Keep on truckin'

I don't remember the film title but I do remember the little gasp of horror from the audience as Michael Douglas padded across the room in half light heading for the bathroom. The reason for the concern was that he had a sunken, old man, bottom and, though I haven't dared to look recently, I suppose mine is too.

So far as I know I have no chronic illnesses though I know from people around me that your luck can change in seconds. I do often feel old though. Old as I feel the pain in my knees. Old as I realise that I'm gasping for breath after climbing a few stairs. Old as my arms ache after a bit of sawing. My feet hurt all the time, and the tinnitus is really loud. And so on and so forth. I'm getting old. No, let's be right about it, I am old. I know that people around me refer to 45 year olds as middle aged but all I can suppose is that they failed their "O" level sums.

Covid, and the responses to it, have kept us all quite hemmed in for a while now. Of course it has done much more. It has killed people, destroyed businesses, overpowered health services, left people penniless, challenged basic democratic rights and much more but, in our case, it has mainly hemmed us in. Lots of normal activity has stopped. Spain, a country where the smallest centre of population has a fiesta to celebrate its patron saint has cancelled them all. Covid is going to do to Christmas what the Grinch failed to do. 

On the cultural side the few concerts and sports events that have found a way to continue have been severely limited or have no spectators. In like manner the big museums may still be putting on new exhibitions but the the visitor numbers are scandalously low. Book fairs have been cancelled left right and centre. It's true that he cinemas are open but there are almost no big budget Hollywood films to see and even the domestic releases have been scant. Who wants to waste all that effort in releasing their film for paltry attendances? Of the five cinemas we most usually go to one has closed, probably for good, and one is running on a five day week. Current travel restrictions mean we can't use three of them; they are out of bounds. I went to a 4.15pm film screening last Wednesday and I was the only person, in the whole of the 11 screen cinema, apart from staff. Last night we went to a theatre in Elche and there were six of us in the dress circle. Down in the stalls half of the seats were taped over but occupancy of the remaining half couldn't have been more than a third. It was all a bit lifeless and depressing. You're living it too. You can add hundreds of similar examples and we're not even particularly confined at the moment.

Despite the fact that I keep doing it, wandering around yet another cathedral or a town centre hasn't really interested me for a while. But for the captions on my photos I often can't tell one from the other. Much better, in my opinion, to go to somewhere when something's happening. So I remember the community opera performance in Peterborough Cathedral much better than I remember Peterborough Cathedral. It's fine popping out to a local town, going to the coast or eating out but for me it's better when there is a twist to that. When the town has a food fair or there's a tapas trail, when something out of the ordinary is happening in the streets, when you've gone because you want to see the latest blockbuster exhibition or maybe something less obvious. Sports events, film festivals and the rest are, to me, great reasons for going somewhere.

It's not that my heart and nerve and sinew won't hold on for a while longer yet but it is all a bit wearying.

Burning certificates and Bonfire Night

Today, the 5th, Bonfire Night, has been rainy. Until today, the month had been deep blue skies and temperatures in the high twenties. You don't fool the trees though - it may still be warmer here than most summer days in England but it's Autumn; time for leaves to fall. Raking or sweeping them up has become one of my daily jobs. I collect them in one of the capazos, big, bendy 55 litre buckets. Once they were made of woven esparto grass now they are rubber or plastic. So simple and so useful.

There is a lot of fallow land around our house so something as innocuous as fallen leaves are easy to dispose of. Not so with the prunings from our various fruit trees or the mound of fronds left behind after our palm got a long overdue haircut. If I owned a trailer I could haul the prunings to the local tip. Sorry, I shouldn't call it a tip any more. It's an ecopark where they collect, sort and recycle waste. I presume that, at the ecopark, they shred the garden waste for compost or something equally environmentally sound. I have no trailer though, so, environmental vandalism it has to be.

It's not acceptable to just pile things into a heap and set fire to them. You have to get a certificate to burn. The certificate tells you what you can and what you can't do - not near roads, not near uninterrupted vegetation, only at such times, with water to hand and so on. You also have to check the local alerts before lighting the blue touch paper. Sensible regulations.

In the past to get a certificate I went to the local town hall, talked to someone behind a desk who took my details and, a couple of days later, when the appropriate councillor had signed the permit, I went back to get the paperwork. More recently they started to send the certificates by email. 

The Pinoso Town Hall website is a disgrace. Unlike most "government" websites, which have been getting better, the Pinoso website got worse when it was updated a few years ago. Some of that was because of new data protection regulations but most of it is because it's badly designed. I also suspect that there is an intentionality to not supply information. On the transparency page, for instance, there is a heading for the 2018 accounts. Presumably it's a bit early to add the 2020 budgets or the 2019 accounts. Click on the 2018 heading though and you'll find that the sections are empty. 

Nowadays the website really only serves for reading the local news and even then only so long as you don't mind party propaganda. That's not quite fair. There's a page called incidencias which you can use to report problems and make suggestions and that bit of the website works fine.

A part of the Pinoso website is a virtual office which supposedly allows you to carry out some administrative steps online. Somebody told me that you could apply for the burning certificates there. I looked and I looked but I found nothing.

In the end it proved a lot faster to drive in to town and go to the town hall. There, before the alcohol gel had dried on my hands, someone had given me a small piece of paper with an email address and details of the information I needed to supply to get a burning certificate. I emailed the details the same afternoon and, a couple of days later I got the certificate. Nice and easy. In fact, I wondered why somebody hadn't thought to put that information on that scrap of paper onto the website but, hey ho. 

I don't really have an opinion

This is a post about Covid. First though one of our cats has been missing for nearly three days. Bea, Beatriz, was the cat that I most expected to die of old age; a bit of a homebody, an easy going girl that gets/got on with all of the other cats. We have no idea where she is - gone walkabout for some reason, carried off by an eagle, poisoned by a wicked witch or squashed by a car. Nothing is too theoretically outrageous because we know nothing. Cats can disappear for days and then re-appear, that's what we're hoping for. Generally though ours don't come back.

I know very little about Covid 19. I have no idea why it is that Spain has incredibly high case figures and Burundi, the Seychelles and Laos have next to none. I've heard lots of "explanations" as to why we're in such a pickle from regional pride and too much hugging to irresponsible young people and an inability to count. I've read how the Swedes handled it well and how the Swedes got it completely wrong. Ask on Facebook or Twitter and you can take your pick from the answers to suit your point of view.

There are obviously lots of ordinary people who know much more about disease control and social planning than I do. They keep telling me little factlets. They tell me the Chinese started it. They tell me it's only winnowing out the weak. They tell me that more people die from falling off step ladders than die from Covid. There is another bunch who tell me that wearing a face mask is tantamount to being beaten on the soles of our feet with sticks and think Human Rights Watch should mobilise. I realise that I'm teetering on the edge of senility, just ask Maggie, but I think I remember that in Catch 22 Doc Daneeka reminded Yossarian of the hundreds of medical conditions that could kill people. I appreciate that, I know that car accidents tear bodies apart and kill and maim thousands each year, I know that measles and bad drinking water kills and kills and kills.  But it's not a comparison is it? People get killed all the time but that doesn't mean that men killing their partners is any less wrong. It's not that the cost of a nuclear submarine would pay for clean water in Mali; it's that killing machines are not a good thing to buy.

