In the dumps

I thought I'd talk about rubbish collection. True, we have a general election this weekend so I might have written about that. After all I've been shouting at the television because the right wingers, populist allies of Trump, Kaczyński, Bolsonaro and Hofer, are using their election spots to show security camera footage of illegal immigrants (they say) involved in brawls and muggings. I might equally have held forth about the incredible distortion of the truth that the British press seems to have swallowed hook, line and sinker about Cataluña in general and about Clara Ponsati in particular. Actually though I laughed out loud when I read about the rambling 59 page warrant for her arrest. I thought back to the multi page letters I get from the Tax Office or the Land Registry and just knew that that part at least was true. But no, rubbish collection it is.

Generally here, you take the rubbish, the stuff that doesn't get recycled, to some big containers in the street. In towns the containers are emptied every day. In rural locations, like ours, the schedule varies. For years and years the bin lorry came three times a week almost without fail. For the last eighteen months or so our collections have been more haphazard. Sometimes they come, sometimes they don't. I thought this was because the company had changed, certainly the name on the bins changed, but the town hall website says it's been the same firm since at least 2014 though there was a new contract in December 2017. The non collection isn't, generally, a big deal because the bin is big enough to deal with all the houses it serves for at least a week. When the bin does overflow it's generally because one of us has dumped lots of stuff that shouldn't really be going to landfill.

About a month ago our next door neighbour complained on the WhatsApp group for Culebrón that the bin was overflowing. I joined in and so did the person who's a sort of representative to the town hall from the village. As an upshot I went to the town hall office that deals with environmental stuff to complain directly. They were very pleasant and said they'd give the firm a firm reminder. Obviously nothing much changed.

We've now got into a little game. When I notice that the bin hasn't been emptied I send a message to the town hall's "incidents" number. They thank me for my message and say they will talk to the relevant department. In today's message, for the first time, I added just a whisper of sarcasm. The reply mentioned that I was the only person complaining. I agreed that was probably the case and added that almost certainly the bin lorry company was doing exactly as it should and it was just a slip, an error, a lapse that they repeatedly missed our bin out as they emptied all the rest.

The customary fig leaf

We were in Shropshire last week for a family wedding. We stayed in Shrewsbury for most of the time. I think the last time I was in Shrewsbury was 47 years ago when I went to hunt for trilobites on Wenlock Edge. Shrewsbury looked rather nice with lots of fashionable, at least for we Spanish country bumpkins, shops and eateries. Maggie pointed out an organic veg shop offering two figs for a pound, £1 that is. She noticed them because we have three fig trees in our garden. One is a small tree with green figs and the other two are larger trees that produce the earlier higos and the later brevas. Just as mares and stallions, geldings and fillies are all horses to me then all the things that grow on the three trees are figs.

Now I like figs alright. Often, when we lived in the UK, I'd eat as many as a dozen over the summer. Here, when the fruit is ripe, the birds feast on the ones at the top of the tree and leave us the rest. I think I've eaten three this year. Sometimes other people come and gather a couple of carrier bags full for jams and chutneys but, even then, most of them just fall to the ground. As I'm weeding around and underneath the fig trees the fallen fruit stick tenaciously to the soles of my boots until I have no option but to acknowledge their existence. That means raking them up and carting them away to dump. Maggie joins in this too as she finds the squished fruit on the paths annoying and often brushes them off. I've just been trying to work out how many individual fruits the trees produce. Google provided lots of different estimates of the size of wheelbarrows and the density of the loads they carry. Eventually, though, I decided that a standard load is about 60 kilos. Figs seem to weigh about 50g each so, if Miss Bushell's multiplication and division lessons haven't failed me, that's about 1,200 figs per full barrow. That just about fits with the estimates of fruit production per tree. Since they started to fall I reckon I've dumped about five barrow loads or around 6,000 figs. That's quite a lot of raking and carting.

It's been windy today in Culebrón. It often is. Several of the gusts have been well over 65km/h. When the wind blows it blows lots of the things off their perches but, more than anything, it sets up eddies and dumps seemingly never ending quantities of leaves at strategic points against the house and around the garden. The fig trees are one of the main producers of leaves though the pomegranates, olives, almonds, peaches, apples, quince, nisperos and everything else do their bit too. There were lots of fig leaves today.

As I brushed and raked and estimated how much painful pruning all the trees will need this year I thought vaguely of axes and chain saws but also of the value of the fig crop if I could just get it to Shrewsbury.

Stone walling

Given my remarkable range of abilities you will be surprised to learn that, after university, I found some trouble persuading any employer to give me a job. At one point I was placed on a job creation scheme where, among other things, I was interviewed for Woman's Hour on the BBC Radio 4 (or was it still the Home Service?). Anyway, one of the skills I learned, as well as how to hack down Rhododendrons with a billhook or build steps on Great Langdale, was how to piece together one sort of dry stone wall. Should you ever be on the road from Newby Bridge to Graythwaite the wall just by the entrance to YMCA Lakeside is mine. It was still solid the last time I passed.

Dry stone walling involves building in stone without mortar or any other materials except maybe a bit of soil. UNESCO has classified it as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland feature on the UNESCO list of places that have examples. The UK, of course, doesn't get involved in World Heritage listings, ploughing our own lonely furrow and all that, but if I think of Derbyshire I think of limestone walls striding across the hills and in my birthplace, West Yorkshire, the sandstone walls are an integral part of the landscape.

This last weekend Pinoso hosted the "La X Trobada Pedra Seca" which is probably translates as something like the Tenth Dry Stone Congress. I might have been interested in attending but the publicity was generally presented in Valenciano and I got the distinct impression that outsiders were not very welcome. Over the weekend there were several pictures of dry stone constructions in the local area that I didn't know.

Now one of our party pieces for visitors who like, metaphorically, to wear Rohan trousers, is to take them to see a couple of Cucos and some the Bronze Age stone carvings on La Centenera Hill. Cucos are just stone huts, built from the local field stone, and originally used as shelter by shepherds, herders and other field workers. Nowadays, in bad weather, the farmers generally sit inside their tractor cab, with the climate control and the music on, as they eat their sandwiches but I suppose the idea is the same.

Not knowing the cucos in the press photos sent me out on a hunt and I was amazed - amazed that I'd passed them so many times without noticing them and amazed how easily I found them. As soon as I got to the first one, which I saw from the road, I could see two more. From the third I could see at least one more and so on. Some of them were much more elaborate than the igloo or hut shaped buildings I'd seen before. In fact there were cucos everywhere, I soon got very bored with cucos but that didn't stop me taking a lot of snaps which are in the October 2019 album listed towards the top of this page should you be interested.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored

We went to a couple of things yesterday. One was reassuringly Spanish but the other followed a disturbing new trend.

There was a fundraising event in Novelda. Some local bands, names unknown to us, were playing a mini festival to raise money for victims of the flooding of a few weeks ago. We turned up a bit after, not much after, the advertised start time of 1pm and, as we expected, absolutely nothing was going on. Lots of people with pony tails, black t-shirts and big bellies were faffing around with bits of wire onstage but no bands. Obviously 1pm comes as a surprise every time. Normal, predictable, foreseeable behaviour. The bands kicked off with the normal, predictable and foreseeable twenty minutes to half an hour delay.

