one stream which always drenched my towel wherever I hung it.

I was talking to a Spaniard from Navarre, from Tudela. He was a hardened festival goer in his early 20s but he complained that he was finding it hard work. He grumbled about the distances between the tents and the campsite facilities, between the campsite and the festival site, about the distances on the festival site, about the poor beer and about the unremitting heat. It never got above 33ºC whilst we were there which is hardly hot for Spain. Bit of a moaning Minnie in my opinion but it certainly wasn't comfortable and the blisters on my feet are still making it difficult for me to walk after two days at home. Be that as it may we got to see a lot of bands and we met some very pleasant people. Oh, and there was beer too. Some of it, a certain quantity of it, interfered with my vision!

Most of the young people were as concerned about how to keep their phones functioning as anything else and proved infinitely resourceful.  I was equally impressed with the effort that so many put into sorting out their outfits for the evening. The effort that some of the young women, put into their hair and gluing on the facial rhinestones astonished me. My only preparation for the evening was to sniff my armpits before concluding that my t-shirt was good for another few hours.

Festivals suit my short attention span. With three or four stages on the go all with overlapping bands I can watch someone do three or four songs and then move on without feeling guilty. With some of the bigger acts it's much more likely that you will see the full set but not always. We wandered from The Kings of Leon to Jess Glynne for instance. Eclectic or what? It's difficult to say how many bands we saw, working on needing to hear three songs minimum to say that you saw a band, it was probably close on 30 which isn't bad at all. There were very few of the "usual" Spanish Indie bands, presumably because there are so many British Fibers, but the range was still pretty good. From the very neat George Ezra, to the surprisingly impressive Fatboy Slim or the very annoyed Action Bronson to Alien Tango where the guitarist flaunted his Murcian heritage by wearing the traditional baggy shorts or zaraguelles.

I'm really glad that Maggie forgot just how uncomfortable we were eleven years ago.

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Lineup: Kings Of Leon, Lana Del Rey, Fatboy Slim, Franz Ferdinand, George Ezra, Jess Glynne, The 1975, Vetusta Morla, Marina, Action Bronson, AJ Tracey, Alien Tango, Barny Fletcher, Belako, Bifannah, Black Lips, Blossoms, Cariño, Carolina Durante, Cassius, Cora Novoa, Cupido, DJ Seinfeld, Ezra Furman, Fjaak, Fontaines D.C., Gerry Cinnamon, Gorgon City, Gus Dapperton, Hot Dub Time Machine, Kodaline, Kokoshca, Krept X, Konan, La M.O.D.A., La Zowi,  Mueveloreina, Mavi Phoenix, Octavian, Or:La, Paigey Cakey, Peaness, Project Pablo, Sea Girls, Soleá Morente & Napoleón Solo Superorganism, The Big Moon, The Blinders, The Hunna,  Yellow Days, You Me At Six.

Putting two and two together

I was in the UK for a couple of days a little while ago. I noticed the car number plates. Actually I notice car number plates as a matter of course. No idea why but I do. I particularly noticed that Britons still have a liking for those personalised plates. I can understand that to a point. If you're called Simon and you have money to burn and you buy 51 MON then that's pretty good but, for the life of me, I couldn't work out why people had paid (presumably) good money for the strange letter number combinations. Why is LFC 24V in an auction with a buy now price of £1750 and a bid of £750?

Anyway, in Spain, you have no choice. You get the next number and letter combination in the sequence. You can't buy and sell number plates. Up to the year 2000 the plates used to indicate where the car was registered with one or two letters to identify the province. Not any more though; now it's just a sequence of three letters and four numbers.

I thought the sequence was AAA 0000 then AAA 0001 etc. till AAA 9999 when it would become ABA 0000 and so on. But I was mistaken. There are no vowels in Spanish number plates and, as soon as someone told me, I realised it was true. And the reason? Well a bit of prudishness maybe. Apparently the Dirección General de Tráfico (look at that you understand Spanish) isn't keen on words like ANO (anus) PIS and GAY (crikey you really understand lots of Spanish) on number plates but also they were against the idea of personalisation; so no EVA (Eva is the equivalent of the name Eve), or LUZ or TEO or POL (all normalish names) as well. There are a couple of other letters that don't get used for their potential confusion - Ñ and Q - and the combinations LL and CH because of their former linguistic use.

Oh, and whilst I'm on number plates I pointed out one of the blue plates with white numbers on the back of a car the other day to Maggie. They are used to identify taxis and the VTCs (Cars with a driver) like Cabify and Uber. I suppose they were introduced as an identifier for the restricted zones of cities, for bus lanes and the like but they also make it easier for taxi drivers and the police to spot the "illegal" taxis of the airport run.

And just how do you get to be extra virgin?

I find it vaguely amusing how the Italians seem to get there first. Here the tiny strong black coffee is called a solo but buy one in Teignmouth in Devon or Alberona in Foggia and it'll be an espresso. Expensive British coffees have Italian names. Another example is Spanish ham, the Jamón Serrano. Commonplace here but, when I want to describe it to visiting Britons, I find that I need to describe it as Parma ham so they know what I'm talking about. Spaniards by the way call the British floppy boiled ham York Ham - jamón York.

Spaniards are often particularly narked about oil. Oil in Spain means olive oil. The default is olive oil. If, for some strange reason, you want another type of oil then you have to be specific - corn oil, sesame oil etc. Even if the Mediterranean Diet is besieged on all sides by hamburgers, pizzas and kebabs the oil is still an essential part of the Spanish diet. Obviously enough it's easy to buy Spanish oil here but it's not difficult to buy Italian oil. What upsets Spaniards is that they believe, and it's true, that lots of the oil sold as Italian is actually produced in Spain. Spain produces about 45% of the World's olive oil and Italy about 20% but, again, Italian oil has a much better reputation than Spanish oil so the Italians can sell more than they produce. To meet demand the Italians buy olive oil from other places and bottle it up as Italian. I should say that the saffron producers of Novelda do much the same with product from Iran but I'm Spanish nowadays so we'll have none of that disloyalty.

We have an oil mill, an almazara, in our village, in Culebrón. From sometime in November through to as late as January lots of local producers, from Britons and Dutch residents with baskets of a few kilos of olive through to local farmers with trailer-loads of fruit, queue up to sell their olives to the mill. Watching the process it all looks very straightforward. Onto conveyors, through presses and into bottles. The oil from Culebrón isn't sold in nice bottles with nice labels. It's sold in big five litre plastic bottles with a very basic label. The last time I looked it wasn't even labelled as extra virgin (that's the one that's just cold pressed fruit) and I'm sure it would be if it were so there must be either second press or processed oil added. It is, though, a good product at a very reasonable price.

I haven't really noticed the price recently but, over the years, we've paid between 13€ and 20€ for five litres of Culebrón oil.  The price goes up or down each year dependant on the quality and abundance of the crop. What always amazes me when we pop over to the bodega to get a few bottles of wine is that other people are buying the oil in industrial quantities. I presume that some of it is for restaurants and the like but Spanish cooks do use a lot of oil. All you need to do is to watch any cookery programme or go to get a cheap meal (which will be dripping with the stuff) to see how.