We have new figures for Pinoso from 26/10/2020. They say that there have been 211 positive tests in Pinoso since time began and that 54 of those positives were in the last couple of weeks. Two people have died - again since it all began. That means the cases in 100,000 figure is 678. The last time I did the primary school sums necessary to work out the infections per 100,000 number and posted it on Facebook in response to someone else's post somebody laid into me for scaremongering. They said that Covid wasn't anything. Flu - the sort of flu that you take Lem Sip for not the sort of flu that lays continents to waste. Donald Trump got over Covid in 25 minutes after all. So, this time, no comment.

We have a curfew from late evening through to early morning all over Spain, meeting numbers are restricted, the manufacturers of Christmas specialities may as well file for bankruptcy now as the politicians fight over a six month long State of Alarm or a parliamentary scrutiny every two months. It's the sort of stuff that's going on all over Europe. For some it's democracy under attack with ridiculous and pointless controls faced by an intractable enemy and for others it's politicians scrabbling to do their best to keep people alive and save their economies.

Maggie just told me as I came back into the living room that Murcia, the Region just ten minutes up the road from us, is going to restrict movement between municipalities. Live in Jumilla and you have to stay in Jumilla. Lots of people from the three Murcian municipalities that border Pinoso come into Pinoso for their shopping, banking and social life. I wonder if they are going to be turned back at the border? 

Flexible friends

Around 1975 I went to my branch of the Midland Bank and asked them for an Access card. Credit cards were pretty uncommon then. My bank turned me down as one of the great unwashed, a person without a job. There was another bank that offered Access at the time, probably the NatWest, and being persistent I went there to ask about getting a card. They suggested I applied for a Barclaycard instead. So I filled in the form, using a Biro, posted it off to somewhere and, several weeks later, got a nice shiny Barclaycard back.

22nd October  2020 and Barclaycard have just closed down that account. I can't use it after today. Not because I'm in debt but because they are cleaning up their European business before the UK finally abandons the Union. I forget what they told me about why they were closing me down. It was something to do with it becoming more expensive of trickier to do business with Europe when they ceased to be a member of the club.

I've had a Spanish credit card since  about 2006. I remember the people hawking their cards outside the Carrefour supermarket being amazed when I approached them to ask to sign up! At first it was a Spanish Barclaycard but Barclays sold the business on to Banco Popular, later Santander, who then sold a lot of the business to some U.S. risk capital group. It's called a WiZink card nowadays.

In the same way that I have a Spanish credit card I have a Spanish driving licence, pay Spanish taxes, I'm on the equivalent of the Council Tax list and we have a TV aerial which collects the Spanish TV signal. I know though that lots of Britons continue to behave as though they live a couple of thousand kilometres North of here. They have bank cards based on money in British bank accounts, they have British mobile phone numbers, imaginative solutions to watching broadcast British TV, as well as Amazon.co.uk accounts and the NHS still thinks they live in Acacia Avenue when they pop in to see the doctor on their trips "home". There has been an enormous kerfuffle as Britons, who have lived here for years and years, scrabble to get around to changing their driving licences, organising their "right to reside" paperwork and even register as living in the house they live in before the Brexit deadline. The fact that there's an advert on the Spanish Spotify channel advertising someone to sort out paperwork for British immigrants suggests that it's big business.

Apart from the slight twinge of losing something I've had for over 40 years I will miss the card not a bit but I do hope that today's change won't cause anyone here too much of a problem.

Peanut butter isn't really a Spanish thing

This morning I was talking to a Sergio. As we got ready to go he said he was off for his breakfast. Get yourself some toast with avocado I quipped. This is because I've recently become aware that avocado on toast is a trendy Spanish breakfast. Sergio quipped back - with peanut butter and mango eh?

One advantage or disadvantage of using Skype to speak to someone is that you see them. I obviously looked confused. Sergio stayed online to say that Social Media Influencers, had been responsible for a huge run on those products in the recent past. He specifically mentioned a 100% peanut peanut butter sold by the Mercadona supermarket chain.

I had a look for Sergio's Internet Influencers by searching for peanut butter and I found them. I found several as you might expect but one bloke, Carlos Ríos, who shows 1.4 million followers on his Realfooding Instagram, popped up time and time again. He was quoted in lots of magazine and newspaper articles. Not that I really read any of the articles or looked at his Instagram properly but it looks as though he rates the healthiness of various foods, recommends easy to prepare healthy snacks and does food related stories with a healthy angle. A reasonable enough way to earn a living in the Internet age. You'll get the idea from one newspaper headline about him;  The nutritionist influencer who taught 400,000 young people to eat like their grandmas. Obviously my Spanish tutor Sergio is aware of these sort of people and the things they post about. They had completely passed me by until today but that's probably because I'm now very old and I say things like "I don't see the point in Instagram and TikTok".

Carlos, on his Realfooding Instagram, recommended this brand of Mercadona peanut butter. As soon as I saw the photos I realised I'd bought some last year. Apparently I'd bought it within days of its launch, I'd tasted it and then thrown it away. It tasted nothing like peanut butter and was completely horrid. Not worthy horrid like that unsalted, unsweetened Whole Earth brand peanut butter I sometimes bought in the UK. No, this peanut butter wasn't simply a bit boring and a bit too chewy for my sugar and fat saturated taste buds. The Mercadona stuff had a horrible runny consistency, it dripped off the toast but, more importantly, it tasted absolutely foul. 

Another lost opportunity to be hip and cool or whatever the TikTok generation says to mean the same!

This is where we live

I was doing the Spanish conversation thing with Ana, via Skype. We were talking about Culebrón. I could see she had the wrong idea. I wondered if I'd ever written about the place we live in a general sense. I didn't bother to check in case I had. No point in wasting an idea no matter how moderate.

We're in the province of Alicante one of the three that make up the Valencian Community. Benidorm is in Alicante to help you locate yourself. Alicante City, our provincial capital, is about 50 minutes away.  Our municipality, Pinoso, is well inland, the last town in Alicante before crossing over the border into the Region of Murcia. Pinoso is nothing like Benidorm. 

If you turn left on the main road that runs close to our house you can reach Pinoso town centre in about five minutes, ten minutes and you'll be in the Region of Murcia. Turn right instead and, within fifteen minutes you'll be in Monóvar town centre. Ten more minutes in the distance from Monóvar you can see Elda/Petrer. Elda and Petrer are two different towns but, in places, one side of the street is in Petrer and the other in Elda. In Petrer or Elda there is a hospital, a hypermarket, cinemas, train station, fast food joints, castles and the Madrid Alicante motorway.

Pinoso is our local town. It's where we go to get cash from the bank machine, see a doctor, stock up on food, get a beer or go to a restaurant. There is a good sports centre, there are gyms and a library and a cultural centre and a theatre and a cemetery and a market hall and so on. It's a remarkably long so on given that, size wise, Pinoso is really no more than a village. It's to do with money. Although there's a lot of worry at the moment about the tumbling income from the marble quarry Pinoso has, within it's boundary, a huge marble quarry which has produced shedloads of cash for ages. I seem to remember that when building was booming the quarry was producing more than 6 million euros a year for the town coffers via a local extraction fee. Income was about 4½ million in 2018. A couple of months ago when I went to hear the sob story about how the town is on its uppers the predictions for income this year were only around 2 million. Goodness knows how Covid will affect that.  Very soon, unless they start to cut services, local taxes will have to increase drastically.