The bar was another surprise for the organising team. The surprise was that people arriving might want to buy a drink from the bar. The system was predictable enough. You couldn't pay with cash at the bar you had to buy tickets first - this is a common, but not universal, system for events with temporary staff. Someone known and trusted handles the money so that the the volunteers and the temps are not subjected to temptation. Usually, but not always, it's reasonably obvious that you need to buy tickets. This time there was nothing. The price list on the bar had € signs to help maintain the illusion that cash was acceptable right to the end. The woman in front of me in the queue was clutching her purse; you need tickets said the server and then we all knew. The woman and I walked the couple of hundred metres back to the entrance to buy tickets to swap for beer. Predictably there were no tickets. The organising team, taken unawares, by the sudden arrival of 1pm at 1pm, hadn't thought to arm the ticket selling staff with tickets. The tickets arrived in due course and then we were able to buy them to pay for beer. Now this is all pretty usual. Things starting late. Things suddenly happening. As Spanish as tortilla de patatas. It's sort of re-assuring because it's expected.

Later in the day we went to the theatre. We went to the splendid Concha Segura Theatre in Yecla. Always worth the visit just for the building. We'd booked late, the theatre was busy but not full. We'd reserved a couple of places in a box and nobody else joined us so we had a great view and a comfy spot. Curtain up time was advertised as 8pm. We've done a lot of theatre in our time here and I would estimate that twenty minutes delay is the norm. But not last night. No, the turn off your mobile phone the performance is about to begin announcement, was made before ten past. This is a bit worrying. I was at the theatre on Friday night too, in Pinoso, and Javier was up on stage to welcome everyone around ten past ten just ten minutes after advertised start. For West Side Story down in Alicante about three weeks ago that was nearer on time than usual too. I've only just realised but there's a pattern emerging. Spanish theatre times are closing in on the advertised time. I hope I'm not too old to adapt.

About Catalonia and not about my adventures at all

I presume that you have seen images of the disturbances at Barcelona's el Prat airport or the pictures of Barcelona on fire. As you may imagine it has been big, big news here and it continues to be so. 

I presume you know that it started when the Spanish courts handed out long, long prison sentences to the leaders of the Catalan independence drive at the time of the illegal referendum a couple of years ago. Following the ruling I suspect that Spanish judges spend a lot of time reading law books but have very little idea of what's happening amongst ordinary people. The legal arguments the judges made were absolutely sound, the ruling was coherent but it took little account of the context in which it was being issued. When the Catalan politicians made their choices they knew they were acting illegally and they knew they could end up in prison. Nonetheless, if the judges had chosen to pitch the decision at a different level there may have been much less of a backlash. Instead it would have been pictures of the paroled prisoners hugging their families and heading off for a nice meal. And the ill informed foreign press might not be harping on about political prisoners and suggesting that there is no separation of powers in Spain.

Watching the live feed last night, with the video tinged orange for the burning tyres, cars and rubbish bins and with the subtitles saying that as well as petrol bombs the crowd had been throwing acid at the police lines it struck me that some of the crusties at the front looked like they were there for the fun of it rather than because they had strong political views. Not all of them though. There are obviously lots and lots of ordinary people who live in Catalonia who are genuinely angry and who feel that they need to voice that rage.

I'm not with the Catalans. I think they have handled their campaign badly. Mind you the politicians in Madrid have been equally torpid. The last President of Spain, Mariano Rajoy, will, in my opinion, go down in history as the man who started the loss of Catalonia to Spain.

But I didn't set out to take sides. I have a staunch Valencian nationalist pal who is very happy to tell me about the wrongs done to his people by the Castilians in 1714. Biased balderdash plucked randomly from history to support his completely blind acceptance of the arguments on one side. His discourse just brings home to me how pigheaded the whole Catalan thing is. On the other hand I've heard the "Madrid" side talk equal rubbish and I've never heard anything that hasn't been straight condemnation of the "Catalans" without any suggestions other than playing hard-ball. The sovereignty of Spain is non negotiable they say - they worry about Basques and Galicians. I have no real knowledge of the processes involved but it seems to me that Czechoslovakia handled its internal disputes better than say Yugoslavia or Sudan. At least the first involved fewer bullets and fewer dead.

But that wasn't the point I set out to make. The point is how do you get out of this mess? Watch the Hong Kong Chinese attack a bank and you know that sorting it out involves the central government starting by withdrawing the extradition bill. For the French Yellow Vests the starting point is about taxes and wages. In Ecuador the root is the austerity measures and the mistreatment of the indigenous population. But in Catalonia you tell me. One side says - we want independence. The other side says - you can't have it. Where does that go? Neither side can back down on the basic premise. There is no common ground. There's nothing to talk about. I like strawberry ice cream. I don't. There's no negotiation about other flavours - we're only talking strawberry.

Some Spanish politicians are demanding direct rule of Catalonia from Madrid again. How long for? Do they seriously think that the Catalans are going to put up with that for long. Last time the direct rule and the calling of new elections went hand in hand but try one without the other and watch the bonfires. Send in the army? Consider that you're an ordinary sort of Catalan (and remember that no poll has ever given the separatists the majority) - happy to be Spanish and happy to be Catalan - and suddenly you have a Leopard tank parked in your street. Radicalised or what? The Catalan president has no idea what to do except to spout independence claptrap. He sends the Mossos d'Esquadra (the regional police force) to keep the rioters in check but he has been openly supportive of the mob. After mounting pressure he did finally offer the lightest criticism of the violence but this man is a bigot and not a negotiator. And on the other side there is no unity. If a "Spanish" politician suggests talking to the Catalans they are an independence apologist threatening the sovereignty of Spain. That's something that would quite likely play badly at the ballot box so it's not a good option. Complete deadlock.

The country I came from is in chaos. The country I moved to in chaos. Is it me?

Pulpí is not a pet octopus

Have you seen those geode things at the craft markets? They look a lot like a pebble on the outside but inside they're (sort of) hollow with lots of crystals growing into the space.

The crystals that form inside a geode can be all sorts of minerals. I checked on eBay and I could have bought geodes lined with prasiolite, celestine, calcite, pyrite, barytes or chalcedony though far and away the most common is amethyst, the purple coloured quartz.

A couple of weeks ago we went to see a geode in the now abandoned Mina Rica, Rich Mine, which is in the municipality of Pulpí just on the border between Murcia and Almeria. Between 1840 and 1960 the mine produced iron, lead and a little silver.

This geode is 60 metres underground and it's a little larger than most. In fact it's 8 metres long and just a bit short of 2 metres wide and high. Eight metres is more or less the length of the old London Routemaster RM buses. Inside there are selenite crystals (gypsum to you and me) which are almost transparent. The boast is that you can read a book through the clearest. Most of the crystals are about half a metre but the biggest is over 2 metres long. They are not the largest crystals ever found, that honour belongs to other selenite crystals discovered in an underground cave in Mexico. Those crystals were some 980 metres deep and the space they were in was really hot, too hot for people to bear for more than a few minutes. There was no chance that the cave could be preserved or opened to visitors so it was re-flooded. So Pulpí has the largest crystals that can be visited.

Getting to see the Pulpí crystals required a pre booked appointment and a payment of 22€ per person. For that we got to stroll through the old mine and to have a quick look see inside the geode which we did one at a time; left foot on the rock there, balance on that foot, twist your head to the left and there you are. The guide turned on the lights when you were in place and it was impressive. I stayed longer than most but even then that was probably only around 20 seconds of viewing time.

Oh, and just in case you're wondering the Spanish word for octopus is pulpo - Pulpí, pulpo. How droll.