There's a newer oil mill inside the Pinoso boundaries called Casa de la Arsenia out Caballusa way. Their marketing strategy is completely different to Culebron's. They do sell oil in mid sized two litre containers, either organic or not, at around 6€ or 7€ per litre but their marketing goes into the classy looking half litre heavy, opaque green glass bottles with gold lettering and a strange name. One variety uses the arbequina olive which has a very light flavour and the other uses picual which has a much more intense taste. The price on their website is 12.50€ for the half litre bottle. So five litres of that oil would cost 125€.

Last year we went on a wine and oil trail in Yecla. We had breakfast at an oil mill, a mid morning snack at one winery and a sweet course at a second bodega. Interesting and inventive sort of day. The oil mill, Deortegas, had several different oils most of them based on different olives but there were also some flavoured with, for instance, wild mushrooms. The usual thing when tasting oil is to dip bread into it but we talked to a couple of blokes who were tasting their oil directly from glasses. The bread changes the flavour they said. Spaniards take oil seriously.

And finally the hoe

Maggie told me the other day that she hasn't read my blog for ages. I may be putting words into her mouth but I think the suggestion was that I'd really run out of material. Being pragmatic I wondered if I could start again - talk about the differences in bar or restaurant etiquette or why Spaniards think we're odd drinking coffee with a sandwich. So I started to look back at the early blog entries.

I see that, in February 2006, I brought a hoe from the UK to Spain. I took the handle off and just brought the blade part back. I remember I was surprised I didn't get more grief about the hoe head in my bag. On that very trip a jar of marmalade in Maggie's bag was dealt with much more harshly. Being singularly unimaginative I was hard pressed to envisage the damage that a jar of marmalade, even Olde English thick cut, could do to a Boeing 737 but the security staff at the airport seemed to be well aware of the destructive potential of the orange preserve. On the other hand they did not pre-judge the innate violence in grubbing out weeds with a well honed hoe.

Our garden has a spectacular and never ending ability to grow weeds. Lots of other things grow too but weeds seem to grow much faster and stronger than the oleander or the figs. I brought the hoe head back because Dutch hoes are not on general sale in Spain. Spaniards use something called an azada, more like a trenching tool, to grub out the unwanted greenery. Basically, with an azada, you have to bend, strike and pull whilst, with a Dutch hoe, it's a much more upright stance and more push than hack. I find the hoe easier to use.

Next time spade sized forks. No, not really. It took me a while to locate one but you can buy garden forks here even if they're not common.

Livestock

Very early on we decided that rural postal delivery was a bit hit and miss so we rented a Post Office Box in town. That makes the letterbox fastened to the outside of our gate a bit redundant.

The other day the village mayoress sent a WhatsApp message to say that she'd left copies of the programme for our village fiesta in everyone's letterbox. Now, if we don't use the letterbox, the wasps do. Both Maggie and I have made the painful mistake of putting our hand inside only to have one of the black and yellow critters sting us. Not yesterday though. In full Balkans genocidal mode I dosed the letter box with fly spray before attempting to extract the programme. To my surprise a lizard zoomed out. Google says it's unlikely I did it any damage. Not so the unfortunate wasps that had built a little nest in there. As in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song  - Four Dead in Ohio - there were just four wasps at home. It was a very small nest. I suppose the rest were probably hanging around the swimming pools of the better heeled.

This morning, I'm coming out of the supermarket. A mother is loading up her children to the car parked next to mine. "Look, a grasshopper!," she says - actually she said it in Spanish but you get the drift. I stared in the general direction but saw no beast. We have tens of them, probably hundreds, in our garden anyway. We also have millions of, and I exaggerate not, ants in our garden. Bumper year for ants. Anyway, I'm driving home and, in the rear-view mirror, I notice there is a grasshopper sitting on the rear headrest.

Just to add that the legion of cats that are living with us, some of them temporarily, bring us lots of animal gifts. Usually in bloody bundles but, last night, Bea brought home a shrew which we managed to wrest from her grip and herd into a closed room where the cats forgot about it. Maggie eventually caught the tiny beast and released it into the corn stubble opposite.

Honestly I started writing about garden hoes

You'll remember we had a general election in April and regional and municipal elections at the end of May. The trend was that the socialists, the PSOE, did well, the far left, Podemos, did badly, the traditional right, PP, plummeted and the centrists, Ciudadanos or Cs, did well but not as well as they hoped. The new far right party, Vox, won a substantial number of seats but without the huge surge they were expecting.

The municipalities have now been sorted out with their councils constituted, the regional governments are nearly all done but the first attempt at forming the new national government won't start till July 22nd. Greased lightning it is not.

Spain, has generally, since the return to democracy, had a two party state. More accurately two big players plus a number of important regional movements and some smaller national parties. Recently the maths had changed. Deciding who might govern a city, a region or a country became some sort of "what if" arithmetic challenge.

Now I'm not up to keeping tabs on all of the regional and town hall discussions but the impression I get is that this sort of manoeuvring is going on all over Spain. The fragmentation of the vote has tended towards a version of political Sudoku that has allowed people to get into power simply by perming their seats in the most illogical way often with a contemptuous disregard for voter intention. You know the sort of thing. A party takes a thrashing, it loses half of its old seats but by banding together with some strange bedfellows it can cling on to power. The obvious "winners" have not been able to consolidate their moral victory with a clear majority of seats in the local council or regional parliament.

Our town borders on Murcia so we notice what happens there. Murcia is a good example of this political wheeler dealing. Since 1995 Murcia, the Region, has had a conservative government. In the recent elections the socialists got 17 seats in the regional assembly narrowly beating the conservatives with 16. The conservative PP had 22 last time. Podemos went down by four from 6 to 2, Ciudadanos went up from 4 to 6 and Vox came from nowhere with 4. Given your point of view you could decide to stress the move to the left (the PSOE won), to the centre (loss of seats for Podemos, more seats for Ciudadanos) or to the right (new seats for Vox, a still solid vote for the traditional PP right and an increased vote to the right leaning centrists of Ciudadanos). You can also choose to complain about the proportional representation system, Cs got 6 seats with 150,000 votes yet Vox only got 4 seats despite getting 143,000 votes. Then you start to look for alliances.

The majority to control the Murcian Regional Government is 23 and so the parties have been dealing. It looked as though the PP and Cs were going to form the government with Vox backing them at vote time. But there was a problem in other locations, away from Murcia, and Vox, suspecting that they were being diddled out of any power, suddenly decided not to support the PP. That meant the potential coalition in Murcia has fallen apart for today at least. Exactly the same is happening in Madrid.