Outside the town centre Pinoso has a municipal area that takes in a fair bit of countryside. The countryside is peppered with vineyards, olive and almond trees; arable land. Pinoso's geographical limits stretch to the border of three municipalities in Murcia and, in our direction, to the municipality of Monóvar. Within Pinoso's boundaries there are lots of small villages. Those villages are called pedanias. By name they are: El Rodriguillo, Cases del Pi, La Caballusa, Casas de Ibáñez, Paredón, Lel, Ubeda, Culebrón, Encebras and Tres Fuentes. There are also a number of other clusters of houses, which are called parajes on the Pinoso Town Hall website. Those very small settlements, sometime little other than a wide spot in the road, are El Faldar, El Sequé, Venta del Terrós and Monte Cabezo. There must be some legal difference between peadanias and parejes because I'd guess that El Faldar probably has more houses than Cases del Pi.

Most of the pedanias have a mix of dirt and tarmac roads in the village centre. Individual houses are scattered around the outskirts of the pedanias. Quite a lot of these villages have restaurants cum bars, they all have a chapel and a social centre though neither is usually open. I don't think any of them have shops though Paredón has a British run restaurant, caravan park type complex which offers other services and that may include some British food products. We once went looking for a bakery in Casas Ibáñez which we didn't find but which people assure me exists. I'm sure that, in the past, the pedanias had bakeries and grocers but now everyone has an Audi Q7 instead.

We live in Culebrón which you probably surmised from the blog title. I wouldn't like to hazard a guess at how many people live in Culebrón. The official number is around 100 and I can quickly count at least twenty, maybe 25 households that stay here all year round so that's probably about right. In summer there will be a lot more because people think that the countryside is cooler than the town.  The main road down to Elda/Petrer used to snake through the houses in the village but a little before we moved to Spain a new road was built which divided the village into two distinct and unequal halves. The bit we're in has fewer of the limited services that Culebrón offers - like tarmac, street lighting, drains, basketball court, recycling bins, the social centre- than the other half. On our side of the road there's a farm, a bunch of houses, lots of crops and some dirt tracks. 

Most of the houses on our side of the road are in terraces, maybe only three houses but terraces none the less. So we have neighbours but we also have, what, by British standards would be, a big garden. The house is house like. It has a double pitched roof, mains electric and mains water though we are not connected to the drains. There is no mains gas but our Wi-Fi is an acceptable 20Mb.

The house itself is probably a couple of hundred years old though as there was no proper land registry in the area till 1987 nobody really knows. At one time it was two tiny terraced houses but they'd been knocked into one by the time we bought it. When we had to change the roof a few years ago the house got a bit of an exterior facelift so it doesn't look particularly old. The walls are thick which keeps the house cool in the summer and freezing in the winter. Nowadays though with pellet burners and gas heaters and hot/cold air-con we can keep the living areas warm when we're in them. It's still a bit nippy, read bloody freezing, first thing in the morning. 

It's absolutely true that Alicante has a brilliant climate, it's no lie that we get 300 sunny days a year but when the sun goes down, when you're inside or when you're in the shade it can be very cold. Sit inside an unheated building when it's sunny, clear and 18ºC outside and, after a while your fingers, hands, nose and ears will go numb. The buildings have almost no insulation, we have tiled floors and there are no curtains at the windows. Add in that we're at 600 metres (nearly 2,000 feet) which means we get lower temperatures than someone on the coast. As I read just the other day where I live it's summer by day and winter by night.

So there you go Ana. A bit of English for you to read!

Spanish for Siegfried, Triston and James

I read a book last week. In it a young woman has moved to the country, to a small village in the middle of nowhere Spain. She's thinking community and tranquillity. She rents a house and the first thing that she asks her landlord is if he knows someone who might have a dog for her. I was reminded of one of Maggie's stories. Maggie worked with a woman in Madrid who had a Spanish partner. The couple decided to move to the countryside and one of the requisites, one of the first things to do, according to Maggie's friend, was to get a "brute of a dog".

In the book the landlord palms the young woman off with one of his own dodgy dogs. Like all good country Spaniards the landlord thinks that it's cruel and unusual to sterilize a pet. The newcomer is from the city though and she takes the dog, for sterilization, to the nearest vet. The description of the vet's office is of a dusty and run down place where the vet is reading his phone and where there are no clients. It was much like that when we lived in Ciudad Rodrigo - except that it was before smartphones became our every time diversion. Eduardo the cat went with us. When it got to the time for his annual jabs I took him to the local veterinarian. The office was a scruffy and the vet was his own receptionist. I went more than once and I never had to wait.

It's not like that in Pinoso. We have a vet who trades under the name of Huellas; Pawprints. There's quite a team at Huellas including a receptionist, a bloke who seems to do a bit of everything, a couple of small animal vets - vets who deal with small animals not diminutive vets - and I think there's also a large animal vet (variation on the same explanation) but I haven't seen him for years so he may or may not still be there. There must be a dog groomer too because they offer doggie trims. Whatever, and whoever, the point is that it's a biggish team and it's a busy office. 

Turn up unannounced and you usually have to hang around for a while even when both vets are on duty. Plenty of Spaniards use the vet but, considering we Britons are outnumbered about 15 to 1 by Spaniards in Pinoso, we have a very strong presence in that office. It's amazing how often there is a Briton waiting with their (usually) dog or (sometimes) cat before I arrive. The vet's is fairly modern and the treatment rooms look properly medical with cupboards full of vials and tablets and sterile wrapped stuff. The vets are pleasant and well regarded.

Pinoso is very affected by we British. Brexit may be changing that a bit and there may be more Belgians and Dutch joining the Moroccans, Ecuadoreans and everyone else but there are still a lot of Britons and we are very noticeable. We're loud, we're old Empire confident and we don't blend in.

Whether we Brits are the reason that Cristina's is so busy or whether she was simply a vet with a well thought through business plan is something you'd have to ask her.

I'm not sure what colour jacket you need

As well as the post box, the bodega, and Jason and Patricia's B&B, Culebrón has a restaurant. The restaurant is called Casa Eduardo because it's run by Eduardo with his wife, Maria Luisa, and nowadays, their son Sergio. To be honest the business used to be pretty moribund but it appears to have bounced back from the number of motors I see parked outside. The usual explanation is that the son added a bit of sparkle. I've always liked Eduardo's but Maggie is less of a fan. That said there's absolutely nothing to stop me from popping over for elevenses or even getting an odd beer when Maggie's out working but I don't, at least not frequently enough.

Eduardo was talking to me quite a while ago now about Sunday mornings. He told me the restaurant had to be open at some ungodly hour for the hunters to get their breakfasts. Hunting is big in Spain. In season you can hear the shotguns going off from dawn to dusk and the abandonment of the hunting dogs when the season is over is a Spanish scandal.

This morning, on a local Facebook community page, someone was asking about hunting. I thought they wanted to do some but when I re-read the post they were asking if the hunters would be a problem if they bought a rural house. Pet dogs slaughtered in error, hunters walking across their land - that sort of thing. Anyway it piqued my interest because I guessed that going hunting in Spain might be a paper heavy undertaking. 

First of all you have to be over 14, over 16 in Galicia, and, if you're under 18 you'll normally need permission from your parents, guardians or carers. Then you have to pass the hunting exam which is set by each Autonomous Community. Once it's passed it's passed though. It's not a recurring test.