He loved Big Brother

I didn't sleep particularly well last night. I kept waking up with some half formed Spanish phrase rolling around the empty quarters of my mind before lapsing back into semi unconsciousness. It wasn't the thought of what the Catalans might do after the sentencing of their pro independence politicians today, it was because I was off to the Social Security office.

When I was last in that office, just before Christmas, I was told that my old age pension would include a little from Spain and a lot more from Britain. I started to get money from the UK, on time, in May. I expected a top up from Spain last month.  But it didn't come. Worse than that, trying to find out why not, I found, online, that my health care had been downgraded from a constitutional right as a worker to a bit of a dispensation for foreigners. Given that the UK has been a hotbed of political idiocy for a few years the less I have to depend on anything coming from there and the more I can rely on things directly from here the better.

I was worried about my appointment on two scores. The first, the perennial, is simply being able to present my case in Spanish. The second is that if my Spanish work history, dodgy and short as it is, was going to be disregarded then all those times I had stood out for a legal contract were going to be wasted. I also know that challenging a wrong, unfair or unreasonable bureaucratic decision is a hard and thankless slog.

My appointment was on the dot, no waiting at all. I told the bloke behind the desk that all I wanted to know was where I stood with Social Security - did I have Spanish rights or just foreign ones? We talked for a while, he looked at paperwork and then he said the magic words "If you've paid in to the system here then you have the right to health care". That was all I needed to hear. I was as happy as Larry; anything else was largely irrelevant. By the way apparently the phrase comes from the state of mind of an undefeated Australian 19th century boxer, Larry Foley, on retirement. But then  he made me happier. I was asked why I hadn't claimed the Spanish part of my pension. It seems that going in December hadn't been enough. I should have gone back when I finished working in April. We filled in the paperwork. All I have to do now is wait.

The handshake, as I left , was as warm as a manly, cisgender, handshake can be.

Not the playing fields of Eton

I remember sport, things sporting, at school with a mix of horror and shame. Rugby was shivering on frost hardened mud with my hands down my shorts waiting to be crushed. On my cricketing skills my report noted that I would do better if I didn't run away from the ball. At university I did a fair bit of sailing and canoeing but they never captivated me nor did I show any particular skill for them. Between then and now I have generally avoided anything that involves wearing shorts, Lycra, oddly shaped sunglasses, vests or neoprene; in fact anything that smacks of sexual fetish or sweat.

Yesterday though, for some strange reason I spectated at two sporting events. No neoprene you understand. Street clothes for me and well away from the activity. Just watching.

You know that round here there is a local language, a lot like Catalan. I usually call that language Valenciano. The Spanish that the world speaks is called Castellano. It can become a bit odd at times - why do I say Valenciano, which is a Castellano word, rather than say Valencià, which is the name of the language in the language or just translate directly into English and say Valencian or Castilian? 

The next town down the road from us is called Monòver in Valenciano and Monóvar in Castellano. That's where I went to watch a sort of handball game yesterday. Despite Monòver producing nearly all its publicity in Valenciano I can, normally, get the gist of what they're saying and if I get stuck Google translate set to Catalan bails me out. The poster said 1 Autonòmic de Galotxes de Monòver and showed some people playing a version of handball. Fair enough I thought the game is called galotxes. When I was there, I began to wonder if the courts were the galotxes and the sport was called pilota because on the walls were things like Galotxa Antonio Marhuenda (so something named for Antonio) and Galocha Oficial De la Matinal (La Matinal sounds like a club so this is their official Galocha). It's probably the first time that I've been to something on purpose and not known what I saw!

The games were a bit boring to be honest - it was played by hitting a squishy tennis sized ball over a net rather than against a wall but those reverse shots from the back wall were allowed. As a spectator I had no idea who was winning and who was playing well. There were lots of quite heavy people, plenty of middle aged players, a few women but, not too surprisingly, the fastest and most competitive game I saw was between two teams of fit young men.

The football I've been threatening to do for a while. Someone who Maggie knows plays in the local Brass Band and he and his wife go to the games of Pinoso FC. They said they'd take me along and they were good for their word. The Pinoso team did really well last season and were set for promotion to some sort of league that, whilst it was still pretty low, was good for such a small town. I guessed, though I don't know, that it was a bit like the old Fourth Division. Anyway there was some political argy bargy about funding with the town hall and the team folded. More argy bargy and it reformed but by now their place in the division was gone and they had to start again from scratch in the deepest pits of the lowest leagues - well Grupo XI de la 2ª Regional sounds pretty modest to me.

It's the sort of ground you'd expect. They do well to have grass given our climate. There is a covered stand along the length of the pitch with plastic seats on concrete terraces and otherwise it's all pretty open. No fancy scoreboards, the dugouts are bus shelter style and just 3€ to watch. Season tickets are 10€. Maybe a couple of hundred people watching though I may be being a bit over enthusiastic. Despite the five nil scoreline it was hardly an action packed game but at least I knew what was going on.

That's probably enough sport for a while though.

Dealing appointments

Spaniards are very ID conscious. They carry ID cards and use them all the time. One of the first tasks of anyone moving here is to get a foreigners identification number, the NIE. It's a bit like your own personal VIN. It will turn up on all sorts of documentation from your tax return to your driving licence. It's not difficult to obtain but it does involve form filling, fee paying and going to an immigration office or National Police station. In the past it meant a lot of queuing but nowadays appointments can be booked beforehand, usually online. Appointment systems are now used by nearly every agency including traffic, social security, land registry, employment and immigration.

Europeans from the European Union have more rights in Spain that someone from Senegal or the US. We're also able to sidestep some of the things that we should do from tax registration to driving licence swapping. Brexit will put us on a par with the Senegalese and Americans so there has been a bit of a rush of Britons trying to put their administrative paperwork in order before that happens. There are Britons all over Spain but most of we pinker and older ones live in Alicante and Malaga provinces or on the Balearics and Canaries. People began to have problems getting citas previas, appointments, in these areas and the presumption was that it was sheer weight of numbers.

My paperwork is, basically, in order. I didn't need to run off for a residency certificate or a driving licence because I already had them. I also felt pretty smug about my healthcare. Then the Social Security people turned down my application to renew my European Health Card. This was not good, I was pretty sure I had health cover because of my status as an ex-worker but it now looks as though it's a concession to a long term resident.

Pension systems all over Europe are creaking and soon we'll all be to working till we drop. Not me though, I'm getting money already. I have enough time worked in the UK and Spain to claim a full pension. Last December the bloke in the Social Security Office told me that I would get a proportion from both countries though my Spanish State Pension wouldn't become due till four months after my UK pension. I've just passed that date. Not a dicky bird though. So, all of a sudden I'm concerned that my health cover is not as it was and maybe I'm not going to get a Spanish pension. I could have to depend on the UK and with Brexit wobbling towards us that's bad. I decided I needed an appointment to talk to someone about my status. I went online to book an appointment - six weeks! This was Social security not Immigration. Why the wait?

Yesterday morning I heard on the radio that there was a demonstration planned outside Extranjeria, the Immigration office, in Madrid to protest the lack of appointments. If, as a newcomer, you can't get an appointment and you can't sort out your ID card or number then you won't be able to get a job or rent a flat or even take on a mobile phone contract. Indeed, technically, some people could be deported. I delved a little deeper and found that all the offices are backed up, not just the ones besieged by Brits, mainly due to staff shortages. Some of that is cuts but apparently it's also because we still have a caretaker government so things that need parliamentary approval, like taking on new government workers, are not happening. And it's not just Immigration there are problems with Traffic and Passports and lots of other agencies.