Oh, and something else that I really don't understand is the part that Ciudadanos has been playing in this game. Being simplistic about this the Cs have usually been considered to be centrist. But, for some reason best known to themselves, Ciudadanos this time has decided to be right wing. They campaigned on the right and they have said that they will never do deals with the socialists. It's not a stance I understand. It seems to me, given that the vote is so fragmented, if they stuck to the centre they would be in the perfect place to deal. Without compromising their principles, without letting down their voters, they could ask both the left and the right if they'll give them the things they want, the things they promised their voters. Whichever side offers the best deal gets their support.

I'm sure I read something about that in Politics for Beginners, Chapter 1.

Oh, and honestly. I started to write about weeding by pushing rather than pulling but some strange force gripped my keyboard fingers.

Always too slow

I hate that old person thing. It's six in the morning; I'm wide awake, it's pretty obvious that I'm not going back to sleep and, eventually, I get up out of sheer boredom. Particularly with the better weather I'm nearly always up quite early though, if I were given the opportunity, and if my body didn't betray me, I'd stay in bed reasonably late. I don't know if you recall the old music hall song  which had a character called Burlington Bertie who rose at 10.30 to walk down the Strand, with his gloves in his hand? Bertie's routine just wouldn't mesh well with the traditionally ordered Spanish day.

I think everyone knows that Spain, historically, has a split day. That's changing and modern working hours in larger cities follow all sorts of models very similar to the rest of Europe. The traditional Spanish timetable though is still alive and well. Again there are variations but the split day involves four or five morning working hours through till lunch at 2pm and then an evening session through till eight or nine. So with Bertie's 10.30 start, and presuming that he has a shower and gets breakfast and what not, he probably won't be on the Strand till around one in the afternoon. Both the Courtauld Institute of Art and Somerset House are on the Strand. Easy for Bertie to pop in to but, if he, and they, were in Spain he'd probably have to make a choice. Both places would, almost certainly close at two, and they'd be throwing out from one forty five. Doing both in 45 minutes might be a tad rushed.

So, the weekend. If Maggie works on Saturday morning, as she does alternate weeks, then basically Saturday is lost. The morning is gone and lots of fairs, fiestas and things in general close down for lunch. Museums do too and they don't do the Saturday afternoon session because they work Sunday morning instead. If I want to go anywhere I could do it alone of course, as I could on every other day of the week, but that isn't my preferred model.

Same on Sunday. If we're not out of bed till 10 the day conspires against us. Any deviation from the task of getting out and moving - a cooked breakfast, a long Facebook session - and the morning is scuppered. The only way to do anything, to "enjoy yourself" is to be grimly determined to get up and get out.

Obviously there are lots of things that don't work to that timetable which we can get to and I'm quietly ignoring the way the Spanish adapt their timetable to the summer by starting lots of things quite late in the evening. Notwithstanding, it is very true that lots of events do require a planned commitment or they simply escape.

The Mark II RX Spade - S

I was talking to someone about older cars the other day. Cars used to come without carpets, without heaters, without synchromesh on first and, sometimes, with just three gears on a column change. The range for any given model was simple. Then the choice widened  - standard, deluxe, maybe a GT or whatever but they were still set packages with set prices. When I bought the Mini, ten plus years ago, the idea had changed. You chose an engine package and then added things at extravagant cost

I've been wondering about buying a car and, faced with fawning reviews from most Spanish websites, I resorted to tried and trusted British sources. When Autocar and What Car and Which magazine recommended a car it probably got added to my list. You'd think that the only difference between a Suzuki Vitara sold in the UK and the one sold in Spain would be which side to get into to get hold of the steering wheel. That wasn't the case though. I think that the British Suzuki Vitara 1.0 Boosterjet SZ-T and the Spanish Suzuki Vitara 1.0T GLE are, for instance, the same car. It doesn't help that several of them have very long names such as the Mazda MX3 2.0 Skyactiv-g Evolution Navi 2wd 89kw.

It's not just cars. Our old microwave was only half working. I'd been looking at Which online for cars so I thought "Why not use their microwave reviews?". Which rates the Russell Hobbs RHMDL801G. The model doesn't exist in Spain. Plenty of Russell Hobbs to be had but not the RHMDL801G. Fair enough, Russell Hobbs sounds a bit British which may explain the problem but Panasonic has an international sort of ring. Not if you want the NN-CT56JBBPQ though.

Obviously sometimes names are changed for good reason. The old Vauxhall Nova means something like "It's not working" or "It doesn't go" in Spanish. Not the best name for a car. The Mitsubishi Pajero needed a name change for the Spanish market too - Mitsubishi naming their car a wanker wasn't going to improve sales! Lynx deodorant, the one that used to have a remarkable effect on women is called Axe in Spain. No idea why. Strange though.

When the weather is fine

Summer began at six minutes to six last Friday. Just a few minutes later we arrived in Santa Pola on the Mediterranean coast. It was pure chance, we'd been nearby doing some shopping and we thought why not?

We didn't do much. We parked next to the beach, walked around the corner to an area that has been developed with bars, cafés and restaurants alongside the marina and had a drink. The sun was shining with that early evening hazy shine. Some people were wading in the water, others were swimming. The sea was sparkly. The expensive and not so expensive boats in the marina bobbed up and down and made those tinkling, ringing sounds that moored boats do. The bar was comfortable, modern looking with light filtering through blinds and awnings. It was a bit pricey with slim young servers and ice cold (alcohol free) beer. Say what you will about far off exotic lands but the Med takes some beating when it's on form. It was one of those moments.

A couple of days earlier I'd already been to the coast, showing a pal around my old stomping ground of Cartagena and, this weekend, we went to see friends near Altea. In fact, one way and another we've spent the whole weekend close to the beach. On the train back from Alicante to el Campello the night-time beach glittered with the life of small campfires raised by friendship groups to celebrate the summer festival of San Juan.

I've written before about the magic of the Mediterranean summer in Spain. It really is something. It's not just the sun, it's not just the brilliant blue skies and the pure white light. It's not the heat or even the ice cold beer but summer here is something really special. It has sounds, it has smells, it has a temperature and a way that the atmosphere behaves, how the air shimmers. It even has a dress code.

Summer engenders a behaviour, it fills the telly with adverts of people eating and drinking together but the truth is that you only need to pop to the coast to find that's a reality and not just some ad agency marketing tool.

Ninety days to the 23rd September when it all ends. Ninety days I hope to enjoy to the full.

Money for old rope

I've been a hostage to opticians for years. I have bad eyesight. When I was very young my mother and father insisted on pointing out sheep and suchlike. I would stare into the middle distance, puzzled. My parents thought I was well down on the learning spectrum until the problem was diagnosed when I went to school. Nearly 8 diopters in the worst eye said the optician on Monday.

Generally I wear contact lenses, old rigid style ones that are relatively cheap and reasonably durable. I still need specs though and my four year old ones are very scratched and the hinge is a bit wobbly so they need replacing.

I bought a lens hood for one of my Canon camera lenses last week. The one with Canon written on it cost 35€ which I thought was taking the mick. To be honest I was not that cock a hoop with 15€ price tag on unnamed version that I eventually bought.

