Colourful

Thanks to William Blake, and probably more particularly to Hubert Parry, we know what colour England is. It's a green and pleasant land. I heard the tune the other day and it made me wonder what colour Spain is.

Round here my first thought is dust coloured. Alicante is summer and the summer is all orange and yellow and buff with a bright yellow sun. 

Blue as well. People often comment on the blue of the Alicantino sky. And the Med of course, despite being, apparently, full of plastic and other even more horrid things often gleams bright turquoise or sky blue. Just over the border into Castilla la Mancha, where they are a bit short of Mediterranean colour, they like to paint their towns white and indigo blue to compensate. 

If the Manchegos paint their towns blue and white the Alicantino tradition is of different colours to the facades of adjacent houses. Villajoyosa is well known for it but even in the streets of Pinoso the tradition is there if you look. Alicantino houses also have tall windows, with the jambs picked out in a different colour and fancy window grilles.

Of course it may be that Spain is green.  Not the British green. Well certainly not that drab grey and browny green of a cold English winter's day, complete with cawing crows. We do have greens. The vibrant greenness of the vines and the the, rather prosaically, olive green of the olives. Mind you, up North, the clichéd picture would show green pastures and black and white or Guernsey coloured cows. There may be pipers too; Galicia is big on bagpipes. The Cantabrian coast is called the Green Coast, la Costa Verde.

Down on la huerta, the market garden, of Valencia, the Orange Blossom coast, I could try to suggest that the orange groves provide another colour but the truth is that it's the smell rather than the look that oranges do best - at blossom time the citrus groves are pungently fragrant. That's not the case with the blossoms on the almond, cherry and peach trees with blossom which goes from the whitest of pinks to the darkest of reds.

When I asked Maggie what colour she thought Spain was she instantly said white. If you've ever travelled around Andalucia you'll know why. The villages there, often built on the hilltops are a blaze of white. Andalucia also uses that colour scheme beloved of bullrings - red and yellow. Like the colours of the Spanish flag. 

And all under the sun as the old advertising slogan used to say.

Nights on a white charger

I was in town this morning, on Bulevar, drinking coffee and reading a really interesting book about doors. A car stopped, the driver jumped out and went into the paper shop to get a newspaper. While he was parked, in the middle of the one way street, a van came up behind and had to wait. When the paper purchaser came out of the shop the van driver shouted to him "You couldn't do that in Madrid".  And it's true

Nobody would describe Pinoso, or even Culebrón, as "Deep Spain", la España profunda. That's the Spain that's empty, without services, left behind by the modern world. No mobile network, no health services locally, no Internet access, no shops. But lots of Spain is like that; nearly empty. There are hundreds of villages that only have a few inhabitants, usually older people, and there are even villages that are totally abandoned apart from, maybe, occasional weekend and summer occupants. There's a whole movement about la España vaciada, empty or emptied Spain. Pinoso is very rural, very traditional, but it has plenty of shops and businesses and even a bit of social life. Young people say it's a bit boring but I remember that Peterborough was voted the crappiest town in the UK by young people a few years ago so we can't take much notice of them can we? And, if Pinoso is rural then Culebrón is much more so.

We once looked at a house in Huntingdon with a view to buying. It was one of those big pre war villas with a really nice, mature, fenced in garden. Inside it was original. The wiring for the lights was bell wire tacked onto the wall. There were 5 amp and a few 15 amp round pin plugs. Original wiring. The house was above our budget anyway and we knew that a full rewire, and the rest, would just be so expensive. Every time we passed that house, modernised by its new owners, I wished we'd been rich enough to buy it.