But the thing that really surprised me about this story was that some people have found a way to take advantage of this situation. I found several complaints about "mafias" operating in the appointments game. I'm not sure how - maybe by simply transporting people to areas where there are appointments are available, maybe by block booking appointments and then selling them on in ticket tout style but it looks as though, as usual, poor people are being robbed by the unscrupulous.

I don't suppose we Britons will generally fall into the hands on mini gangsters but I do wonder what will happen when Brexit actually happens and nearly 400,000 Britons start looking for an appointment to get new ID cards.

Señor Martos and us

We went to see Raphael last night. For those of you who don't know who or what Raphael is this is what Wikipedia has to say about him:

"Miguel Rafael Martos Sánchez, born May 5, 1943 in Linares, Spain, usually simply referred to as Raphael, is a worldwide acclaimed Spanish singer and television, film and theatre actor. A pioneer of modern Spanish music, he is considered a major influence in having opened the door and paving the way to the flood of Spanish singers that followed on the wake of his enormous success."

This is something like an English person going to see Cliff Richard. Incredibly famous at one time, still very popular with the faithful and even today most young people would still recognise the name.

I always think there are three things about seeing a band or a singer. There's the show, the presence, then there's the content, the music and finally there's the atmosphere; the chemistry between audience and performer.

I'll use old bands as examples. Hundreds of years ago I saw Bruce Springsteen (actually it was thirty four years ago in Roundhay Park). Ten years before that I'd seen the Rubettes. Presuming that you're of a similar mind to me you think that Bruce is a tad better musician than the Rubettes but as performers, working the crowd, they were both excellent. Van Morrison is also musically superior to the Rubettes, but, as a performer, he has about as much presence (from the one time I've seen him) as a telegraph pole. And then there's the Rod Stewart and Rolling Stones type performance where the audience does as much to make the show enjoyable as the performers.

I was expecting Raphael to be poor musically - he's old, his voice isn't what it was and he couldn't rely on me singing along, getting carried away with the event, because I only know a couple of his songs. I was expecting him to be a great showman, working the audience, and I expected him to get the crowd going. I was wrong of course. Musically he did OK (plenty of provisos but not bad at all for a 76 year old). Crowd wise the whole thing was spectacular - the crowd roared and swayed and chanted and danced. Performer wise he was a huge disappointment. Hardly a word spoken to the audience - no anecdotes, no references to the greatness of Murcia, no topicality.

When I told people I was going to see him nobody said "who?" though several said "why?". The answer is obvious. I can now say I've seen Raphael.

Deflated

Last year we couldn't go to Yecla, to the Jazz Festival. We went to St Petersburg instead. Tough call - eighth largest town in Murcia or the jewel of Tsarist Russia.

We went to Yecla in 2015, 2016 and 2017 though. Absolutely cracking event, usually five nights. The bands are often really good - good enough to cost money with Amazon later. And the acts are introduced by one of the wise, avuncular Radio 3 DJs which adds to the fun. Even better it was free and, because it was free, you could sit where you wanted. Given that the Concha Segura is all red velvet and gilt choosing between stalls, boxes and the dress circle is a difficult but pleasurable call. We even tried the Gods one year. All we had to do was to turn up early enough to get the full choice.

The Festival started yesterday but Lord Grantham, Maggie Smith and the rest won out. Dubbed versions are fine but the once a week English language version film is better. Downton Abbey in Spanish? Hardly!

Just before we set off for Yecla tonight Maggie asked if I'd noticed that the Festival was no longer free. I hadn't. Tickets were 3€. We've never had any problem finding a seat when it was free even when we arrived close to kick off so we thought that, by arriving early, half an hour before curtain up, we'd be fine with the, new to us, ticketing system.

There weren't any tickets left. I'm away tomorrow, we have another concert on Friday, "Anything for Saturday?," we asked. Nothing. So no Yecla Jazz festival for us this year.

Sad. And a note in my calendar to buy early next year.

The Home Counties

Maggie has a plan for a bit of a rebuild of our house. Demolition and rebuild apart there is also a long list of ancillary jobs. One of those is putting a sliding door between the kitchen and living room. Maggie has something specific in her mind's eye, something rustic, something wooden, and a visit to the Fundación Casa Pintada in Mula yesterday made her wonder about reclaimed doors.

I remembered that we'd been to a market where they had a supply of antique doors. We misremembered (something that seems to happen more and more frequently) the name of the market and ended up going to a place called el Mercadillo el Zoco in Algorfa rather than the Mercadillo el Moncayo in Guardamar.

I've been here, in Spain, a while. It's not new to me, not novel, but it still takes me by surprise when we go somewhere public and Britons apparently outnumber Spaniards. It can happen in bars, in housing estates, and even in towns. It happened today. Maggie was sure that there were lots of Belgians, Dutch, Germans and French at the market, which is almost certainly true, but there was no doubt that the lingua franca was English, not Spanish. Also, in my opinion, the overriding presence was British.

Knobs and knockers

I bought a new car yesterday evening. I mean new new. Pensions mean I have an income. Pensions mean I can get finance.

The registration letter has just flipped over from K to L and my new SEAT Arona has an L registration. There can only be about 23,382 cars in front of mine in Spain with that registration letter. So far I haven't seen another on the road.

I parked the Mini outside the dealer and drove away without saying goodbye after nearly 220,000 kilometres or around 137,000 miles together. The SEAT had just 10kms on the clock. They'd put a red cover over it. As though there would be champagne and stuff. It wasn't like that. I sat in the drivers seat whilst Juan Carlos tapped the screen where the radio should be to tell me that this activates the automatic parking and that is the on/off for the mirror blind spot warning and so on. He wanted to know what colour I wanted the ambient lighting! I remember my mum being dead pleased that her Ford Prefect had a heater and rubber mats - it's a long way from there to mood lighting in the doors. At least the Arona still has some things I understand like the steering wheel and a normal six speed gear arrangement. It even has a handbrake lever and not just a switch. I suspect there will be hours of fun trying to work out the park assist, lane deviation warning and even how to work the music system

I drove it home stopping off at Lidl to buy some brandy. It seemed fine, a bit sluggish maybe, the car, not the brandy. Maggie came out of the house to wave us home.

Shine on you crazy diamond

For years and years I used Brylcreem. Not a lot you understand but some. More like those 1970s adverts about a little dab of Brylcreem on your hair giving you the Brylcreem bounce. Nonetheless, as we entered the 21st century it became more and more difficult to find. Not impossible but difficult.

Then I moved to Spain. No RAF here, no Brylcreem back story. I asked people to bring it in their hand luggage but the terror bombers and HM Revenue and Customs put paid to that.

But luck was with me. Pinoso is a bit backwoods, a bit short on the latest trends. Juanjo had some in his shop. It said Ryelliss, Abrillantador del Cabello - hair brightener is one possible translation. It makes your hair shine is the idea. It was brilliantine. Then I realised that the biggest supermarket chain in Spain carried it too. So Juanjo and Mercadona kept my hair in place and shiny for years without Brylcreem.

There was none in Mercadona last time, Juanjo has none. Online everyone is out of stock. I can only assume that the various gels and waxes have done for Ryelliss. It's a shame. But the game is still on. Amazon UK has a supplier of Brylcreem and they'll deliver to Spain.