Next, each season you have to get a hunting licence for the region or regions where you intend to hunt. The licence is for a named person so it's non-transferable. There is a multi community licence available. If you intend to go armed you need a firearms certificate. There are different certificates and presumably different procedures for getting licenced for the guns suitable for small game hunting (rabbits, hares, partridge and the like) or for larger animals (deer, boar etc.) Crossbows also need a licence though apparently longbows don't. It looks as though the licencing for those is a state licence administered by the Guardia Civil. It's the firearms certificate that requires a health test which has to be done every so often dependant on your age. If you commit an offence or you break the rules your hunting licence or your firearms licence can be taken away. There are different procedures, and different licences, for hunting with birds of prey! Hunters need civil liability Insurance and without insurance all the other licences lose their validity. 

With the exam passed, the licences bought, your guns (or raptors) licenced and everything insured you then need somewhere to hunt. All over Spain you see the little square signs divided by a diagonal line into two triangles, one black and one white. They delimit the coto - I suppose the English word would be hunting reserve though that sounds like an oxymoron to me. Anyway, to hunt you need to get authorisation from the owner of the coto. I'm pretty sure that I've heard that farmers often sell the hunting rights on their land to clubs and associations.

The article I used as the basis for this post from the Royal Spanish Hunting Federation reminds hunters that they should always use legal methods for hunting which I presume rules out AK47s and hand grenades. Only animals listed as fair game in each region can be hunted. Hopefully then our cats are safe so long as the hunter's eyesight test is reasonably recent. There was also a general reminder that there are safety rules that have to be respected - for instance someone on the Facebook page that I mentioned above said that hunting within 500 metres of a house is not allowed and I presume there are other comparable rules and regulations. (This is apparently duff information; see the footnote). Then the hunting seasons have to be respected. I just had a look to see when that was but it's far more complicated than I expected. For instance, this year you can hunt rabbits with dogs from 19 July to 25 December but only on Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays and on regional and national holidays. On the other hand if you want to blow song thrushes out of the sky from a fixed position you'll have to hold your murderous instincts in check a little longer as the season doesn't start till 12 October and goes on till 6 December. You can't do that on Thursdays either - just Saturday, Sunday and regional and national holidays. Its the same start and finish dates and the same days for the lone hunter banging away at anything they find or a line of guns flushing out everything in front of them though hare and partridge have to be left alone after 8 November. No wonder they need to pass an exam! I suspect there will be a large section on noting the difference between rabbits, hares and chihuahuas and an even larger section on calendar use.

Oh, and I forgot all about hunting with dogs but without guns. And fishing. Pah!

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

It's a couple of weeks after the original post. It's Sunday morning and there are hunters near our house. There is a comment on this piece which says that the commentator didn't know about the 500 metre rule. As I said I read that on the answers to the Facebook question that prompted me to write this post. Apparently it's wrong. It may have been 500 metres at some time but there is an entry about Hunting in the Official State Bulletin signed Francisco Franco in 1970 which sets the limits at 100 metres from villages and the like and 50 metres from individual houses. There is a more recent entry in that same Official Bulletin relating to Valencia which sets those limits at 200 metres from the edges of villages and 50 metres from isolated houses with prohibitions too on shooting close to roads and tracks. Sorry about that misinformation.

Expect cloud cover and drizzle

I've been to Skegness and Morecambe and Rochester several times but if Star Trek's Mr Scott were to transport me to one of them without warning I don't think I'd know where I were. It's exactly the same with Spanish towns and cities. Of the 50 Spanish provinces I've been to 49 of their capitals but the only ones I know well are the local ones. The one I'm missing is Palencia. In order to be a completist though I'm also short of one of the two autonomous cities on the African coast; I've been to Ceuta but not to Melilla.

Last week we went on a bit of a jaunt, 1,979 kilometres of mainly motorway plugging passing through 15 or so provinces. The plan was simple enough. Up to a village included in the 20 prettiest villages of Spain list for the first night, a village in Huesca more or less on the French border with views to the snowy Pyrenees. Next a couple of nights in Pamplona, the place where they do the bull running with the red and white clothes a la Hemingway, before a longer stay at Zarautz on the Basque coast just outside of San Sebastián. From there we'd head south, running for home with an overnight in Zaragoza. Being that way inclined we added in a couple of stops along the route and our seaside lodgings were the base from which to sally forth. Just as I've been to Skegness I've been to Pamplona, San Sebastian, Vitoria and Zaragoza before but the bits I remembered were few and far between. The smaller stops, such as, Ainsa, Alquézar, Anso and Zarautz were all new to me.

If you want to look at the snaps they're towards the end of the September album and at the beginning of the October album. Click the link words. 

As we packed the car in Culebrón, to head off, I thought it was a bit chillier than it had been so, at the last minute, I threw a pullover and a light jacket onto the back seat of the car and a pair of trainers to accompany my sandals in the boot. Anytime any of the Northern regions of Spain feature on the TV news so do the umbrellas and snow ploughs. I know this but somehow I failed to register it. Maybe, because we live in the same country I thought it unreasonable that the weather differences would be significant. The sandals remained unused but I certainly used the trainers, pullover and the jacket. It was chilly, cold at times, and it bucketed down more than once. I knew it, the weather that is, but I hadn't really acknowledged it.

With the holiday over, as we unpacked in Culebrón, I thought maybe the Northern weather had travelled with us. It was nippy. I've often argued that Spain seems to have these quite sudden changes, often calendar linked, in weather. October has arrived and the warm weather is kicking its last for the year. I wore long legged pyjamas to bed for the first time in months, the window we leave permanently open all summer is now closed and, as we watched telly the other night, I added a bit of low level aircon to raise the temperature a tad. Today I dragged the calor gas heaters from out of the garage and even hung a couple of woollies in the wardrobe. At the moment daytime temperatures are still high but the mornings and evenings are cooler. Before long the five or six months of chilly, or downright cold, Spanish Autumn, Winter and Spring will be back to remind me why it is I really, really enjoy those months when the sun beats down relentlessly.

5,844 days

Sixteen years ago today, on 7 October 2004, I parked up in Santa Pola having travelled the 1,349 miles from Huntingdon behind the wheel of a 1977 MGB GT. My travelling companion was a black and white cat called Mary. Our destination was the flat where Maggie had been living for over a month whilst she worked as a teacher in nearby Elche. The journey took two days and cost 200€ in fuel, 120€ in tolls, 55€ for accommodation and just 25€ in food.

Now, if anyone had asked, I'd have sworn that on the first full day in Spain I went and signed on the equivalent of the Council Tax Register, the padrón. In fact my diary tells me otherwise. The only interesting thing I did that first day was to go, with Maggie, to a Spanish class that she'd booked us in to. It seems I didn't get around to signing on the padrón till the week after. Even then it wasn't my first bit of officialdom - apparently I'd managed to get a social security number a few hours before. Strange how memories become distorted with time.

Having done a couple of courses of Spanish classes in the UK I spoke some Spanish when I got to Spain. My memory is that we struggled with the language but that, overall, we used to manage OK. Again my diary suggests that I may be misremembering. I obviously felt strongly enough about it at the time to record that I had problems buying dusters and kidney beans one day! I didn't know the Spanish for either and, though I found the dusters easily enough, there were two jars of potential candidates as kidney beans. My solution, at the time, was to go to the international section in the supermarket (we were in Santa Pola after all) where I went through the ingredients on the side of a can of chilli con carne to find the Spanish words I needed. I suspect that the entry is a sign of frustration at feeling lost and adrift with the language. It's a frustration I still often feel.