I never really thought about the electric installation in the UK as I moved from house to house. I still have no idea what sort of circuit breakers/fuses most places have but I know that they never popped unless something went seriously wrong. Here in Spain it's something to be aware of as you buy or rent a house or flat. You might have a contract for 5.5kw for instance. In theory this means that the fuses might pop with just a tumble dryer, the oven and an aircon unit on. In practice the circuit breakers are quite elastic and you could probably draw about 11kw before they plunge you into darkness. Here in Culebrón, for years, we got by with 2.2kw because the infrastructure wasn't up to supplying much more and even now we only have 3.45kw. It doesn't really cause us much of a problem except on cold winter mornings when it's easy to get over enthusiastic with fan heaters, toasters, kettles and microwaves.

At the start of next month all the electric bills in Spain will be changed to reflect a new three tier pricing system based on the time of day. In the parlance there will be peaks, troughs and plains. Rather unsurprisingly the most expensive electricity is when demand is highest and the least expensive is in the dead of night and also on national holidays and at weekends. For those of us on a controlled price type contract this will be reflected directly in the bill. We'll be able to see how much we were charged in each time zone. The idea is that we will change our habits to save money and consequently be a bit greener. How the companies that sell power in the free market pass on the new pricing structure will, presumably, be reflected in each customer's contract.

The interesting thing about this new three time zone controlled contract is that it also allows for two different levels of supply. For instance if you have a power supply of 10kw you may decide that in the troughs you could get by with 5kw. In our case the contracted power is so pathetic that we'd be popping fuses left right and centre, particularly over the weekends and on those bank holidays, but if we lived in a less rural place with a decent supply, it might be worth considering dropping the contracted power supply overnight. As you may expect the price for a lower rated supply is less than for a higher rated supply. The example that is always quoted is for the people with electric cars. Charge up overnight on doubly cheaply rated electric.

I rather suspect in our case that the new three tier system will make our electric bills just a tad more expensive than the current two tier system we're on. It might also mean that I have to stay up a bit later to run the washing machine from midnight and the tumble dryer at the end of the wash cycle or maybe I can get Alexa to do it for me.

Boundary changes

We were in a traffic jam this last weekend. A proper traffic jam. A traffic jam that kept stopping and starting and which we took half an hour to clear. I felt quite sorry for the bloke in the Porsche Cayenne Coupé. He was originally alongside as we put on the hazard warning lights and slowed to join the tailback. He was so pressed for time though that he had to dodge from lane to lane. It worked. He was at least 100 metres in front of us when the traffic started to move again as the RM19 motorway, the one we were on, merged into the A30 that skirts Murcia city. 

I seriously don't remember the last time I was in a similar traffic jam here in Spain. We don't have traffic in the countryside. We really don't. Sometimes, where the Monóvar road meets the Yecla road in Pinoso, there's a police officer to make sure that you don't have problems turning left across traffic but that's only around the time the industrial estate kicks out. On the main roads in and out of Pinoso it's quite likely that you'll only see one or two cars, or none, in every couple of kilometres.

The traffic jam was important only in a lateral thinking sort of way. There was so many cars because, for the first weekend in ages, most of the Covid travel restrictions had gone. A few regions tried to maintain the border controls but the courts were having none of it. We've still got a midnight curfew in Valencia which might have been important if we'd been making our way home three or four hours later but we weren't so it wasn't. 

We didn't go far. About 100km from Culebrón but only 3.3km over the border from our home province. We were near Lo Pagán with the salt pans, the mud baths, the flamingos and the Mar Menor. Hundreds, nay thousands, of people had the same idea. Hence our difficulty in parking at the Port in las Salinas and the traffic jam later. 

When in Rome as the saying goes.

Hubble Bubble

The modern world is leaving me behind. I've said before about paying for things with my phone. I keep meaning to but, well, I don't really see the point. It looks as though using an app to pay may be slower than taking a plastic card out of my wallet and waving it at the payment terminal. I know I'm not keeping up though. My outlook is wrong. Lots of things that are, apparently, essential, from gaming to only tucking in half of my t-shirt seem a bit pointless to me. It smacks of my dad complaining about my musical tastes. Tom Eliot put it so well in his poem Little Gidding "let me disclose the gifts reserved for age". 