Canon obviously charge for their name. Their RF 28-70mm F2L USM is a pretty good camera lens though even if it does cost 3,249€. For your money you get 19 elements packed in a sturdy barrel with all sorts of little motors built in as well as precision threads and what not. My arithmetic says that each element in that Canon lens, complete with their name on the barrel, costs 170€. The optician wants 240€ for each "mid range" lens. And 80€ for the plastic frame. 560€ for a pair of specs.

It's quite difficult to shop around amongst opticians. Spanish opticians aren't keen to give you their fitting information or prescription and even if they do the second optician always suggests that they can't trust the first's work. Obviously that changing lenses in that funny goggles thing and saying repeatedly - better? worse?, requires years of training.

No ice cubes for me

Sometimes visitors put Spain on the other side of the North South divide. The Third World side. Guests ask us if the water is safe to drink. On one, very embarrassing, occasion a house guest wanted to know the price of some towels on a market stall so we asked on her behalf. Using her fingers as euro markers our guest offered half the amount to the stall holder. The trader snorted and turned away. Maggie and I inspected the shine on our shoes.

There is a similar sort of appreciation of Spanish traffic law. Somebody who lived near us used to always drive the wrong way up a one way street to leave his habitual parking space. "Oh, it's Spain, everybody does it," he said. That's not true. Most Spaniards obey signs and the like in exactly the same way as most Britons do. He was applying his own prejudices to the situation. The other day I turned down a drink, an alcoholic drink, "No, I've had a couple and I'll have to drive in four or five hours so I'd better not". My travelling companion said something like "Well, they don't bother much here - do they?". The answer is yes; they bother a lot.

There are two sets of Spanish alcohol limits. One, a more lenient limit, applies to people like me, your normal everyday non professional driver. The other is for lorry, coach, or delivery van drivers and the like - professional drivers. The same, lower, limits are applied to people who have passed their driving test within the last twelve months.

Then there is another division. There's a lower limit that gets you fined 500€ and puts four points on your licence and a higher limit that costs you 1,000€ and six points. Exceed that higher limit and you're looking at bans, driver re-education, community service and even prison time. The level when it becomes an offence is 0.25 miligrammes per litre of breath (0.15 mg/l for professionals and novices), it becomes a more serious offence at 0.5 mg/l (0.3 mg/l) and it gets deadly serious at 0.6 mg/l. For comparison the English, Welsh and Northern Ireland limit is higher, at 0.35 mg/l and even in abstemious Scotland it's 0.22 mg/l. The Spanish drugs limit is much easier. Zero. Anything above zero and you have a serious problem.

I've been breathalysed here four or five times here. All of them routine checks, all of them negative. Sometimes the checks were no big surprise - driving away from a pop festival at four in the morning but the Wednesday afternoon stop of everyone going through the toll gate on the underused section of the AP7 near Torrevieja was a little unexpected. The one where I had to remove the ignition key with my left hand whilst a man pointed a pump action shotgun at me was not an alcohol check! Also negative.

Last year the Traffic Division of the Guardia Civil did more than 5 million alcohol or drug tests. About 1.3% gave alcohol positives or around 95,000 drivers. The alcohol tests are random. A control is set up and every red car, or every car with just one occupant, or every third car is stopped - or whatever protocol they use. The drugs tests are usually done when someone is pulled over, either randomly or because of some traffic offence, and the police suspect drugs use. In that case the results are pretty astonishing. At least 35% in the semi random checks and around 55% for those stopped after a traffic violation test positive - cannabis, cocaine and amphetamines are the drugs of choice and in that order of precedence.

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I was very unsure whether to add this section. The best and safest amount of alcohol for driving is absolutely none. It's not just about fines and rules. The problem with alcohol is that it makes the driver less able to control the vehicle. Alcohol makes the possibility that a badly driven car will kill someone much more likely.

For most people 0.25 miligrammes of alcohol in a litre of breath doesn't translate into anything meaningful. How sober, tiddly or well drunk is 0.25 mg/l? I did find an article which suggested that a tercio (a 33 cl bottle) of a common Spanish beer (5.5% alcohol) would put most men just over the limit and that it would take that same "average" man about two hours to metabolise the booze. The same bottle of beer would put the "average" woman well over the lower limit and possibly on to the more penalised 0.5 mg/l limit. In her case she'd need nearly three hours to metabolise that bottle of beer. A glass of wine (how big is a glass?) might just leave most men under the lower limit whilst women would probably be in breathalyser trouble. And whilst it would take that woman about two hours to clear the alcohol from her system a man would do the same in eighty minutes. However accurate those figures are they do tend to suggest that the limits are very low. Definitely best to stick to the DGT slogan "At the wheel, not a drop".

Rocking and Roving

I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Land Rovers. I have no idea why. I think it's forty three years since I first drove one and maybe twelve since I last did. I still notice them though. Terrible vehicles really. Noisy, thirsty, probably environmentally disastrous, clunky, with awful visibility, uncomfy seats and the way they tramp about at the back at the least provocation can be terrifying. That hasn't stopped me liking them.

Land Rovers stand out yet blend in. The one in the Rocketman film gets a spot in the trailer. The one in Four Weddings was just so right, so upper crust. Our local quarry has a fleet of them, David Attenborough uses them. There are several  pictures of the Queen, in a headscarf, in front of Land Rovers. I suspect there is no news story about a forest fire or an earthquake that doesn't feature a Land Rover doing its bit. Production stopped in 2016, after 67 years, so I suppose they will slowly cease to be so ubiquitous as any number of much more anodyne but sophisticated vehicles take their place.

This reminiscing was brought on by the simple fact of seeing an oldish Defender, probably from around 1998, parked in our local supermarket car park. It had an old style of Spanish number plate, retired in the year 2000, which tell you where the vehicle is from. J for Jaén, the Andalucian province full of olive trees in this case. That was a second thing. I've recently taken to playing a song over and over again called Andaluces de Jaén. The song is based on a poem written by Miguel Hernández who died in prison, he was on the losing side, after the end of the Spanish Civil War. He was from Orihuela which is just down the road from us. Obviously enough the poem/song is about the people, the Andaluces, from Jaén. Ostensibly about growing and collecting olives but I suspect it may have a somewhat deeper meaning than that!

The time I first realised that a battered Landy is nearly as axiomatic a sign of deep, deep, Spanish rurality as the small white van and bright blue overalls was in 2006, in Cazorla, also in the province of Jaén. We were sitting in a square in the town as Land Rover after Land Rover went by. They may, in fact, have been Santanas because, between 1958 and 1994, Land Rovers were built under licence in Spain. To be honest it's immaterial whether they were built in Solihull or Linares because they were instantly recognisable as Landies.

Looking at the prices, even for old and battered examples, it's unlikely I'll ever be able to buy one but if anyone has one and feels environmentally guilty you could always salve your guilt by gifting the motor to me.

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Andalusians from Jaén,
proud olive growers,
tell me in good conscience who,
who grew the olive trees?
Andalusians from Jaén,
Andalusians from Jaén.