The rain saves a soggy post

I started to write a blog earlier this week. I didn't post it because it was boring. That's not going to stop me now though. Here it is.

"Leaves are swirling around in eddies outside our front door. More sweeping. It's what I expect. September has come, the weeds have started to grow again, there are piles of rotting figs under the trees. Where the branches overhang the path it is painted purple with gravity squashed fruit. The flies are out in squadrons and the crickets have stopped singing. Out in the vineyards the tractors and grape harvesters are doing their stuff and the air smells of sweet fermenting wine. Temperatures have dropped considerably and before setting the washing machine going I need to scan the sky to decide whether it will be a good drying day or not. This morning I couldn't even sit outside to read with my second mug of tea because it was a bit nippy and a bit blowy. The one good thing about the hot weather going away is that everyone stops moaning on about how it's unbearable and how did people manage without air conditioning ad nauseum and I can go back to wearing shoes and socks and jeans without lots of stupid comments.

When I was at school, sometime shortly after the wheel was invented, my headteacher often said that whilst  most of the world had a climate the UK had weather. It's one of the few things that the bullying fathead said that I would not disagree with. In England, in August, one day can be sunny and the next can be cool and wet. It's not like that here. Obviously the weather can change, a cold front can come in or we can find ourselves in a heatwave and time after time we have tremendous storms with torrential rain or hailstones the size of Cadbury's Creme Eggs but, in general, we get the same sort of weather for days and days, and sometimes weeks and weeks, on end. It makes it easy to predict. It will be hot and dry in late June and all through July. August will be hot to start and cooler later and by September the cooling will be noticeable. Although most days from November to February will be sunny with bright blue skies we'll be cold in the house. And March will be a terrible disappointment, temperature wise, and we'll have to wait for the official Spring before we can change to lighter bedclothes".

That's as far as I got. Now to start again. Our yard is awash, the garden looks like a lake, there is water everywhere. The kitchen floor is a pattern of muddy cat paw marks. Lots of schools, including the Pinoso ones, were closed today because of the threat of rain. It has been wet, the rain has been heavy but we've been lucky.  So far as I know, it's not been catastrophic locally. Close at hand though it has; utter devastation. Torrents of water flowing in and out of people's houses. People killed in Caudete (not far away) when their car was washed away with them in it, two more killed further South, Orihuela cut off, both local airports under water and big towns like Cartagena and Murcia with serious problems.

As I was checking closed windows this morning Maggie made a throwaway comment "Well, it'll soon be back to being warm again, we're not done with the decent weather yet!"

You see she agrees with that long dead headmaster too!

Slippery when wet

Spaniards seem to like napkins more than Britons. Now I'm not trying to say that we Britons don't like napkins or that there is something intrinsically right or wrong about using napkins. Go into a British restaurant and there will be napkins. They give you piles of them in McDonald's because, as the bun disintegrates, you will end up with a palmful of slimy hamburger patty, lettuce and ketchup and you will need them to clean up. If my family home was anything to go by the English use them only when we are being a bit posh; Christmas or when friends came to dinner. Normally though, especially at home, no serviettes, no napkins. Spaniards on the other hand put napkins out as naturally as they put out the cutlery and bread when they are setting the table and there is no Spanish restaurant, bar, barbecue, picnic or home without them.

Order a beer in a Spanish bar and you probably won't get a beer mat - sometimes yes and more and more frequently but not usually. The beer on the other hand will be cold so water will condense out on the glass and, after a while there will be a little puddle of water on the bar or table. But fear not, there will be a handy dispenser full of serviettes and you will be able to mop up the liquid. Only you won't or at least you couldn't but more and more you can.

I've just realised, pushed by an article that I read in el País, that it's ages since I've seen the sort of napkins that were everywhere in Spain at one time. They were a bit like the old Izal hard toilet paper and about the same sheet size too. They usually had a pattern around the outside in blue or red - sometimes chains, sometimes rhomboids, sometimes aeroplanes and the name of the bar in the middle. They came in spring loaded dispensers that were called miniservis and the serviettes were called servilletas zigzag (or sulphite glazed paper napkins to anyone in the trade). When you tried to pull out one you would be rewarded tenfold. No matter though because they actually seemed to repel liquid rather than to soak it up so you needed the whole ten to redistribute your puddle. It was similar if you were eating tapas with your fingers. By the time you'd finished you would have a whole pile of these sodden, grease, oil or sauce covered bits of paper piled alongside your plate.

Nowadays the normal serviettes are more like Andrex than Izal. This struck me as I was pulling an effectively absorbent black napkin from the little box in front of me in a bar the other day. They were held in place by a daintily painted pebble. Very pretty. Not as trendy though as the unbleached yellowish napkins that you get in the gastrobars on the coast or in big cities. There was, though, one advantage to the old slippery sided napkins. When they were put under food on a plate, like a sandwich or a croquette, they acted like grease-proof paper forming an effective non stick barrier between plate and food whereas the new sort tend to sort of attach themselves to your food in a most unpleasant way.

-------------------------------------------------------

I have used the terms serviette and napkin interchangeably. I thought, for sixty four years, that napkins were cloth and serviettes paper but, in checking for this blog post I found that although there used to be some distinction in the way distant past that hasn't been the case for a few hundred years.

How much?

My foot hurts. It's been a bit of a problem since I made the wrong choice of footwear for wandering around the Benicassim Festival site. The blisters were very big but that was ages ago now and, although the blisters are long gone, my heel still hurts. More worryingly it's getting worse rather than better.

I thought strapping it up or cushioning the heel may help. I went to the chemist and wandered around the displays. I found a couple of silicone heel cushions and, according to the box, they were just what I needed. Then I bought some lint, twenty individually wrapped pads, and a roll of sticking plaster. Total price 23.80€. Of that nearly 12€ was for the lint. Bit of a shock.

To be honest it wasn't a surprise. I just didn't like it. For years I've thought that the stuff they advertise on the telly that you have to buy from pharmacies (and lots of medical stuff can only be bought at pharmacies) is exorbitantly priced. You know the stuff; the spray for your aching knee which means you finish the marathon, the capsules that stop your nose running so you can be feted by your work colleagues for such a brilliant presentation or the haemorrhoid cream that allows you to throw away that blow up cushion. For all I know things may be equally expensive in the UK but I don't remember any angst the last time I bought lint or a roll of plaster in Huntingdon.

It's not the same for prescription medicine. My experience with prescribed medication is that it's affordable. The amount you have to pay depends on your financial and medical situation. Lots of people with chronic problems or work related injuries pay nothing whilst pensioners pay 10% or 60% depending on their income and they are also protected by monthly caps. Workers pay 40%, 50% or 60% of the actual cost of the medicine with no caps or limits.

Every now and again, I hear or read that the average Spanish salary is such and such an amount and it always makes me guffaw. At the moment they say it's just a bit short of 27,000€. I can only surmise that there must be a lot of very well paid Spaniards balancing out the miserly Spanish salaries I'm aware of.

Last week though I heard something that sounded much more realistic. It said that the most frequent salary (the sort of pay packet that most people get) in Spain is around 16,500€. When I went checking the most recent figure said that is now nearly 17,000€ year. Take off the tax and whatever and that translates to somewhere around 1,000€ per month take home pay.