It's not that I feel that dinosaur like. I know about Google lens. This morning the arty Spanish podcast I was listening to (on my noise cancelling bluetooth headphones may I add) talked about the 40th anniversary of Bob Marley's death (who I proudly admit to seeing, in concert, in London in 1976). The music that accompanied the piece was a Joe Strummer version of Redemption song. I mentioned that I'd liked the song to Maggie who often comments, one way or another, on my dotage. She suggested that a quick visit to Spotify or YouTube would soothe any unrequited musical hankerings. I knew that. The truth is though that I still tend to buy and download music rather than listening to some streaming service. I find the unreliability of mobile networks quite annoying. There's a duet version with Johnny Cash too.

Anyway. Yesterday I had a phone appointment with a doctor. She said she would write me a prescription for some medication. I asked about the process for picking up the scrip and she sounded nearly as patronising as Maggie when she answered. "I've put it on your card," she said.

Here in Valencia we have a SIP card. The initials stand for, Sistema de Información Poblacional, the Population Information System, which sounds very Big Brother to me. Although this health service card, well the phone app associated with it, can be used to make and check appointments the card is most used as identification within the health system; every time you see a doctor or a nurse, have a hospital appointment or pick up a prescription from a chemist you are asked to show the card. What I didn't know was that the doctor can tap the details of any prescription into her computer and that same information becomes available in the pharmacies. Produce the SIP card and the chemist can hand over the medicines. I don't use doctors often enough to be sure of this but I think it may be something that has been beefed up because physical appointments have become so much rarer in times of Covid. 

Just to finish off I have another old man confession. I had jobs to do in town. I had to fill the prescription but I also needed a butane bottle. Whilst I was getting the gas I bought a broom. A Macbeth type witch's broom. I hoped that it would be good for flicking the fallen mulberries to the side. You can't get much more traditional than that. I'm told it needs no recharging and works without any sort of internet connection.

Getting my jab

Not that I expected a marching band or anything but I did expect a bit more of an event. A queue of people waiting for the vaccination would have made it more memorable, serried ranks of desks each one attended by a little group of medical personnel all in purple gloves would have been good. But none of it.

Yesterday I got a phone call on the landline. It was the local health centre and they gave me a time for an appointment today. I left home fifteen minutes before the set time. "I'm here for the jab," I said and I think the person on the door already knew my name rather than reading my name from the health card she asked to see. No temperature check or anything.

I was taken to a chair in the corridor, where people normally wait to see the doctors, and told to wait. I was given a couple of stapled bits of the sort of photocopy where the second copy was made from a copy and the third copy from the second copy and so on for forty generations. Stencil quality. The first sheet told me all the possible side effects. One of those was cefalea. I sniggered. It's the technical term for a range of headaches. Spanish "authorities" have never agreed with Hemingway that there are older and simpler and better words and always choose to use an obscure word to show how much cleverer they are than you. There was a date and time for the second dose too just three weeks away. The second sheet told me that I was getting the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The paperwork also told me the internet links to get copies of the full prospectus sheet for the vaccine and a certificate of vaccination.

I waited a while. A young woman wearing a white coat and pushing a trolley asked me if I was allergic to anything - I gave my usual answer of bills and taxes - she checked if I was taking some drug, which I wasn't, and pushed a needle in to the top of my arm. The same sort of injection that I've had hundreds if not thousands of times before. She pushed a bit of damp gauze against my "wound" and said to wait for fifteen minutes. I did. Then I left. At the door I made a vague effort to check f it were OK to leave but nobody was the least interested in me and I needed to go to Alfredo's to arrange a haircut while I was in town.

And still no band.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away

I always called it Road Tax and I suppose that's what it really was, in the beginning. You had a car and you paid tax that was then used to build and repair roads. It's not a principle that's applied to schools or social services but I can see the sense.  Not everybody needs roads so the people with vehicles pay. But UK road tax was abolished in 1937, long before even I was born, and replaced by Vehicle Excise Duty. This is, and was, a tax on cars, not roads, and it goes straight into the general fund.