Neither the Nothingness grow them
nor money, nor the lord,
but the silent ground,
work and sweat.

Together with pure water
and together with the planets:
all three gave beauty
to the twisted trunks,
Andalusians from Jaén.

Andalusians from Jaén,
proud olive growers,
tell me in good conscience who,
who grew the olive trees?
Andalusians from Jaén,
Andalusians from Jaén.

How many centuries of olives,
with captive feet and hands,
all day long, sun and moon,
weigh on your bones!

Jaén, stand up, brave,
on your moon stones,
don’t become a slave
with all your olive groves.
Andalusians from Jaén.

Andalusians from Jaén,
proud olive growers,
tell me in good conscience who,
who grew the olive trees?
Andalusians from Jaén,
Andalusians from Jaén.

Dolly Parton "It's a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I'd be a drag queen".

We'd wasted the Saturday. We'd tried the new pork pie shop but not much else. In the evening though we were spoiled for choice. There was a choir from Valencia singing Habaneras in the Municipal Gardens and then, an hour later, the selection of the Carnival Queens in the Town Hall Car Park. If we'd thought about it there was no need to rush. Spanish things generally start a bit late, unless you presume they will start late in which case they will start without you. This time though there really were no worries as the councillors listening to the Habaneras were an essential part of the Carnival Queen process. Mind you, somebody keeps a seat for them. Not so for we humble folk.

The car park had been turned into a spectacular setting for the Queens event. A fashion model type runway, a big stage with some giant centrepiece, a couple of big screen tellies and two very competent young women being Eurovision Song Contest style comperes. The stars of the evening were the contestants, the girls for Reina Infantil, the Junior Queen, and the young women for Carnival Queen.

The staging and stage management were equally spectacular. The frocks were very Hollywood, the crowd was appreciative and smiling was the order of the evening. It was intriguing watching the man at the mixing desk pressing his headphones hard to his  ears, presumably listening for the OK from lights and sound, before giving the nod to the handler at the start of the runway to let the participants walk. No real losers either. The ones who miss out on the title form the court and go to all the same events, they just don't get the title.

Amongst the complaints levelled against the current and recently victorious, PSOE, administration is one that it's good at fiestas and gardens and not good at the things that count like road repair and rubbish removal. I don't agree but I've heard it lots of times. Equally I've heard the explanation that fiesta spending has actually decreased during their time. I've never inspected the accounts closely but I think that's perfectly possible in that some events (a big concert with a big name Spanish star last year for instance) probably run at a profit, there are always low cost events and whilst there are some that look very flash they are often very participative and cheapish to mount.

As I remember it, before we got this Socialist administration, the opening speeches for the annual fiesta involved the Mayor, flanked by the Carnival Queens and the appropriate councillors, introducing the guest speaker, the Pregónera/o, who addressed the crowd from the balcony and then declared the fiestas open. It's an obvious way to do it. They do it more or less like that for Blackpool Illuminations. But, as soon as the socialists took over it all moved to ground level (I like to think it was a political gesture but it may have been simple logistics). There was a little dais but it was only so the key participants could be seen above the heads of the crowd. There was a big TV screen and the town's press people had made a short promotional video about the town and fiestas. The Carnival Queens and their Court were escorted into the square on the arms of local personalities through a corridor of past Carnival Queens and Fiesta Committee Members. There was lots of music, lots of fanfares and clapping and then it was back to the guest speaker to eventually do the bit they needed to do. The big difference was that it was participative. The event was conjured almost from fresh air with existing resources used to the full.

The do on Saturday followed basically that same pattern. True there was acres of staging and dancers and lots of lights but I suspect that a lot of the outlay was borne by the participants not by we ratepayers. Of course there's a downside to that. Just as any US Citizen can be President of the USA, as long as they can raise the finance I suppose any young woman can aspire to Carnival Queen provided they can afford the gala dresses and the traditional costumes. It can't be an inexpensive undertaking looking at those frocks. Cheaper than being President though - Hilary's campaign cost about $1,400,000,000 and Trump's about $957,600,000.

There are a bundle of photos in the June album

Bread

There used to be an advert with a lad pushing his bike to the top of a steep hill to deliver his Hovis bread. The tagline was "as good today as it's always been". The clear suggestion was of pedigree, that Hovis was real bread, proper bread, the sort of bread that our grandparents ate and that was good for you. Hovis always stressed that their bread was, "made with wheatgerm". I remember being taken aback when I heard that the word wheatgerm was maybe a bit of sleight of hand. It's true, a loaf with added wheatgerm is better, health-wise, than a loaf made from processed white flour but, apparently, Hovis is basically a processed flour bread spiced up with a bit of wheatgerm. The stuff you really want, for all that colon cleansing fibre, is wholemeal where nothing has been removed from the wholewheat grain.

For years, in Spain, I thought that bread sticks - the sort of bread that onion toting, beret wearing, stripy T-shirt clad Frenchmen, add flavour to under their armpits - were the typical Spanish bread. Actually, in any period piece on the telly, where the olden days is the theme, then the chunks of bread are hewn from a mound shaped rounded loaf. I've been told the Spanish sticks were copied from the French.

Of course there is sliced bread too, pan de molde, it usually comes in the shape we Brits recognise as a loaf, like Mother's Pride. Pan de molde is usually horrid, over-sweet, over processed. I'm sure someone likes it but I don't. The generic description seems to be Pan Bimbo, Bimbo being a trade name not related to Pamela Anderson's Baywatch character. Pan Bimbo is white, Spanish bread is white - well it used to be. Nowadays all sorts of bread is sold sliced in packets and it comes in all sorts of variations.

I'm not sure of the chronology, and I'm not going to spend time researching it because that's not the point of the piece. As I said, in general, Spanish bread is white. I'm sure that other types of bread have been around for ages and have been available from craft bakeries, but they were not, generally, available. Then, a few years ago all sorts of different breads started to appear in supermarkets and in franchised bakeries. At first it was just things like Pan Gallego and Pan Rústico - Galician bread and Country bread - but the range started to extend - ciabatta, rye bread, multi cereal etc. Odd outlets, like petrol stations, began to sell bread and the big difference was that this wasn't the age old story of a baker leaving some sticks with the local butcher or bodega - this was bread, baked on site, from frozen dough. I think that there was also quite extensive use of those baking bread flavoured scents. None of this was like the stuff my boyhood pal Fluff made when he was serving his bakery apprenticeship and getting up at 4am. None of it tasted like the still warm fadges I got from Arnetts's bakery in Hull at around 2am on a Saturday morning in my student days.

When the Consum and HiperBer moved premises in Pinoso, when Día got its face-lift, the bread sections in those supermarkets got much bigger. There are breads with seeds on them, there are regional breads like the Andalusian molletes and even the everyday bread got a face lift. Take your choice of a variety of formats - normal stick, family stick, mini stick - there are breads that say integral (wholemeal), masa madre (sourdough bread), pan de salvo (bran), pan de espelta (a trendy wheat variety), pan de cristal (I have no idea; it's bread that has nearly as much water, by weight, as flour), pan de aceite, as aceite means oil I suppose it's bread using olive oil rather than whatever they usually use, oh, and the old favourites Pan Gallego (crusty outside and big air holes, sourdough fermentation), Pan Rústico, also called Pan de Pueblo (thick crunchy crust, soft inside, long lasting). You get the idea - a variety.