As well as misremembering there are other early entries in the diary that show just how wrong some first impressions were. We went to Villena that first weekend. In my diary I mention that the town seems nice enough but that it has no "old part". If you've ever been to Villena you'll know just how wrong that is. It also shows too just how lost we were. Nowadays, when we go to a new town we always head for the bit where the town hall and parish church are because that's where the heart of the town will be. Seemingly we didn't know to do that in Villena all those years ago.

The house hunting began nearly straight away. If we could we went out looking at places together. There were a lot of cowboy house sellers at the time and we saw all sorts of junk. We soon became very aware of some of the very dodgy sales techniques of the numerous get rich quick merchants in a market where house prices were rising week by week. On lots of occasions people were simply wasting our time so it became routine for me to talk to agents and sellers and have a look at the places alone so that I could filter out the no hopers. Later Maggie and I would go back to anything that I'd added to the "reasonable" pile. 

Eventually I went to an Estate Agent in Monóvar who showed me, amongst others, the house in Culebrón where we now live. I saw other houses, with a different agent, in the same area, around Pinoso, on the same day. I didn't care for the Culebrón house much and I discounted it but, the next day, on the Saturday, I'd arranged for some second viewings so that Maggie could see my selection. As we passed, what is now, our track I made the short detour to show the house to Maggie. It just happened that the owner had been so appalled by the state of the garden, when he'd shown me around, that he'd come back to do a bit of tidying up. By sheer fluke he was in the garden when we showed up and so he was available to show us around. I still didn't like the house much though the driveway was nice. Maggie hated the other houses I'd lined up but she reckoned the Culebrón house had potential. The truth is that our house hunting was not going well, we didn't have enough money and we seemed to be running out of options. With the help of the estate agent we got a builder to have a look. On a miserable November evening in the light of very low wattage bulbs Maggie invented a plan for the design of our house on the spur of the moment. It was drawn freehand in an old school notebook. A few days later we got the builder's quote back and on the 19th November we made an offer on the house which the owners rejected. We ended up paying the full asking price.

Back in the diary my summing up at the end of the year contained the following - "... and now living in Spain with absolutely no income, no job prospects to talk of and living off Maggie. I've just agreed to spend all the money I have in the world on a damp, shed like house in the middle of bugger all where. I am quite unable to speak the language". 

We didn't complete the purchase till after the Christmas holidays and we didn't move in till April of 2005. I have a photo of Maggie, the photo at the top of this post, unlocking the gate as we took possession and, every time I see that snap, I remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach that we had just made the most terrible mistake.

The oddest thing though is that, the other day, I was driving somewhere close by - it could have been the Yecla road or the one down to La Romaneta - and I found myself grinning all over my face for no apparent reason. I was thinking how stunning the countryside looked and congratulating myself on having made the right decision when we upped sticks and moved here.

Oh, and in't seat o'nowt, as we say where I was born or aprovechando que el Pisuerga pasa por Valladolid as we say in the place where I live, there's another entry in my diary about the first weekend after getting here in 2004 which notes that our first meal out was at a local Chinese restaurant and cost a massive 4.96€.

Four syllables bad, two syllables better

I'm up to three sessions a week now with the online Spanish learning - a bloke in Alicante, another in Manresa in Cataluña and a woman somewhere that's really Barcelona but isn't actually Barcelona - like Croydon isn't London. The hour long sessions are just conversation so none of us have to do any prep. The conversations go hither and thither; we've talked about squatters, the pluses and minuses of vanguard cooking, the differences between elections and political representation in the UK and Spain and other similar topics. I often trip over words and pronunciation but, generally, the conversation flows well enough and I often surprise myself with the obscure vocabulary that I seem to be able to dredge from the deep corners of my rapidly decaying brain. The tutors are uniformly complimentary but I've noticed that I keep my end of the conversations simple. I'm hoping that it will become more complicated with the amount of time that I'm now spending on speaking Spanish but I fear I may be deluding myself.

When I was teaching English to Spaniards I was once asked to explain verb inversion. I didn't know what it was but it isn't actually all that tricky. Verb inversions happen most commonly in questions. Apparently something like -they are working- is considered to be "normal" while -are they working?- is considered to be inverted. That wasn't what the students were asking me about though. No, they were asking about an obscure but essential element in their curriculum at the Official Language School where they were all doing their exams. Take a word like seldom. If you put seldom at the beginning of a sentence the word order has to follow a pattern. It's not good English to say -Seldom you hear a politician apologise. We change the words around and say - Seldom do you hear a politician apologise. It's the same with other words like never and hardly. Never have I heard a politician apologise. That was the verb inversion the students wanted to know about.

I was a bit surprised by this. It was something I'd never noticed in English. I was so impressed that I set up a little experiment. I asked a few English speaking pals in a bar to use the word hardly in a sentence to see if we all, intuitively, changed the word order. My experimental design was poor. Everybody used hardly perfectly. The problem, for my experiment, was that nobody used hardly as the first word in the sentence. They didn't say -Hardly ever do I pay with cash- they said, instead -I hardly ever pay with cash. I went back to the students and told them to forget about verb inversions. I told them it was an example of archaic language that very few people use when speaking. Their response was an indictment of Spanish education in general. Not in our exams they replied. Ah yes, an education where trainee carpenters learn about, and are examined on, trees and the different qualities of wood they produce as well as the history of wood working tools but where they never quite get around to making a bread board or a shoe rack.

Back to my English pals in the bar. They did what I do when I'm speaking to the tutors online. I circumnavigate the difficult constructions with perfectly good, but simpler, phrases. Instead of saying -If I were to go to Madrid I would visit the Mercado de los Motores- I say -The next time I visit Madrid I'm going to go to the Mercado de los Motores. Or -I missed the bus yesterday because I got up late- to avoid the much more difficult -If I hadn't overslept yesterday I wouldn't have missed the bus.

For years my excuse for my halting conversation has been that I hardly ever speak Spanish. You don't need much language to do the supermarket shop or order a beer and I've always argued that my opportunities for longer conversations have been few and far between. These sessions will rob me of that excuse and only leave the reality of old age and fewer functioning neurones.

Fireside chats

If I'm going to blog anything this week it has to be Covid again so if you're fed up with Covid stop now.  

Pinoso is a small town. Just under 8,000 inhabitants. Over the time of the Covid alert there have been 68 cases with 40 of them being reported in the 14 days to 14th September. As it's now the 16th the figures are lagging behind the reality. Today, for instance, there is news of a pupil at one of the local junior schools testing positive so that the whole class is now in quarantine.

In the week beginning 10th August there were no reported cases in Pinoso, week beginning the 17th August just 2 cases, 24th 6 cases, 31st 17 cases and the 7th to 13th September 39 cases. The progression is obvious enough.

The figure that seems to be being used to compare how bad things are is the number of cases per 100,000. My sums convert 68 cases in a population of 7,966 to 853 in 100,000 with that number having increased by 502 in the last fortnight. The town which borders Pinoso is Monóvar and their cumulative figure since the start of the pandemic is 221 cases per 100,000. The big difference is that, in the last couple of weeks, their numbers have risen by just 3 cases. Monóvar is also substantially bigger with a population of just over 12,000 people. Mind you a bigger town over the border into Murcia, Jumilla, was closed down last week because of the increase in infections there.

Today, the 16th September, the national average for Spain is 281 cases per 100,000 population. The equivalent figure for the UK is 55 per 100,000. Bolton, which is I understand the hot spot in the UK, has 196 cases per 100,000. Obviously all these figures are a bit dodgy in the sense that I may not be using them properly, that they are dependant on the different percentage of tests amongst a population, that there are different reporting cycles and heaven knows what other unknowns of statistical trickery. The point is obvious enough though; Pinoso is not doing so well at the moment.