Here in Spain I pay a vehicle tax too. It's charged by the local town hall and collected on their behalf by a tax management agency, called SUMA. SUMA is a local organisation created by most of the Alicante town halls, working collectively, to collect local taxes. The tax on the Arona for this year is a bit short of 18€. Obviously comparing a local tax with a central government tax is unreasonable but it looks as though the Vehicle Excise Duty in the UK for the same car would be £155. 

The roads have to be paid for somehow and we have a lot of toll motorways in Spain. The motorway that runs up the Mediterranean coast was a toll road for years but most of that became free at the beginning of 2020. Not all the local motorways are free though and we still have a couple of paying motorways close to us. There's one that goes around Alicante and another that branches off the Mediterranean motorway heading for Torrevieja and Cartagena. In the olden days, when we weren't confined to our home region and we could stay out after 10pm, the SatNav often warned us of tolls. I think we were paying 12 centimos for every kilometre on the Mediterranean motorway just before the toll was removed so that popping up to see pals in Altea, which only took a bit over an hour, cost around 18€ for the round trip. 

I don't like tolls much. It's not that they are inherently bad but they always strike me as expensive. On October 7th 2004 my diary entry says that my 1977 MGB GT covered the 1349 miles from Huntingdon to Santa Pola using about 200€ worth of petrol and with 120€ in tolls. MGBs are old and thirsty cars. Mine had the steering wheel on the wrong side for paying tolls on the European mainland. I got quite a lot of exercise, running around the car. The cat in the passenger seat was no help at all!

Anyway. You may have noticed that we've been having a bit of a problem with a virus. Like nearly everyone else the EU decided to print money to deal with this. They told Spain they could have 140 billion to fund a recovery plan. There were lots of conditions to getting the money, most of which I don't remember, or never knew, but the news reports always mention principals like developing modern infrastructure and being greener. Spain had to write a plan to say how it intended to spend the billions but also how it intended to help itself. Apparently the plan is only about 800 pages longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace and on, at least, one of those pages is the plan to introduce or reintroduce tolls on all Spanish motorways.

I can't imagine that the new tolls, due for 2024, will be paid at toll booths by actually handing over coins or banknotes or even virtual money but, however they track my use and make me pay I'm sure I won't like it.

On C90s and Romesh Ranganathan

Valencia, the region we live in, has had less severe Covid restrictions than some other regions. Bars and restaurants, cinemas and theatres, shops and hairdressers have been open, with varying restrictions, since May of 2020. We've been confined to our region and there has been a curfew from ten in the evening for months and months but, overall, we've got off pretty lightly. On May 9th the State of Emergency will end and, when it does, heaven knows what will happen. The Spanish Constitution outlines rights and duties and free movement is one of the rights. I'm interested to see how things go as the regional governments try to enforce restrictions that will be challenged as unconstitutional in the courts.

Spain hasn't yet reaped many of the apparent benefits of mass immunisation because the vaccination programme has been very slow. At first the organisation was a bit slapdash but now the main problem seems to be the supply of the various vaccines. The regional health authorities have used, or have a use for, all the serum made available to them. The confusion around the safety of some of the vaccines for certain age groups also caused so many fits and starts that the social networks are awash with complaints that some groups have been immunised before other groups have had their first jab.

Given that we have been supposed to stay at home as much as possible lots of the things that normally happen haven't. Even the things that we have been allowed to do have seemed a bit desperate, a little like doggedly lighting the barbecue under the eaves of the building despite the wind and rain. It's fine walking along the coast but gazing out from misted sunspecs, because of the mask, onto a panorama of closed shops and bars soon loses its appeal. It also feels a bit uncivil too. Like the way that dancing has been criminalised. But fewer things happening means less to blog about.