Basically the whole bread selling thing in Spain has become confusing. Even though consumption of bread in Spain has dropped from 57 kilos per person per year in 1988 to 32 kilos in 2018 bread is still an absolutely essential part of any Spanish meal. There is now some really good bread available in taste, in style, in nutritional properties. There is also lots of stuff that purports to be traditional wood baked bread which is, instead, made with chemical yeasts, preservatives, saturated fats, processed flour and baked from frozen dough. The stuff that says home made, wholemeal bread is actually dyed with caramel and produced in articulated lorry sized quantities by robot mixing machines and conveyor belt ovens. So, from July this year we'll have new laws about labelling bread which will take over from the last set of rules drafted in 1984.

I'm going to use a fair bit of Spanish in this next section on the basis that anyone living in Spain and reading this post might use the information when they go shopping. It's also a bit technical, formal and probably a little bit tedious. So non Spanish dwellers please skip to the last para. It's not my fault, writing about new regulations is hardly the stuff of bodice rippers or doctor and nurse literature.

Some of the big things in the new regs are:

• Ordinary bread, pan común, the bread made from mixed flours with water laced with yeast has to be fresh, made that day. If the bread has not been made today it has to be clearly labelled that it is not today's bread. 
• Casero, home made, will have to mean that it is made by people on a human scale with a qualified master baker on hand. 
• Masa madre, sourdough, can only be made with flour, water and salt with the yeasts being naturally occurring in that mix. No more adding yoghurt or vinegar to speed up the sourdough process
• Fermentación lenta, slow fermentation, has to mean that. At least eight hours at temperatures around 4ºC for the dough.
• Wood baked, pan de leña, will also mean what it sounds like. Burn wood to heat the oven and it's good. Blow the scent of wood smoke into the mix and it's not.
• Brown bread, pan integral, which is still not particularly popular amongst the majority of Spaniards, means that from July wholemeal bread has to be made from whole grain and the grain has to be named. There is still a bit of a labelling get out in that if they use a mixture of processed and wholegrain flour they can label the bread as elaborado con harina integral, made with wholegrain flour, and specify the percentage (would you like to place a bet on the different sizes of typeface?). Instead of calling this integral it can also be called de grano entero, whole grain.
• Breads made with cereals like rye (centeno) or oats (avena) and a whole lot more, can only be labelled as such if they have the percentages of the cereal required by the new law. The percentage depends on the cereal. Multi cereal bread, pan multicereal, has to have a least three different cereals and have at least 10% of each of those cereals. 

There are other labelling requirements, for instance it can't just say vegetable oil on the side of the bag, it must say palm oil or sunflower oil or whatever. The salt content will also be reducing but that's on a sliding scale over time so that bread doesn't become too bland for consumers overnight. Oh, and they're reducing the VAT rate to 4% which may mean a few cents off the price.

Lets's hope it all works out and we get more and more yummy bread.

Think Walden Pond

Maggie often comes home and tells me about a house that she's shown or a new house on the books of the estate agency she works for. At the best I'm vaguely interested. The other way around I often start a conversation with "I'm reading this book about ....," and Maggie is just as responsive. So, if I can't tell her I'll tell you. Don't think of it as a book review though, think more of it as a bastardisation of the book alongside my own ramblings.

The book in question was written by a woman called María Sánchez. This is the sort of Spanish name I approve of. It's like one of the names in a Learn Spanish text book. There are plenty of Spanish names that are easy to say like Fernández or García but there seem to be many more which don't exactly trip off the Anglo tongue: Úrsula Corberó, Sandra Sabatés, Lidia Torrent or Isabel Díaz Ayuso for instance. Maria's book title is dead obvious too, at least in Spanish - Tierra de mujeres. It's not quite so easy to translate effectively into English, the idea behind the words isn't quite the same. Land of Women, Women's Land, Soil of Women etc. don't capture the multiple meanings about the ownership, or the place and number of women wedded to the earth, to the soil, to the land. It happens the other way round too. T.S. Eliot's "At the still point of the turning world." can be translated into Spanish as the point that doesn't move or the point that is quiet and peaceful but there is no single word to give the same double meaning as in English.

Anyway, back at the page face. The book is largely about demanding recognition for the significant role that women have always played on the land, in the countryside, as shepherds, herders, planters, collectors, labourers and the like alongside their role as homeworkers. One of her key arguments is that the men get the praise for the horny handed sons of toil role whilst the women are only recognised as the sweepers of floors, the laundresses of overalls and the bakers of bread. There is no mention of Jill Archer or Annie Sugden but, as the author is a vet, James Herriot's Christmas cake baking heroines get a mention.

I've talked about rural Spain in the past. Partly because we have a friend who is politically active about rural issues and lives in a very rustic bit of Teruel and also because of where we live. Pinoso, is hardly urban, Culebrón less so. Here agriculture is important and everyday but where there is other work too and we are close to major centres of population. Part of Maria's argument is that we are all very quick to accept a view, forged by city dwellers, that lots of Spain is empty, a nice place to go for the weekend to relax, a place where we (Spaniards in this case) all came from but where none of us (Spaniards again) would like to stay too long. A place full of country bumpkins, good with their hands maybe, people who know all the gossip about their neighbours as well as being able to name birds, plants and trees the people who live in a place where doors can be left unlocked and where neighbours pop in all the time leaving trays of fruit, veg. and fresh baked pastries but who have been left behind by the modern world. Plenty tractor drivers and very few JavaScript developers.

She suggests that view needs a reappraisal. That rural Spain needs services more than it needs poetic praise and bucolic representation. Spain, lots of Spain, doesn't have much population but that doesn't mean it's empty. Just because it's not built up, or full of people, doesn't mean that it's abandoned. Sometimes the farming is extensive rather than intensive. There are places where the combines and the logging trucks roam, where the monster tractors equipped with tree shakers and catcher nets roar but equally there are places where herds of goats belch and fart overseen by a solitary figure and his or her dog and where families stop for a bucolic lunch with their backs against the olive trees that they have spent all morning beating with sticks to collect the crop. One fills supermarket shelves with cheap and accessible product and the other produces the high value local cheese and specialist olives of more "select" outlets. Both are alive and well, both have their place.

There was lots more too, it was a short book, fewer than 200 pages, but it was interesting given our situation. I suppose less so to someone enjoying the 3am traffic jams in Madrid. Well, according to one of the possible candidates for Mayor of Madrid that's one of the things that Madrileños enjoy.

Confucius it ain't

In fact it was the English poet Lady Mary Montgomerie Currie who said "All things come to those who wait." In my case what came, after a wait of 12 years, was a branch of my bank in my home town.