You will be surprised to hear that I just happen to know the salary scales for teachers working in language academies. Non school teachers are unusual because their working week is shorter (34 hours) and they have longer holidays (10 weeks) in a country where a 40 hour week and 4 weeks holiday are still very common. Anyway the highest salary for that sort of teaching work is a bit under 15,000€. I never had an employer who paid the full rate but that's another story.

Your average Spaniard on that most frequent salary, or a language school teacher, paying rent or a mortgage might have to bind their injured foot with old rags so maybe I should think myself lucky!

Don't it always go to show

Maggie and I may be among the last few people in the world who are awoken by a clock radio alarm. A thirty year old clock radio at that. The wake up programme is Hoy empieza todo on Radio 3, a contemporary culture and music station. We don't listen for long, even if we're very slothful it will only be about twenty minutes though the programme stays on in the background.

I change the bedclothes on Friday. As I fought with the duvet cover the main presenter on the programme was talking to the organisers of a "pop" festival that runs in Miranda de Ebro in Burgos about 700km from home. They said that they were giving away a package of two tickets, travel and accommodation for the festival and to enter all you had to do was to make a comment on their Twitter account.

Now I've never quite mastered Twitter but, eventually I posted something as to why I wanted to go. I said I was old (and may die before the next one), because I was poor (and I wouldn't be able to afford to go with my own resources) and because I was English so that understanding anything around me was more or less impossible. I added that one of my delights was complaining and that at a festival at two in the morning I could complain mightily about my aching back.

Yesterday evening someone from the programme sent me a message via Twitter and asked whether I would go to the festival if I won. The messages went back and forth in very dodgy Spanish on one side but the last message said "Me das un email y un teléfono para gestionarlo todo?" - can you give me an email address and a telephone number so that I can arrange it all.

I presumed that I had just won something. I broke out the gin that I'd promised myself I wouldn't drink.

This morning, three minutes before the clock radio burst into life, I got another Twitter message. "Lo siento Chris, al final en la última ronda no os ha tocado! Quizás el año que viene." Sorry Chris, in the end, in the last, round you didn't win. Maybe next year.

Very disappointing.

A clean pair of heels

There's a shoe museum in Elda. You have to ring a bell to get in. They have some very odd (sic) shoes. Elche has hundreds of shoe factories. Nowadays lots of them have signs with Chinese script characters over the door but the product still carries the label "Made in Spain."

If Elda and Elche are the most important centres this area, in general, has a tradition of shoes and leather goods. The tiny village of Chinorlet about 3km from us has a factory that makes handbags. Our next door neighbour has a company that produces bows and buckles and the like to stick on leather goods.

Pinoso too has a history of shoe making.  In the middle of town there is a small square dedicated to the shoemakers, (just like there are places dedicated to marble and to wine the other big industries of Pinoso). A local firm, Pinoso's, always has a stand at the celebration of the town's identity, the Villazgo celebrations, where you can don an apron and pose with a shoe last looking like you're doing something very footwear. When I taught one of my students said that her family had a firm that produced a part of the soles for shoes and another was a sort of shoe broker selling designs overseas. Just beside the library, on one of the principal streets of the town, there is an anonymous building which always attracts my attention when I walk by because the powerful smell of epoxy resin that issues from its open window. I have no idea what they are up to but unless they are the glue sniffing unaccompanied minors that the far right party Vox is always going on about then it's something shoe related.

So Pinoso is still a shoemaking town. I don't quite know where the factories are though. I had a vague idea there was one near the sports centre, Maggie thought so too, and maybe on the industrial estate. I asked a Spaniard I know who seems to know almost anyone local over a certain age. He wasn't quite sure where the companies were either - maybe on the industrial estate he said but he also wondered if it were more backstreet workshops than big factories. I asked if he thought a factory on the corner of Calderón de la Barca and Camino del Prado was shoe related - "Could be," was the response.

Sometimes it's amazing what you don't know even after ages and ages even if you're home grown.

Dancing the night away

We've just had a bit of a debate about where we were going to go this evening. The wine harvest fiesta in Jumilla is in full swing and tonight they have a Queen tribute band. Down in La Romana there's a Moors and Christians parade with music and bull running later. Chinorlet, the nearest village to Culebrón, is also partying for the weekend. Tonight they have a children's parade and then a band. In fact, within 45 minutes maximum travelling time we could go to Elche, Aspe, Cañada del Trigo or Fortuna instead. Oh, I nearly forgot and one of the outlying villages of Pinoso, Paredón, is at it too. In fact August 15th, a bank holiday for the Assumption of Mary, is the day when there are more fiestas in Spain than on any other day, the official count is more than 1,000.

Jumilla is probably our first choice but the tribute band are not due on till half past eleven which means a start nearer midnight in reality. My guess is we wouldn't be home till maybe 2.30 and we're a bit old to miss out on our nightly Horlicks. Maybe we should go to the less exciting La Romana and pop in to see the live band in Chinorlet at eleven? Given the inevitable late starts we'd still be home by around one which would leave time for a soothing hot beverage before bed.

The fiesta programmes reminded me of the importance of music in these events and of one sort of music in particular. The band on in Chinorlet (Permanent population 192) is called Kalima, last night in Caballusa (where just four families live all year round) there was a singer called Leandro. At the recent Pinoso fiestas (the official population of Pinoso is only just over 7,600) there were several bands. We did go to see the top twenty band Dvicio but we missed most of the rest including Trio Amanacer, Me and the Reptiles, Grupo Zafiro and Orquesta Athenas. We could make amends for missing Athenas by seeing them in La Romana tomorrow. La Romana has another orquesta, Orquesta Shakara the day after.

Spain, obviously enough, has every sort of musical grouping you can imagine. There are individual musicians doing the rounds, there are groups that do rock or pop or indie or grime, there are brass bands, string quartets, opera singers backed by pianists and flautists, there are folk groups, bagpipe bands, symphony orchestras, Colombian Cumbia groups, Mexican Mariachis and lots of Brazilian Samba bands to name but a fraction of the styles. There is, though, a species of band that exists predominantly to do fiestas and verbenas (verbena is a loose term but it usually means a bar, food, dance and music area which constitutes part of a larger, city wide fiesta) and that's the orquesta. Guess the English translation.

The orchestras have a simple enough mission - they have to ensure that everyone from the smallest child, to the least nimble grandma and even the sulky teenagers get up and dance. They fulfil their mission with a mixture of timeless classics and this summer's hits. It's a while since I've seen one to be honest but they have a style which is sort of trashy and glamorous at the same time. The men often have a bit of a belly whilst the women wear tight clothes with sequins and short skirts or shorts. Obviously that's a massive over-generalisation - some of the men are bald and wear sequins too! The repertoire is international though Spanish hits predominate even if they were originally sung by foreigners like Shakira or Luis Fonsi. I've just read four different lists of "indispensable" songs for orquestas and, apart from the incredibly successful and timeless Paso Doble tune Paquito El Chocolatero there wasn't a single song that was present in every list. That doesn't mean that all the lists weren't very similar with the same styles and names turning up again and again. A very danceable style called reggaeton was definitely over represented and Rosalía, the fusion flamenco/pop artist seemed big this year too.

Anyway, whilst I've been typing we've decided and it's nearly time to go. Jumilla it is and Queen  - so songs that we'll know. No Soldadito Marinero, Princesas, No rompas más, Cannabis or A quién le importa to add to my cultural education this evening then.

Valencianos have a reputation for liking fireworks

I don't quite remember when but it was long before we lived here. We were in Spain for a holiday and a couple of friends, Pepa and Jaime, invited us to stay in their flat in Bétera near Valencia.