One of my few sources of outside news are the italki sessions, the one to one online Spanish sessions with "native speakers". I've already written blogs based on several of those conversations but, drastic times call for drastic measures, so here I go again. 

Last week Juan Pablo seemed a bit down. He told me he'd just turned 30 and that he was still living at home without anything he could call a career. He supposed his life would be pure decline from then on in. We spent a while talking about what he wanted to do in the future. Simply as something to talk about I suggested that he go into business for himself. It was noticeable how uninterested he was in that idea and how quickly he dismissed most of my suggestions. I wasn't surprised and not just because my ideas were a bit far fetched. General perceptions, backed by numerous surveys, show that most young Spanish people hope to land a traditional, reasonably well paid, steady job rather than to make it big as an entrepreneur. Obviously enough video blogging has now joined the old favourite, pie in the sky, jobs of footballer and rock star in the lists. It's very unlikely that the next Elon Musk or Kylie Jenner will be Spanish. Failing in business here produces a stigma that nobody from the United States, and only very old Britons, would recognise and the bureaucratic obstacles to starting a business in Spain are still manifold and labyrinthine.

If Juan Pablo felt old then Susi helped me to feel ancient. At one point, no doubt after a failed play on words on my part, she told me that she didn't understand British humour. I said that I thought one of the main differences seemed to be that Spaniards often like physical humour. The sort of comedy that involves silly voices and falling over. I was at a bit of a disadvantage because the chance of me knowing anyone famous from the Anglo world who would be famous here was remote. When I left the UK people like Catherine Tate and David Walliams were cutting edge and YouTube comedians hardly existed. My grasp of the Spanish comedy scene is more than tenuous. I suggested to Susi that UK comedians were more like the standups Eva Hache, Berto Romero or Luis Piedrahita and not at all like Santiago Segura in the Torrente films (sexist, racist, slapstick) or José Mota (silly voices but and some sitcom type sketches). As Susi continued to look confused I suddenly remembered. Benny Hill. Benny Hill I shouted. Benny Hill was incredibly famous here. People loved Benny Hill. But apparently not Susi. Too young (her) or too old (me) I suppose.

A bit later I'm talking to Susi about how my experience is that Britons are more culturally in tune with European countries than they are with the United States despite the shared language. I have a time worn anecdote that involves someone in my 1989 Rover 416 Gsi choosing to play a Beethoven cassette because it was "more British" than the salsa, rancheras or cumbia which made up the bulk of my in car entertainment at the time. The story fell down a bit because Susi didn't know what a cassette was and also because my pronunciation of Beethoven wasn't immediately recognisable to her. 

It just goes to show though that whilst Susi may be young she isn't that "hip" either as the new Wolf Alice album in July has a cassette release. I also noticed that a singer from Murcia called Yana Zafiro is offering stuff on cassette along with lots of Bandcamp artists. Never mind, all of it is something to chat about.

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By the way if you fancy having a go at the italki lessons yourself, for any language, let me know. I'll recommend you and we both get to save some money if you actually sign up

When?

For this post to work you're going to have to pretend that lots of generalisations are true. For instance that a man and a woman living together and caring for a few children is the historically normal family unit or that, through time, women have worked at home while men have worked elsewhere. You can't bridle either at the idea that people in the UK go to work in the morning, have a lunch break and then go home sometime in the early evening; 9 to 5. Likewise, for Spain, we're going to agree that people go to work in the morning, stop work in the early afternoon, start work again in the late afternoon and then go back to work till mid evening. Again, Pitman style, we'll call it 9 to 2 and 5 to 8.30.

So, in this generalised world, Britons have a shortish lunch break during the working week which means that they eat their main meal of the day in the evening. Spaniards on the other hand, with a longer midday break, eat their major meal of the day then. This is not to suggest that dinner is non-existent in Spain but it is, usually, a much less substantial meal than lunch. This can cause British holidaymakers to Spain some distress when they want to follow their habit of eating more in the evening. They wonder why so many restaurants are closed in the evening especially out of season or away from tourist areas.