You may remember that the Spanish Government wanted to extend the state of alarm a couple of weeks more but they are a minority government and they couldn't reach a consensus with the opposition parties. Rather than lose a vote they gave way and let the emergency controls lapse. Since then the controls have been in the hands of the regional governments. One of the most often quoted reasons for Spain being in its current pickle is that the State of Alarm was ended too early and that the de-escalation was piecemeal.

During the State of Alarm, when we had to stay at home, the local mayor, the head of nursing services in our health centre and the chief of the local police did a weekly "fireside chat" on the local radio. Those talks were discontinued when the state of alarm was lifted but the triumvirate was back on the radio this week. They sounded more concerned this time than they did when the hospitals were overwhelmed and the death toll was high. Then it was "together we can beat this thing", "Pinoso is responding magnificently," etc. This week's report had a clear subtext that we were on the verge of disaster because most of us were not taking it seriously any more, that we were meeting who we liked and being lax about hand washing, disinfection, keeping our distance, wearing masks and particularly that lots of us were presuming that our friends were somehow safer than strangers. The tone was very much of a strong telling off - get your act together now or suffer the consequences.

It could be an interesting few days to come.

Please wash your hands

We went to a concert by La Habitación Roja last night. When I bought the tickets, only a week or so ago, the event was scheduled for the Teatro Principal in Alicante - all green velvet and gold leaf. Theatres have, obviously, been hit hard by the Covid thing and one of the reasons I bought the tickets was to do my bit for a local institution. A few days later I got an email to tell me that the venue had been changed to the bailey of the Santa Bárbara Castle in Alicante. Safer they said. Fewer viruses in the open air.

The castle in Alicante is on top of a big hill. Although it's a fair drag you can walk (or drive) to the castle on a road that starts from near the Archaeological Museum. On the seaward side you can get to the castle by using a lift that is accessed through a long tunnel. Along with the details for the change of venue the organisers said that the car parks behind the castle would be open and that the lift would be working. Yesterday, a few hours before the concert was due to begin I got a second email to say that the lift and castle car parks were now closed. There would be a minibus shuttle service. Covid certainly keeps organisers and rule makers on their toes.

The message said that it was still possible to drive to the two small car parks half way up the slope to the castle but that the police might close the car parks if there was too much mingling going on there. I suspect that had a bit of a hidden message. Young people in Spain have a fondness for impromptu gatherings which are called botellones (from the word for bottle). Often botellones are linked to parked cars and their music systems. Youngsters take the vodka, gin and mixers to the event in a plastic carrier bag, poorer young people take cartons of wine ready to mix with coke to make the disgusting but knee buckling calimocho. Obviously enough there is no set recipe but basically a botellón is an open air knees up with booze, snacks and music. The talk, amongst we older citizens, is only ever of booze, we never mention anything smokeable or poppable. Botellones, like discos, have been taking a lot of the heat for the recent increase in Covid numbers amongst young people. Well, that and family get togethers.

We have to wear masks all the time when we're in the street and in all public places. Given that eating or drinking whilst wearing a mask is counterproductive we can remove them to eat and drink, for instance outside a bar. We are supposed to pop the mask back into place between sips or whilst we're waiting for the pudding to arrive but most people don't. There are regular stories of police getting physical with someone who says no to mask wearing and the fines can be ludicrously high.

So, on the way to the concert we stop off for a drink. Our route to the terrace is clearly marked. No bar service, just table service. Gel at the entrances, limited access to the toilets following a marked route. A reminder about 40 second hand washing. Variations on a theme but the usual sort of stuff to try and check the spread.

After the bar we join the queue for the minibus shuttle. People aren't exactly careful about keeping 2 metres apart but it's a forgetful rather than defiant proximity and the line is much more widely spaced queue than normal. Nobody kisses, nobody hugs and nobody pumps hand on greeting friends. The minibus is an anomaly though. It smells very strongly of something ready to go hand to hand with viruses and bacteria but, nonetheless, we ride sardine like.

The concert is seated. The chairs are numbered. It's a slow process at the entrance; gel on hands before name and surname, the door keepers find you on the paper list and direct you to the designated seating. I notice that my phone numbers, email and address are alongside my name, presumably in case they need to hunt me down later. Our two chairs are a couple of metres from the four to the left and the five to the right. We are reminded not to wander around during the concert.

And so it goes. I visited someone in hospital yesterday. Masks and gel a go-go. The floor of my pal's room was mopped and his bathroom cleaned twice whilst I was there. There was a reminder from the local town hall about the protocol for funerals after someone died in Pinoso last week. Jumilla, one of our neighbouring towns over the border into Murcia, is sealed off from today because of the increase in cases. Nobody in and nobody out. Procedures and processes everywhere.

2020 is a strange vintage.

Making do, eating and mending

I maintain an impression that our bit of rural Spain is still quite traditional; a society that repairs things. Just check the roads at the moment with the tractors out for harvest. Most of the small ones look nearly as old as the blokes driving them! Whenever I think of this make do and mend culture I think of my sunglasses. In Cambridge, in 1984, I bought my first pair of Ray Ban Aviators. At the time the company was still Bausch & Lomb and their sunglasses were a superior product. So twenty years later we're new to Culebrón and one of the pad arms came loose on the sunglasses. I went to the local optician to see if the specs could be saved. The optician soldered the piece back in place whilst I waited and charged me nothing. Last year I threw the same sunspecs on the floor and trampled on them. The nose pad came away again. I went back to the same optician. This time she sucked on her teeth, suggested I bought new and only grudgingly sent the Aviators away for repair. They took a couple of weeks to come back and cost 15€. Still not a bad result.

A couple of weeks ago we went on a walking tour around Yecla. The historical story telling was complemented by music. Lots of the sites to be visited were in a maze of narrow winding streets. The guide, and the flautists, were repeatedly drowned out by noisy mopeds with pizza delivery boxes strapped behind the saddle. I reckon everybody in Yecla was eating pizza that Saturday. In Pinoso there is a points scheme which eventually earns you a free pizza for returning the empty box. It's obviously to curb the problem of boxes littering the streets.

I'm coming apart at the seams and my feet hurt most of the time. People spoke well of sandals made by a local Ilicitano firm called Pikolinos. I forked out a good number of Euros and bought some. They were fine, comfy and classic, perfect for an old bloke. I'm not easy on shoes though and, disappointingly, after a couple of months the stitching gave way in a key area and the sandals became unwearable. Now Pinoso is a shoe making town so I wondered where I could get them fixed. I didn't know a cobbler and my questioning of quite a few locals about the whereabouts of a shoe repairer drew a blank. I'm still sure there will be somebody but I didn't find them. More than one person laughed at the idea of repairing shoes instead of just buying new. In the end I got them fixed in one of those franchise places alongside a hypermarket.