Bétera was having its annual fiesta and we went into town one evening to take part. I think there was a parade, there were stalls and a fair, we ate some tapas, we drank some beer and all sorts of normal fiesta things.

The next evening we went back to the fiesta and to the town centre. We didn't park in the same place. We walked much further than we had the night before. I didn't know why. As we walked through the streets in the centre of the town most of the windows were boarded up, there were no cars in the streets. The whole town was odd. Either Jaime and Pepa didn't explain very well or we didn't have enough Spanish to understand what was going on.

We waited in the main street with hundreds of other people. At the appointed hour someone lit the blue touch paper and suddenly there was a wall of fire advancing down the street towards us. I don't think we'd been expecting that. How it worked was that there was a principal cord running down the centre of the street and there were other fireworks hung on other ropes that went from the buildings on one side of the street to the other so that they criss crossed that central cord. As the waterfall of fire advanced the crowd fell back, the more foolhardy close to the fireworks and the wiser further back. Wading through the fire zone, just behind the main fire-front, were some blokes dressed in overalls and crash helmets carrying fire extinguishers. They were there to pluck up the fallen or to guide the panic stricken to safety and, if needs be, to put out anyone who was on fire. The cord ran into a square but the fireworks stopped a few metres short of it so that, once you were in the square, you were safe. The fun was that all the people who had been in the street, and all the people who had been in the square before the fireworks started, had to fit into an ever dwindling area as the fire pushed us all back. A bit like that scene in Bambi. It was a tad sardine like and Harvey Weinstein would have been busy but as the fireworks fell silent and fizzled out we were still alive and unscathed.

When it was over Jaime made us run back to the car insisting that we only had minutes to reach safety. We had no idea why. As we headed back we passed several groups of people who were putting the finishing touches to their own version of the uniform of overalls, crash helmets and gloves with lots of duct tape to seal the joins. They didn't have extinguishers and fire blankets though. They were arming up with Roman Candle type fireworks and, at one or maybe two in the morning the signal would be given that they could engage in all out warfare on the streets of Bétera. We saw something very similar years later on the streets of Elche on the Nit de l'Albà - the Night of the Dawn. That's why the properties were boarded up, that was why there were no cars and that's why we were parked well out of harms way.

The Cordá, for that's what it is called was on last night, the 15th August, in Bétera. The subsequent firework fight is, I think, called la Coheta 

Every year, since we've lived here, it crosses my mind that we should go back to Bétera for the event. It was one of the maddest fiestas that I've ever been involved in and it's been one of my stock stories for over thirty years, right up with that one about being on the wrong side of the fence, with fighting bulls, in Ciudad Rodrigo. So I set to looking up the details of times and things yesterday. I found some videos on YouTube of lots of people on the streets but they were all booted and suited. Then I found a form to apply for permission to be on the street for the Cordá. I didn't bother to read any further but it was obvious enough, now you have to apply to be potentially set on fire by a curtain of fire and you can't just turn up on a whim. 

I was telling Maggie. "Well, it's like Britons always say, Health and Safety wouldn't allow this in the UK - now they don't allow it in Spain either". Actually, I suppose that improves our story. When men were men and Spain was Spain and all that. Or it could be that I've misremembered the whole thing.

Taking and keeping

I've complained before about our occasional tussles with "authority" here in Spain and how it's quite tricky to complain or fight back. It's not just the language. Some of the processes can be a bit Kafka, a bit Catch 22.

You may remember that the tax people questioned my 2014 tax returns. It cost me 118€ to defend myself, not a lot but 118€ that I could have invested much more wisely in, for instance,  throwing the money in the dust and trampling on it. Their final response after a couple of months was "we will take no further action". They didn't say "whoops" or "sorry" or "here are your expenses" and I rather suspect that we will go through the same rigmarole for my 2015 returns in a few months.

We also had some trouble with the Land Registry, the Catastro. The Land Registry sets the rateable value of houses and this figure is used by the Local Town Hall as a way of fixing the local taxes which, in the end, pay for street lights, parks and gardens and council worker's salaries. An agency called SUMA collects the tax for most of the Town Halls in Alicante province. The Town Halls sets the tax as a percentage of the rateable value. Lets pretend that rate is half a cent on the euro. If your house has a rateable value of 50,000€ then you have to pay 50,000 lots of half a cent or 250€ in local tax.

Our problem was that the Land Registry thought we owned a good percentage of our next door neighbours house. When the Catastro finally sorted this out the rateable value of our house was reduced by about three quarters. Like the tax agency the Land Registry showed no sign of regret when they acknowledged their error. With backdating and what not we have paid this inflated price six times in the last three years.

I expected that, when SUMA sent us our local rates/council tax bill for this year, it would reflect the new, revised, lower Catastro rate and that there would be a refund for those six over payments. But no. The bill was exactly the same amount as last year and they want us to pay the inflated price for a seventh time. I went to talk to the collection agency.

"Ah, well, you see on their last letter the Land Registry say that this rate applies from the day after you receive this letter". I agreed, I'd read that at the time we got the letter, Maggie had read it too, but both of us had failed to grasp the significance. We should have contested the ruling and asked for the corrected rateable value to be backdated to when the error had first been made.

I grasped at straws. "Well the bill for this year should be proportional then," I said. "No, the IBI, the local tax, is due on 1st January for the year and, on that date, the rateable value of your house was the older, higher value".

I'll see if we can fight it of course but I suspect that we are, in the vernacular, buggered. There is something immoral though in a Government Agency recognising that there has been a mistake but not refunding the couple of thousand euros that it has collected under false pretences.

August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk

If I were to ask you whether you'd expect summer in Spain to be warm or cool what would you say?

Exactly.

I like it warm. I like the unremitting heat of the Alicante summer. Sun every day, no rain for weeks or months, the sound of flip flops on the street and the telly full of people having outdoor parties and frolicking in the sea with orgiastic fiestas in every town and village.

So summer here is as mythical as Christmas in England. There it's snow, robins, family camaraderie, goodwill, never ending mince pies and the warm feeling of gift giving. It's sort of true, it can be true but most of it is some sort of aggrandisement of the truth.

People of course love to complain. In winter we complain about the cold and in summer we complain about the heat. This always amuses me slightly. Anyone who knows Spain knows that there are bits that are, generally, cool and rainy. The coolest (temperature wise) place I can find for yesterday was Covatilla near Bejar in Salamanca where it was just over 20ºC but Covatilla is a winter ski resort so it's at the top of a mountain. The warmest couple of spots for yesterday, in the whole of Spain, were Xàtiva and Yeste at a bit over 40ºC. Both are within an hour (or so) drive  of Culebrón. In general, Britons think of Spain as being a sunny place. White people come here to lie on the Mediterranean beaches and go, by turns, pink and then red. So my amusement is because people seem surprised that it's warm.

I know that the weather is bonkers. I'm not unaware of all that highest temperature ever recorded in Tuluksak, Tobermory or Tudela stuff but the truth is that the differences aren't that great - at least not for we humans. A temperature rise of 3ºC may have huge global consequences as glaciers recede, ice caps melt, krill do something odd that messes around with whales or jellyfish take to swimming in bits of the ocean that they haven't habitually swum in for a while but, for most people, a few degrees isn't that noticeable. We work on a sort of cold, cool, warm, hot scale with humidity and air movement added in the mix. A biting wind makes can turn the scarf and mittens pleasure of a chill winters day into a painful struggle. The crisp linen of a desert dry landscape is much more comfortable than the sweat sodden shirt and the ridden up underwear of some mangrove swamp.