Remember that we are in some sort of world where Victorian values have been restored. As the man comes home his expectation is that his woman will have his food ready. In the UK we're presuming that workplaces finish around 5pm so, with a bit of travel, the mealtime, set by the man's work schedule, will be sometime a little later, maybe 5.30 or 6pm. In Spain the man leaves work at around 2pm so the food should be on the table around 2.30 or 3pm. Spanish men come home from work twice a day, the second time he'll be home around 8.30 so mealtime will be around 9 or 9.30pm.

Leisure activities tend to fit around the work and meal schedule. As a, going to the pub before going on to the disco to get turned down by any number of young women, youth in the UK in the 1970s I would arrange to meet my chums at maybe 8pm in the bus station. That would give me time to eat whatever my mum had cooked for me before putting on my going out clothes (washed and ironed for me by my mum). If I'd been a Spanish youth, and I was working, I'd still be at there at 8pm and even if I were studying or out of work I'd still have to wait for my evening meal. So a Spanish youth would arrange to meet his or her pals in the estación de autobuses at maybe 11pm. In British and Spanish cases we're meeting our pals a couple of hours after mealtime.

It must have been around 1985. I was staying with some chums in Valencia. They asked me if I wanted to go out for the evening and I said yes. They rang a few friends and suggested meeting in a bar at midnight. I thought this was as hilarious as it was outrageous. What a ridiculous time to meet! Surely midnight was a time for coming home after a skinful not time to go out to get one? Remember that at the time British pubs closed at either 10.30 or 11pm. To be honest the thing I most remember about that meeting was not the time, it was the bar. It was like entering Bedlam. The noise, the smoke, the crush of people and the overwhelming nearness of it was impressive but somehow my pals magicked a table and chairs from the chaos and then waited to be served. Table service and paying the bill at the end seemed strange to me too. 

This time shift takes some learning; some deprogramming. To we Northern Europeans used to a different schedule these timings just seem ludicrous. Nonsensical. We don't understand why the Pinoso town fiesta, for instance, has an opening ceremony at 10pm, why the firework display starts at midnight and why the folk dancers will be on stage sometime around one in the morning. It's the same, but in reverse, for Spaniards at the moment. They are having a lot of difficulty with the idea of a theatre performance at 6.30pm or the last session at the cinema being one at 7pm so that everything can be done and dusted for you to be home before the evening curfew.

Time to greet

When I used to teach English to Spanish speakers we had a lot of fun with Good Morning and Good Afternoon. I'd stress with the students that we Brits are often pedantic about the time. At 11:59 it's morning but at 12:01 it's afternoon. Evening is vaguer. Does it really begin at six and run to midnight? In summer surely the evening starts a bit later than on a dismal cold grey day in December? And what about greetings? Spaniards use Good Night when they meet people whilst we Britons don't. In my shebeen going days I used to prove my sobriety to the bouncers at four in the morning (at night?) with a cheery Good Evening. If I'd been a baker or a morning show radio presenter going to work at the same four in the morning I'd probably have greeted my work colleagues with a Good Morning instead.

The word "tarde" is used here to describe both, what Britons call, afternoon and early evening. Most people learning Spanish usually thinks of tarde as translating directly as afternoon. When someone suggests to me that we meet in the tarde my years and years of British training kicks in and I think they mean sometime between three and five whilst they're visualising an early evening drink around eight or nine o'clock. Night starts about then, about nine, but again, it often depends on when you eat your evening meal.

We were watching some afternoon British TV yesterday. People who'd set up businesses in France and Spain were the focus. It's one of those programmes done as a sort of fly on the wall with commentary. In Spain a couple wanted to put Yurts on their land to complement their B&B business. They were waiting for the mayor to talk about planning permission. "He said he'd come in the morning," said the yurt owner, "It's already half past one so I don't suppose he's coming. This is Spain after all". I guffawed because it is, indeed, Spain and in Spain morning lasts till you've eaten lunch. As 2pm is the earliest that you might consider lunching then half past one is still, very much, morning. If someone greets you, at half two with the Spanish version of Good Morning then you know they haven't eaten yet. 