I quite like the adverts on the telly. I mean, how did they know that I needed something to clean the gunk from the rubber concertina seal on the washing machine? On those TV adverts, amongst the cars and mobile phone networks, there are lots of ads for food. I've mentioned legions of time that Spaniards are deeply interested in food. The adverts on the telly aren't for quality products, they're for the sort of stuff that comes in packets, the food, loaded with sugar and grease, of industrial conglomerates. For instance one of the Spanish MasterChef hosts is currently advertising pasta. He suggests that the perfect complement to the pasta is a Bolognese sauce. Even with the perfect lighting of TV advertising the sauce looks like the sort of stuff blasted by high pressure hoses off the broken bones of nameless animals and reconstituted into meat shaped meat in a factory full of infernal machinery. There are adverts for Just Eat where happy families grin at perfectly shaped hamburgers, colourful salads and pizza slices that seem to make people show off their teeth in Julia Roberts style smiles. Children swoon and whoop with joy before non chocolate eggs and young adults find their enjoyment of video games and sporting competitions greatly enhanced by crisps made from reconstituted potato or instant noodles flavoured with powder from sachets.

It's not the end of the world or anything, though actually it might be a small example of the route there, but we older people notice change more.

The washing machine cleaner doesn't work by the way.

Watery stuff

Artemio is a heavy set bloke who works for Pinoso Town Hall. Usually he has a big cigar clamped between his teeth. I'd prefer not to commit to giving him an age. He drives a Jeep which, he says, is much better than the Land Rover he used to have but, as you can see from the snap alongside, the Land Rover is still with the team. Artemio's  voice is raspy and, until the second or third sentence, when I tune in, I find him really difficult to understand. Artemio is the bloke you call if there is a water leak out in the street, or in our case, on the track. It's a 24 hour a day service. Should you ever need it the number is 656978410. If the leak is on the domestic side of the water meter then you need a plumber but if the leak is on the other side of the meter you call Artemio. Or rather you call his number. He's in charge of the team and he's not always the person who turns up.

Most people expect that when they click the switch on the wall the electric light will come on and when they open the tap water will come out. In rural Spain that's not always the case. I suppose in rural Scotland it could well be the same. If you live a long way from power lines or water pipes then you're on your own. We have mains water and mains electric but not everyone in the countryside has. People have water storage tanks which have to be filled up from time to time by tanker lorry and lots of houses run off solar power either for environmental reasons or because they have no economic option.

Piped water around here comes as two variants. The stuff we have is drinking tap water. It comes filtered and treated. There is another network of water supply organised locally by S.A.T. Aguas de Pinoso, la Sociedad Agraria de Transformación. That network is designed for crop irrigation but, because it runs in places where the drinking water network doesn't some people use it as their primary water source. I think that it is basically filtered but I don't think it's suitable for drinking. That said I've made tea with it presuming that the boiled water would be safe. I wrote that section without checking the detail. I think it's correct but if it isn't I apologise now.

So, the last time I called Artemio was because I'd cut through a thinnish water pipe when I was hacking out weeds alongside our track. It turned out that it was a pipe our neighbour had laid himself to water his almond trees so I had to ring Artemio back and cancel. The time before that it was the public water supply and the water bubbling up through the soil was in the same place that it has bubbled up time and time again. "It's 30 year old pipe," said Artemio, "what do you expect? It goes time after time and we patch it up time after time too".

Interesting that about the pipe. We had a leak on our side of the water meter the other day. We got the original leak fixed and then the pipe, which is sort of semi rigid rubber, not quite the Durapipe type but not as flexible as hosepipe, sprang a pinhole leak. When I tried a temporary repair with some potty putty type epoxy resin the pipe sprang another leak. When the plumber finally got around to visiting he said that the pipe lasts for so long and then starts to fail; as if it had a sell by date. He also said that the piping which had failed, the stuff he was replacing, was thin walled agricultural pipe rather than the thicker walled domestic supply pipe. From the outside they would look identical if it were not for the blue pinstripe on the domestic stuff. He thought that we may have the thinner walled pipe from the meter to the stopcock in the house. He cheerily suggested that if it were beginning to go it may have reached the end of it's useful life. "Keep an eye on your meter." he said. 

I do check the water meter every week. I've heard far too many stories about unrecognised leaks leading to huge bills. I also pondered the pleasures of house ownership.

These things are sent to try us: five

I got my new Brexit inspired ID card a while ago. I'm sure you read the blog entry! A chum asked me if I'd help him get one too. Actually I can't help him much in that they won't let two people go in to the foreigner's offices together for some sort of anti Covid procedure. Filling in those forms and standing in queues is all a bit of a pain in the bum so I wasn't exactly overjoyed by the idea but I said yes anyway. That's what friends are for and other cliches. 

Then another pal told me that, yesterday in Murcia, when applying for their new card they'd bumped into an official who said that they needed not one but two appointments. One to apply for the card and one for the taking of fingerprints. I'm pretty sure that's not the procedure but, faced with someone who won't let you pass it doesn't really matter how right you are and how wrong they are. The somebody told me they stood their ground and actually got the card. Another example of the inconsistency of rules and procedures changed at the whim of an individual. 

The person who asked me to help him get the card would also have to go to the Murcia office but his Spanish isn't up to arguing his case. I just winced at the potential waste of time of it all.

Update: I went, with my pal, yesterday to get the TIE card in Murcia and I was wrong about them not letting me in. They let me into the building with him and into the waiting room so that he got to the point where I was able to direct him to the correct desk with the correct paperwork in his hand, duly completed and paid for. They didn't let me stay with him for the bit where his paperwork was processed but, at that point, it was basically all done. A few minutes later he came back to the waiting room with the application process completed. It'll be about four weeks until he's able to pick up the card with another appointment in Murcia.

These things are sent to try us: four

Spain, the nation, has all the safeguards on personal freedoms and rights that you would expect for a modern European democracy. The problem is that it also has lots of "authorities" too. These authorities impose various rules and regulations. Most are sensible enough. Some are stupid. If it's a stupid rule most people just grin and bear it but, from time to time, someone is unhappy enough to go to court. Despite the judges being, generally, old, rich, white men the decision usually comes out on the side of modern rights, freedoms and values in general. Basically stupid rules and procedures get struck down but it can all take a while. Covid though is testing some of those rights to the limit as authority after authority comes up with some sort of bright spark wheeze.

We seem to be getting Covid sick again, lots of us. People are dying too but not in the same numbers as earlier this year. As the numbers go up the rules get added to.

A local bar had it's live music cancelled. From having a look through the published restrictions on live music it seems to me that the local police chief has interpreted those rules in a way distinctly different to the majority of people and not in keeping with the spirit of the regulations. The problem is that even if his interpretation is blatantly wrong then not much can be done because, well, he's authority and we're not.

We've all been wearing masks in public places for ages. Obviously opinion on mask wearing is divided but most people seem to think that it's a reasonable enough rule and, the people who don't agree generally have the good grace to go with the majority decision. But the rules are getting more and more bizarre. All over Spain it is now quite difficult to smoke outside in public because, apparently, smoker's spit carries further than your average person's. My guess is that runners and trumpet players are equally dangerous but there is no moral crusade against them so they remain in the clear. For the moment at least.  

In Murcia they have reduced the number of people who can travel in a car. I wonder what happens if you're driving from Andalucia to Catalonia in an overfull car? Do you have to skirt around the Murcia region? That possibility has probably been anticipated in the rules but I don't suppose it stops drivers being pulled over by the police.

More fun to come I'm sure.

These things are sent to try us: three

I was determined that I was not going to get sucked into more cleaning or gardening or household tasks today. I was going to do a bit of reading and then pop in to town and have a chat with Jesús - not that one, just an ordinary bloke with a moustache. 

I had the bright spark idea that I'd dust the cobwebs off the bike and cycle in. When I went in the garage to get the bike there was a lake of water on the floor. Water was dripping down the Dexion shelving that we have there to store things. The main victims of the leak were boxes and boxes of old photos and photo albums. Soggy boxes are difficult to move. Getting a plumber wasn't as smooth a process as I may have hoped but I did get it fixed relatively quickly and the moist victims are sunbathing still.