You may wonder why that's a bonus. The root of the problem is that we still use a lot of cash in rural Spain. Spanish banks like to charge for services and you can avoid some of those by using your own bank. There's nearly always a maintenance fee unless you pay in over a certain amount each month and there can be charges for both paying in and for withdrawals.

I originally banked with the Caja Murcia, a savings bank, obviously enough, centred on Murcia. Murcia is pretty far to the right on the map of Spain and Ciudad Rodrigo is on the left, or if you prefer the technical term, the West, butting up against Portugal. I moved there in 2007. Not surprisingly there weren't a lot of Caja Murcia branches. The costs of taking money out of non Caja Murcia bank machines was mounting up so I opened an account with Banesto which was a national rather than regional set up. They had a branch in Ciudad Rodrigo and another in Pinoso. But the bank system in Spain was just about to teeter on the edge of total collapse. Banks and savings banks got bought and sold, merged and closed left right and centre. By the time I moved back home to Culebrón the Banesto had become the Santander and the branch in Pinoso had closed.

My nearest Santander was 15 kilometres from home which was, occasionally, a nuisance. Then, in June 2017, the Santander bought the Banco Popular. There was a branch of the Popular in Pinoso. Good I thought, only a matter of time. I should have known. No particular rush. This week the bank finally became the Santander. So, for the first time since 2007, I have a branch of my bank in my home town.

We want to go next

I was once a Geologist. The trick with geology is time. Imagine that if, every year, a stream were to cut a groove 1 millimetre in the ground. In two years the groove would be 2 mm deep and in 10 years it would be a centimetre deep. If the stream were to follow the same line for a million years the groove would be a kilometre deep. Just for my mum make it a sixteenth of an inch a year and the valley would be nearly a mile deep.

Now the earth is about four and a half billion years old. Just in case you're never sure what a billion is nowadays that would be 4,500,000,000 years. Obviously it's not possible but if our 1 mm a year stream flowed, non stop, in the same place, from the beginning, the groove would be 4,500 kilometres deep or about 500 times as deep as Mount Everest is high.

When I studied geology I found out about graptolites, brachiopods, lamellibranchs, belemnites and all sorts of other fossils large and small. I particularly approved of trilobites. I thought they looked cute. The first trilobites turned up some 520 million years ago and died out at the end of the Permian or about 250 million years. So the lifespan of all the different sorts of trilobites was 270,000,000 years.

There were a bunch of people before Homo Sapiens but the first Sapiens turned up in what is now Africa about 200,000 years ago. So trilobites lasted 1,350 times as long as people have existed so far. Stromatolites, by the way, make trilobites look like youngsters. They've been on Earth for 3,500,000,000 years and if you're not impressed by things you can't beat with a stick then jellyfish are around 500 million years old and elephant sharks are maybe 400 million years.

We've just had a couple of rounds of elections in Spain. The cambio de cromos, the dealing, has only just started in several areas. In Madrid the stupid internal wrangling of left wing politicians means that the conservative Partido Popular will probably get the leadership of the City Council. They can't do it alone though. In fact the PP governed Madrid, without break, from 1991 to 2015 and this time round they got their worst result ever. Nonetheless, with partners, they can govern. One of those partners is Vox, the fathead right wingers who have won their first representation at local, regional and national level this year. The outgoing mayor of Madrid is called Manuela Carmena. She actually polled the most votes in the elections but with all the permutations possible she can't pull together enough coalition votes to stay in office. Carmena put in place a scheme called Madrid Central. It's a programme to clean up the city environment. Bike lanes, pedestrianisation, not letting in the polluting vehicles etc. In the first month there was a 38% drop in Nitrogen Dioxide, 15% drop in Carbon Dioxide in Madrid with traffic flow down by 24%. And what does the potential new PP mayor say? - he will go back to less strict restrictions based on priority for residents and that he will concentrate on the problems that matter most to Madrileños such as clean streets and conservation. The Vox man said "starting tomorrow Madrid Central is over".

Those trilobites survived at least one mass extinction event, maybe two, before the one at the end of the Permian got them. There are various theories about the extinction from massive volcanic activity to a surge in microbe numbers but whatever it was it caused a destabilisation of the atmosphere and so the climate. Apparently after the Permian one it only took a couple of million years for the planet to bounce back though. To re-establish some sort of normality.

The general consensus is that there have been five big extinctions so far: late Devonian, 375 million years ago, 75% of species lost, end Permian, 251 million years ago, 96% of species lost, end Triassic, 200 million years ago, 80% of species lost, end Cretaceous, 66 million years ago, 76% of all species lost. I've heard that some plastics can take 1,000 years to decompose. As I said the trick with geology, the trick with the planet, is time. Currently humans, as a species, are a tiny blip in geological time. If fossil fuel type pollution started with the Industrial Revolution then people have been affecting the atmosphere for about 290 years or 0.145% of our time on Earth. It does seem a bit stupid though to purposely speed up the dash towards that next extinction event.

Home and away

There's a strangeness about being home and yet being a foreigner.

Last week I asked the lad who served me coffee how his birthday celebrations had gone. He'd told me his plans the last time I was in. I got the full story. Later, in the same bar and in the same session a different, and new to me, waiter asked me if I wanted another coffee. He asked in broken English - to him I was just another foreigner.

There were a lot of political meetings running up to the local elections. I went to one of them and the prospective, now elected, candidates were lined up against the wall in a show of solidarity at a political rally. A couple of them greeted me by name. We knew each other because I'd taught them a bit of English. I'd actually worked alongside another of them several years ago.

Alfredo, the barber, nods through the window - he cuts my hair and I didn't get his daughter through her B1 English exam. And so it goes on and on with example after example of knowing both Spanish and British people in Pinoso.

We've been here a while. If a road in town is sealed off, and they often are, I know how to skip around. If I need knicker elastic, tracing paper or knitting needles I know which shop to use - actually nowadays I'd probably go to the Chinese shop but I'm sure you take the point. There are new things to learn all the time. We're as local as local could be and yet we are still foreigners.

I walked past one of the three British run bars in town and there were a bunch of young (to me) people outside. They were talking estuary English. My father, who was so politically incorrect that I probably wouldn't speak to him nowadays, if he were still alive, used to describe people speaking languages other than English on the streets of England as jabbering. I wondered if he would think the same of our very noticeable presence on the streets of Pinoso?

We Britons are obvious here. Most Spanish people I meet presume I know next to nothing about Spain. I'm not surprised. From what I can see the majority of my compatriots have very little idea of the country around them. I don't mean in the sense of filling their car with fuel, buying bread, getting a drink or paying the electric bill. They are perfectly well able to get on with their lives but culturally, linguistically, geographically and historically they are clueless. It's a choice. I have never worried myself too much about football yet I know people whose very existence would be much meaner without the beautiful game. Lots of Britons here are much more "integrated" than me but there is another group who continually surprise me with how little they know of the place they have chosen to immigrate to. It's that choice though; they have chosen a sort of voluntary isolation.