I do and sí quiero

We went to a wedding at the beginning of this month. It was only my second in Spain. The last one was back in 2017. That time it was a civil ceremony but it was a full scale event with both the bride and groom turned out in traditional style  - white frock for her and a suit with a waistcoat for him. The setting for the ceremony was dignified, we threw things at the newly married couple, they drove away in a classic limousine and the do at a hotel afterwards was posh and tasteful. There was copious and excellent food, lots of drink, smart clothes, little presents from the bride and groom, speeches and modern touches like a "photo booth"; the full works. Spanish weddings are very recognisable to Britons, there's no best man and the language is different but otherwise it's all very much to format. 

We did get to go to a wedding in the UK in 2019. That time the setting was a country castle with an oak panelled bar where the Lagavulin flowed. The ceremony was in the open air in a walled garden with the British weather threatening to do its worst. The groom and best man wore tailcoats. There were bridesmaids and pageboys. The bride was in the sort of white wedding dress that people comment on. A sit down meal, forks tinkling on glasses, please be upstanding announcements, loosening of ties, cake cutting, first dance, uncles and aunts, cousins, in laws, a crying baby and never ending photos. Memorable.

Our most recent wedding, planned for 26 March was a bit different. The decisive difference was that it didn't take place as planned. It was also different because it was a same sex wedding. The reason it didn't happen was that the person whose job it was to process the marriage paperwork got ill. The documentation languished on his desk for weeks. The ceremony was due to take place in Pinoso Town Hall with the mayor officiating. I think the story is that when the mayor's secretary phoned the couple to check some details the realisation dawned that none of the appropriate permissions had arrived. The couple kept calm, accepted that the ceremony had to be postponed but saw no reason to cancel the lunch they'd booked at a local restaurant. Maggie was a witness, which is why I got to tag along. Covid restrictions meant that the numbers for the civil ceremony were limited so it was just seven of us that enjoyed the champagne and the special menu. Whilst we were at the table news arrived that the paperwork had been delivered to the Town Hall. A vision of the Japanese Ambassador waiting to deliver the declaration of war to the US Secretary of State in 1941 sprang to mind.

The wedding ceremony did take place nearly a week later. The second time there were just eight of us in the  mayoral office to witness the couple tie that knot: the mayor, the translator, the couple, the two official witnesses and two hangers on (Paco and me, partners to the witnesses). Ceremony wise it wasn't quite on the same scale as the weddings above. It was a really nice event though. The ceremony just felt so friendly with quite a lot of laughing, plenty of verbal asides and a bit of line fluffing when it got to the all important, sí, quiero - the Spanish "I do". I grinned a lot and shed a tear or two. And we got to go back to the same restaurant for a second time.

Trainee journalists always used to start in the births, marriages and deaths department. Fortunately for us, although we're still missing a baptism (and the incredibly important Spanish rite of first communion), the uplifting events still outnumber the one funeral that we've been to this century. I should add that Maggie, being much more sociable than me, has done other weddings whilst I've moped at home claiming poverty.

Shops, shopping and clicking

First my habitual opening diversion. Over the years there has been a fair bit of controversy from time to time about the skin colour of the actors who interpret Othello in the Shakespeare play. You probably know that the full title is The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. Moor, from Blackamoor is an outdated and offensive term to describe a Black African or other person with dark skin. In Spain the word moro is the direct equivalent of moor. It's used to describe dark skinned people, usually people from North Africa: Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans and Sahrawis. As with other, similar, words its use can be racist or not. Generally though, for most Spaniards, moro is just a descriptor, like the use of Eastern European, Whilst the media shy away from the word ordinary people don't. I haven't heard many suggestions of a name change for the Moros y Cristianos events though there are plenty of concerns about white people blacking up during those, and other, events.