I should have known. Six or seven hours later and I set about returning the refugee objects to their natural home only to find that there is still a pinprick leak spraying water all over another set of cardboard boxes. I am reminded of Hugh Grant practising vocab as he prepares to marry Duck Face in Four Weddings and a Funeral. 

Update: We had to wait for the plumber till Tuesday to come and fix the second leak. It seems to be OK now.

These things are sent to try us: two

If you need to go to a bank in Spain think about it taking a good part of your morning. You may be lucky. Correct desk. Person not at breakfast. No wait. No complications. I'm sure it will happen one day but even when it's been a relatively problem free run it has seldom taken me less than twenty to thirty minutes. It doesn't matter where it is, as soon as there's a physical or virtual queue it's going to take time.

Obviously the Post Office falls into this category. Yesterday I had a package to post. I went to the Post Office. Because the number of people who can be inside the office is limited the queue was in the street. I stayed for a while but after 20 minutes nobody had gone in and nobody had come out. My mask was getting tacky; I gave up. I popped back twice more in the next two hours. The queue was going nowhere. The main man in our post office isn't the sort of person to get flustered. He doesn't hurry. I thought I may be able to sidestep the queue and went to get the price from a private carrier but 20€ to send a 1 kilo packet seemed a bit steep. 

I went back to the Post office before 9am this morning when I reckoned there wouldn't be much of a queue. I was right; there was just one person in front of me. I was in and out in about 25 minutes.

Actually whilst I was there I got one of the DGT (Transport Directorate) stickers for Maggie's car. There are four stickers related to emissions - one for things like electric cars, another for the hybrids and then a couple more for modern and modernish diesels and petrol engined cars. The stickers come with new cars but Maggie's Ford Fiesta didn't have one. They are used in some cities as a way of identifying cars that are welcome or not welcome under certain conditions and in certain areas. You can get the stickers online but you can also get them at the Post Office and as I'd anticipated there would be no queue I'd taken the vehicle paperwork. I handed over the 5€ fee and came out with one of the C stickers as well as having left the parcel to their tender care.

These things are sent to try us: one

My Spanish old age pension is paid by the Seguridad Social. The idea is that I get a proportion of my state pension from the UK and a portion from Spain based on my work history in each country. Yesterday the SS sent me a text message to say that there was a message waiting for me on my account page on their website. The message was quite bald. "Your retirement benefit has been cancelled. You can find more information in gestiones" - I don't know how to translate gestiones for you - maybe something like management or processes. In gestiones it said "No steps have been found".

I think it may be an error or it may be an unfortunate use of the Spanish verb cancelar. It means cancelled but it means cancelled in both directions and finance language is a bit strange. It seems to be that the accounting viewpoint always reflects the situation of the payer. I'm hoping that when the SS tells me that they have cancelled my benefit they mean that they have cancelled their debt to me for this month. It's a bit of wishful thinking and when I asked a Spanish friend if she thought that may be what the language meant she was quite clear that it didn't. But that's the straw I'm clinging to at the moment. 

Otherwise I can look forward to a few visits to the SS office and a bundle of form filling and even maybe the loss of a significant part of my monthly income.

Update: The pension turned up in my bank account on the habitual date and in the expected amount. I have no idea why I got the message. Presumably it was just to unsettle me!

A decent innings

When Spaniards talk about electricity, in the house, they talk about light or at least they use the word whose principal English/Spanish dictionary translation is light. Or take tyre; there is a Spanish word for tyre but the commonplace word translates as wheel. It's pretty normal that a word we'd use in English has a direct translation into Spanish but the Spanish and English usages are different. Sometimes we have one word - slice for instance - whilst Spaniards have several and sometimes it's the other way round.

I was talking about this with my online tutor this morning. We got onto how words change with situations. It's unlikely that you would use the word piss directly with your doctor and equally improbable that, down the boozer, you'd talk about urine, micturition or passing water with your mates, though you might use the last if you were talking about a drive through the Lake District. The tutor said that he always found funerary language difficult. The way that, in both languages, we find ways to avoid words like body, dead and death. I said that one of my English language favourites, for avoiding plain talking, is the phrase that he or she had a good innings. It means that someone lived a long time. I should have kept quiet and nodded sagely.

To explain this phrase I needed to talk about cricket. Bear in mind that the majority of Spaniards know nothing about cricket. Well, in the same way that I think that American Football is a bit like rugby, Spaniards think that cricket is a bit like baseball. It's not the first time that I've talked about cricket with Spaniards. When I say that it's the second most popular game (fans not participants) in the world they never believe me which leads to a bit of a conversation about the size of the Indian population and a cricketing geography tour. Next comes a bit of a disposition on the bat - not just a club, like a baseball bat, but a carefully engineered bit of  kit. I could make the mistake of trying to explain leather on willow as a way of describing something traditional. I might even mention other cricketing phrases - on the back foot or on a sticky wicket. All of this so I can explain about an innings. I don't think there are many games where the length of a persons participation in a game is quite so elastic - though I suppose tennis and chess games can go on for ages too - or where a game lasting three or five days is normal.  Obviously I have to mention the one day game and the fixed over game too just for completeness. Along the way I may need to describe stumps, bowlers, fielders, umpires and goodness knows what else. And this from a man who, as my old pal Jim Buchanan used to say, could write all he knows about cricket on a small post-it note.

This happens a lot. I manage to tie myself in linguistic knots by walking into the ambush of difficult explanations. Explanations that would be difficult in English without the background of a shared culture. Do people from the US know about a long innings? Are sandwiches only made with sliced bread or does sandwich encompass rolls too? Pies and pasties are tricky to describe and differentiate as are cakes, buns and pastries. Explaining why we drive on the "wrong" side of the road, why people weigh themselves in comparison to rocks, why socks and sandals make sense and why not all beer should be served ice cold are just more snares that I have passed through in the past. No doubt I will again.

Apocritacide

There are a lot of flies in Culebrón. There are also plenty of wasps. The most common type in Culebrón don't seem to be quite like the one that stung me in Elland when I was at Junior School. I inadvertently squashed the poor beast as I rested my chin on a low wall to marvel at a Mercedes 220 SE "Fintail" passing by. Mr Kemp, the Headteacher, used an onion from the Harvest Festival display to lesson the considerable pain. I've been stung a couple of times here but, to be honest, I've hardly noticed. Obviously British wasps are tougher. National pride and all that.

Anyway, as I said there are lots of wasps. One of the common questions on Facebook, amongst the Britons living here, is how to deal with the hordes of them swooping and hovering over swimming pools. Being poor and poolless our wasps have to make do with drinking from the water bowls that we leave for the cats. Recently the wasps have also been feasting on something growing on the leaves of the fig tree. Wasps are not my favourite beasts but they have as much right to the planet as I have so, generally, I try to leave them be. Not always though.

They sometimes start to build very small nests, usually underneath the roof overhangs though not always. The one in the post box was a bit of a shock! The nests we've had have been very small, two or three centimetres in any direction, and usually with an obvious population of only three, four or five wasps. Sharing living space with wasp nests is just a step too far. Fly spray has proved to be drastically lethal to the wasps on the nests. One quick burst and the whole population drops dead to the ground. 

I've slaughtered one such population just minutes ago. I'm sure I will be judged.