He hasn't been on at me for a while but there used to be a Spanish bloke who read and commented on this blog. He blamed me for the hubris that lots of Europe lays at the door of we Britons but he also took me to task for my British perspective on things. That's true. I do. I must. Just in the same way as his viewpoint would be a Spanish one. Our backgrounds are coded in through years of experience. I remember, years ago, in Cuba. I forget where we were, Trinidad maybe or Cienfuegos. We were beginning to get the idea that everything in Cuba was in short supply even if you had dollars. "Do you have alcohol other than rum?," we asked. "Of course, for tourists we have everything," said the owner. I missed the irony. "Okey dokey, she'll have a red wine and I'll have a beer, please." The man came back and put down two rums - "Here's the beer and here's the wine," he said. It's often not a good idea to presume that you've got the measure of a place.

The Spanish health system, the medical system, traffic law, the voting system and the way that parliament runs are exactly similar to the UK. Well they are in broad-stroke yet they are completely different. The British first-past-the-post voting isn't the Spanish party list D'Hondt method of proportional representation. Actually even the mechanics of how you vote, crosses on paper and lists in envelopes is different. The effect is the same though and both produce democratically elected governments. Externally verified end of secondary schooling GCSEs are not the same as the internally marked ESO, the certificate recognised as the successful completion of obligatory secondary education, in Spain. Both have a similar purpose and similar recognition by employers or higher education establishments too. Nearly everything has a different equivalent from electricity bills to the etiquette of using a knife and fork.

All of this is because someone commented on one of my blog entries. The one about washing up. I could write the blog with any number of perspectives. I've generally written it based on the things that happen to us or around us. I've wondered about making it more current affairs and I've wondered about doing the sort of information pieces that I used to do for the TIM Magazine. In the end though I decided to stick with the mundane and everyday with references to those wider issues as I bumped into them. The entries are often too wordy but, in general, I think I'm happy with it. I'd be interested in any views you may have about the blog in general though.

Washing up

I've never owned or used a dishwasher. I still wash up in the sink and I follow the routine that I read on some poster on the wall of the fifth form classroom I used at school. I got my first ever OAP payment today so fifth form was quite a while ago. The poster advised to rinse as much junk off as I could with cold water then to fill the sink with water as hot as I could stand. A good dose of quality detergent. Glassware first, plates and dishes next - washing the cleanest first - and working through to the pans and oven-ware. Cutlery when I pleased. Use common sense and change the water when it becomes necessary was the only other guidance on the poster. Useful poster I thought. Much better than the Wilkinson Sword one about how to shave. Until technology invented the Gillette Mach 3 a few years ago wet shaving was always a very bloody business for me.

I don't spend a lot of time watching Spaniards wash up and I presume that, nowadays, most of them use dishwashers. They still advertise Fairy Liquid on the telly though and I know from the ads, and from seeing Penélope Cruz washing the murder weapon in the film Volver, that Spaniards probably don't wash up like me. I suspect that they think that washing up in a soup of detergenty food filled water isn't a particularly good idea. They seem to rinse and wash under a running tap using one of those sponge scourers loaded with detergent.

This revelation came to me as I was brushing up the white mulberries from our path using the British pile and shovel method I described in a blog ages ago. Ah, the exoticism of a life abroad!

Cats

We've just had a few days in Tangier. I'm sure that, in my youth, when Simon Templar went there, we used to say Tangiers. Anyway whatever it's called the city we went to is the one in Morocco, just opposite the southernmost tip of Spain at Tarifa. Between 1923 and 1945, it was a city jointly administered by Britain, France and Spain as an International City. I'd had a vague hankering to go there since I read a Spanish novel which was set in Tanger (Spanish name). So, when I saw a flight from Valencia for 12.99€ one way (even after all the usual Ryanair tricks and ruses it still only cost 40€ there and back) it was a done deal.

One of the several things we noted wandering around Tangiers were the cats. There were hundreds of them. Some were skinny, some were clearly unwell, some looked like cared for pets. Whatever their status they were left to their own devices. It's not the same in Spain. Spanish street cats stay well away from people whom they don't trust at all. As a general rule Spaniards do not approve of castrating or sterilising cats. They see it as something cruel and unusual. The Town Halls have vague sterilisation schemes, supported with paltry amounts of money, but the main forms of cat control are disease and motor cars. This means that there are plenty of wild cats in Spain generally to be seen at dusk skulking around the communal big bins in the street. I wouldn't like to give the impression that cats are not kept as pets in Spain but they have nothing like the same status as dogs. If a family does have a cat it's often a sort of half pet, half domesticated, fed from time to time, if there is anything left over, but generally expected to fend for itself, pet. There are pampered cats too but there is nothing like the same division into cat people and dog people here that there is in the UK for instance.

We've got a couple of house cats that we've had for a while: Beatriz and Teodoro. We've had other cats before only one of which has survived to old age. These two we got from a woman, called Irene, who runs a cat shelter and re-homing scheme called Gatets sense llar, which translates, from Valenciano, to something like Homeless Kittens. Bea and Teo came to us at a very young age so our house is their home. They have their territory centred on the house and they don't stray very far which, as we're surrounded by open country, is nice and safe.

We're not far from a farm and, in time honoured tradition, the farm has cats. Farm cats are not coddled; they have to be self sufficient. They are constantly flea, tick and worm infested and, of course, hungry. We put out food for our two and so we become an easy source of gourmet dining for the farm cats. They invade our garden. We chase them off. We're not very good at it. We're a soft touch especially with the cats that are a bit more approachable or trusting than others. It's happened too many times now that a cat begins to trust us and we take a liking to it. We start with scraps and left overs and then work up to feeding it on a regular basis. After a while we abuse its trust, give it a name and, when it's not looking, take it to the vet for de-paratisation and a quick sterilisation. On one occasion we did that for a cat, Gertrudis, only to find that she hadn't trusted us enough to introduce us to her two hidden kittens until they were well grown and in need of a solid meal.

The farm cats are a sub colony of another group that lives across in the village. This means, that unlike the cats that have grown up with us from kittens, these cats call a range of places home - our house, the bin by the farm and a couple of bins on the other side of the road that separates us from the main part of the village. There is also a woman in the village who is a softer touch than us and feeds dozens of cats. Taken all in this means that the cats are prone to pop across the road for a chin wag, for company, for sex and to see if there is anything tasty on the menu.  One day as they cross they don't make it and we never see them again. There are lots of other theories about how and why cats disappear, from being taken by owls to being poisoned, but I'm a big believer in the the motor car catslaughter theory.

So, recently, two small, basically white, cats have taken to calling. Our cats don't like them but the stand offs have been low key. We followed the well worn route of scraps to regular feeding. It became obvious that one was pregnant and we didn't send her packing. She ignored the prepared nests of cloth and paper and had the kittens by the fence, hidden by thick foliage, whilst we were away in Tangier.

"We'll have to adopt them," said Maggie as she busied herself with leaving for work this morning. I hope she doesn't mean all of them as in all of them. That would be five more which I don't see somehow. Best not to think about it for a while.