Over in Petrer there is a shopping centre. Until recently it was called Bassa el Moro; Bassa the Moor. The  reason for such an odd name is that the shopping centre stands on the site where Bassa surrendered Petrer Castle to the Christian King Jaume I in 1265. The shopping centre recently changed name. It's now Dynamia. When I saw the name I immediately imagined some muscled bloke wearing his purple underpants over his tights but I'm sure the idea was to try and give a new image to the shopping centre which has been a white elephant for years. We used to go there quite a lot because it was home to our preferred cinema but then the cinema closed. We popped in the other day just to have a look at the new paintwork. It was sad. The place has almost no open shops. The cafes and restaurants have closed. Good luck to the new owners on revitalising it though it seems to be generally accepted that physical shops are in decline as we increasingly shop from our phones. The obvious problems of the Dynamia shopping centre made me think there may be a blog about the current situation of other local developments.

In broad stroke I suppose it's fair to say that shopping malls, the shopping centres where lots of individual retailers cluster together in purpose built buildings, are a 20th Century phenomena while department stores, one retailer building a big store with separate areas for separate types of goods, are more 19th Century in origin. I notice that the Burlington Arcade now advertises itself as the original department store so perhaps my homespun definitions aren't correct. Nonetheless it is true that department stores are having a tough time. Here in Spain the near legendary Corte Inglés, a quintessential part of Spanish city life, is struggling, laying people off and closing stores very much like John Lewis and Debenhams in the UK. This ties in with the idea that physical shops are now an outdated concept and that online sales are the way to go. We were in a shopping centre in Elche just a few hours ago though and, given that we are talking about Wednesday afternoon shopping, it looked to me as though lots of people haven't heard that they should be buying online.

Normally we venture into shopping centres because we are going to the cinema but from time to time we do go specifically to buy things. The one I like best, because it's big and because it has a bookshop, is probably Nueva Condomina which is over the border into Murcia. I think that the buildings were originally owned by the supermarket chain Eroski but they got into a lot of trouble with property speculation and sold the centre on a while ago. The last time we were there, over a year ago now because of the travel restrictions, it was still doing well with lots of bag laden shoppers, queues outside the cinema and a wait to get into the fast food cafes and restaurants. 

The other centre we tend to use, for shopping, is the Aljub in Elche; that's where we were this afternoon at the cinema. It's not a particularly big centre and I think that it's main attraction for us is that it's the closest to home and the easiest to get to. Again it was Eroski owned but they hung on in this one by reducing the size of their store so that other shops could open in the freed up space.

If those two seem to be doing OK the shopping centre almost literally across the road from the Nueva Condomina in Murcia, the Thader Centre, is dying on its feet. Every time we pop in there are more and more empty units. Probably it's saving grace is that it's home to one of the successful low price supermarket chains, Alcampo, and on the same site there is IKEA which seems to have some sort of fatal attraction for any number of people. It's the same story at the Puerta de Alicante centre which is, obviously enough, in Alicante. There even the shops opposite the string of tills in the Carrefour hypermarket are unlet but, just across town, the Plaza Mar 2 centre in Alicante seems to be doing OK. It could be because it's more central, it could be because the tram stops there or it could again, be the lure of Alcampo. Whatever it is the last time we were there, at the end of December, the Christmas shoppers were knocking us aside with gleeful abandon in their shopping frenzy. Of course personal perceptions can be wildly misleading. Busy does not, necessarily, mean profitable and it could be that we only ever see the places at their best but it certainly appears that there are big differences between the different developments.

While big shopping centres and online shopping are right enough we've been trying to do that shop local thing recently and I must say that whilst it might be more efficient getting stuff online from Amazon or in the flesh from a series of shops in the same space the service you get from our local shops can be much more uplifting and personal.