The maximum and minimum for yesterday in Pinoso were 38ºC and 21ºC. Last year, for the same date I recorded 31ºC and 16ºC in my diary so it's currently a bit warmer this year than last. Usually I don't really notice. Sitting outside with a cold drink or cup of tea and a slight breeze or in the car with the windows down I'm happy as Larry when it's in the high 30s. Maggie on the other hand feels the heat much more. She likes the car or house windows closed and the air con pumping out refrigerated air. I have to be honest though. The other day when I was crawling under the car and the sweat was filling my eye sockets or today, as I unloaded the recyclable stuff, and little rivulets were trickling inside my shirt I did think it was a tad on the warm side. Much more though I thought about that word I nearly always use to describe the summer heat - unremitting. The relentlessness of the heat. The way that, for a couple of months, it never goes away. The manner in which it waits to pounce as you leave an air conditioned building, when the first touch of the steering wheel burns and when, as you awaken at 3a.m., you find yourself enclosed in moist, sticky sheets for the wrong reasons.

Short change

I've given up not wearing shorts. I don't like them, I think they look stupid (especially on me) and, more than anything, they seem to require that I wear footwear which leaves my feet severely compromised. But shorts are so commonplace that I've decided to stop fighting and to wear them.

We went to a barbecue last week at a posh, modern house. It was time to go so I washed my hands and face and combed my hair. I didn't think to change my faded shorts and my rolls of flab displaying t-shirt till Maggie appeared wearing a spotty dress. "Do I have to dress up?," I groaned. I did, so I did. A shirt with a collar and leather shoes. I even shaved.

We weren't out of place but I could have got away with the shorts, well maybe. Perhaps I would have needed to iron them first. Most people, even if they were in shorts, looked neat. I cultivate crumpled and scruffy. Like those 1980s Bacardi ads but without the firm flesh.

We went to see the opening speeches of the Pinoso Fiestas on Thursday. Maggie commented that lots of the women in the audience were very smartly dressed. It was then that I realised then that I have a view on dress codes in Spain.

The only place where it seems, for everyday people, to be essential to dress up is for a wedding and probably for a communion. Women at weddings wear unusually smart clothes; red carpet stuff.  Men, on the other hand, wear badly fitting suits dragged out of a genteel semi retirement. The men look uncomfortable. Funerals are different. There seems to be no need to smarten up for a funeral and I'm often a bit taken aback by the casualness of funeral wear. In fact there seems to be no need to smarten up for work, for the theatre or for the opera. This doesn't mean that Spain is scruffy it simply means that people dress as they think appropriate. Most of the time there is no imposition of a dress code or even a particular expectation. Not always of course. I worked somewhere that had a (very light touch) dress code and I saw a restaurant website the other day that said that the dress style was "formal" though I'm sure they meant neither black nor white tie. The flip side of this is that if you go out wearing a traditional cape, a dinner jacket, a lounge suit or a scarf when it's 25ºC then nobody will give you a second glance.

I'm probably wrong. My wardrobe choice has been greatly reduced by the unfathomable shrinkage of many of my clothes over the years so I may be seeking justification for my own slovenliness. And I do still try to adapt, a little, to the situation by choosing black jeans, faded blue jeans or my Cliff Richard jeans. The last because my mum always reckoned that Cliff was so clean cut he pressed a crease into his jeans. It's true that some jeans are smarter than others.

The few times I've been to a classy restaurant in the evening I usually wear beige chinos and a short sleeved, checked, button down collar shirt. If there are other grey haired British men there they will be wearing exactly the same basic outfit. We Britons are well trained.

Working the whole day through

People keep asking me if I'm bored now that I'm retired. I say no. They ask me what I do and I say I don't know. What I do know is that I'm not getting lots of the things done that I mean to get done because I don't have enough time.

Probably the thing is that busy means one thing and another. When I visited the UK a few weeks ago I noticed the immediateness of everything. Buying a beer is a plish plash operation. Ask, get, pay, drink or sometimes ask, pay, get, drink. Table service, the Spanish norm, obviously slows things down anyway but even if I order at the bar before sitting it's a much more leisurely process. The format is based on trust not mistrust. Paying, getting someone to take your money, can actually be a problem at times and I often pay at the bar as I leave to speed things up a bit.

I reckon it's digital stuff that makes people want to go faster. To watch Hill Street Blues in my youth I waited for the episode each week. Now people watch whole box sets in an orgy of bought in pizza and underwear (or so I'm told). And if you don't like the conclusion to Game of Thrones then raising a petition to have it changed is only a few clicks away. Ordering something by mail order used to be seconded by a guarantee to deliver within 28 days. Amazon and Ali Express deliver tomorrow morning. Half the time you don't need to wait at all. No more going out to buy the new album just download it at one minute past midnight on release day or stream it on your Spotify account. Booking holidays, buying a bike, getting a train ticket or doing the supermarket run can all be done from your phone or laptop whenever and wherever you like.

It's true we flew out of a new and underused Spanish airport but we left the spacious calm of Corvera to arrive in the frenetic maelstrom of Stansted where we were goaded and guided forward in something akin to a giant cattle market. Even in rural Cambridgeshire that change of pace was very noticeable to me - heaven knows what it must be like in Brum or London. There was a traffic jam on the approach road to Stansted. Obviously we have slow traffic from time to time as we travel around Spain but that was the first real jam I'd been in since the last time I was in the UK.

People don't really eat on the street in Spain but buying food to go and eating it at the bus stop or as you send a message on the phone seemed to be very common in the UK. There appeared to be almost an imperative to use every moment effectively. From listening to people in Madrid and Barcelona I think there's a tendency to that there but I don't live in a big city. I live in Pinoso. And here we have a bit of time.

At the moment the stalls and stands and paraphernalia of the Fiestas are blocking up the streets of Pinoso. Streets are closed off, one way streets are suddenly two way. It's all a bit tricky. I saw someone try the normal right turn onto the Plaça el Molí to find her way blocked. The car stopped, the woman considered her options. The cars behind waited patiently. They didn't wait long really but 15 seconds delay in Huntingdon or Todmorden would have horns a go go. In Pinoso nobody tooted, they just waited. We do it all the time, wait patiently that is, as people stop their cars in the middle of the street to greet a friend or to drop off the not too nimble relative close to their door.

Slowing down can take some getting used to. I think it's worse if you, if one, is still British at heart, watching British TV and reading UK news and seeing things going quickly. I don't really. But if you compare the lightning fast selection of BoJo in comparison to the continuing, outrageous, non negotiations going on here about not forming any sort of government you have a case in point. That thing of an election one day and a new government the next isn't the Spanish way. I think it's the same with traffic reports. Here the police tell the DGT and the DGT tell the media so, by the time you hear the traffic report on the radio or Google maps knows to route you a different way, the tortured metal and smashed bodies have been dragged aside. Meanwhile in the UK someone phones the radio directly.

So, when someone behind a desk tells me it may take a few months for a pal to exchange their UK driving licence for a Spanish one I just say right and I'm surprised when my friend thinks it's a long time. When they told me the waiting time for a new car was three months I didn't think of it as being overly long till a couple of Britons expressed surprise.

No, I'm keeping very busy thanks.