Unexpected effort and unexpected success

We are going to have a cut down version of the Pinoso Fiestas next week. Less than usual but much better than nothing. Well done Pinoso!

The various conditions to keep the concert type events safe means that the audience for any events has to be controlled and that involves tickets. Most of the events are free so the tickets are called invitations but, nonetheless, you need to have one in your hand to get to see or hear the event. We've had to get the same sort of thing for months, and nearly years, now at lots of venues but mostly the bookings have been possible online. That wasn't the case for Pinoso. 

As well as the fiesta events next week there was a concert by a local choir yesterday and the town band have a concert today. I got the band tickets by going to their office one afternoon. A bit of a trek but easy enough. I went to ask at the Cultural Centre about the choir concerts at the beginning of the month and I was told I was too early. I tried, unsuccessfully, on two separate occasions later in the month to get the invites. The main problem was that nobody seemed exactly sure when and where I should go to get the tickets. In fact, on the night, there were tickets on the door and the space for the outdoors concert was enormous so it was dead easy to keep our distance. The audience capacity of the venue was much, much greater than the size of the audience.

To get the fiesta tickets I went to the Town Hall at the beginning of last week and I was told they would be available later and that there would be an announcement on one of the various online channels that the Town Hall uses. I saw no announcements but I went back anyway a few days later to find a long queue for tickets. The local mayor and the councillor responsible for fiestas were handing out the tickets. A bit extemporised or what? I waited about 20 minutes and got tickets for two of the three events I wanted. The process was inevitably slow because they were taking names and phone numbers just in case there was a need to follow up after an outbreak. For the tickets for the third event I was told to come back tomorrow. Tomorrow was Friday. On Friday I was told Monday. No queue the second time at least.

This is how it always used to be in Spain. Things having to be done face to face. Often you needed "inside" information to be more successful. Nowadays it's not usually the case. Even in Pinoso I was able to get tickets at least one event, a theatre performance, during the fiestas, online.

Yesterday evening, late, I realised my bank card wasn't in my wallet. Pit of the stomach feeling. I searched high and low. Not a sign. My banking app told me there were no dodgy movements and it was easy to suspend the card using the same app. It seemed though that I needed to phone someone to definitely cancel the card and go to a branch to get another one. I tried the free-phone number to report the loss and got a message to say there was a fault with the number and to try later. The extra stumbling block, after psyching myself up for the call, was most unwelcome. Spanish on the phone still can't be counted amongst my strengths. I went back to the website to check how to cancel and renew lost cards. They had a video. I clicked here. I clicked there. Within seconds the website tells me that I've successfully cancelled the card and a new one is on its way. The process I expected to be difficult, and was the last time I did it, was easy peasy whilst something I'd expect to be a piece of cake, getting a couple of event tickets, took eight visits. 

Such, as they say, is Life in Culebrón.

Is it a car, is it a skirt? No, it's a glass!

Being remarkably hip and cool, or whatever you say nowadays for being hip and cool - straight fire Gucci maybe - we go to see a fair number of contemporary musicians. Just so my mum understands I mean pop festivals. We go to see the town band too so, really, we're neither hip nor cool. Never mind. At a music festival, in non Covid times, the security check at the entrance was to look for anything unsafe and to root out food and drink. Nobody likes to pay festival prices for beer or for a rum and coke.

Festivals aren't permanent events, more or less by definition. The jobs they provide are temporary. Most of the staff are temporary. And temporary tends to unknown and unknown tends to untrustworthy. Years ago the daughter of one of my work colleagues went to Ibiza for the summer season to work in a bar. The young woman turned up, sober and unstoned, on time, every day, for the whole of her contract. Her boss was so unused to this responsible behaviour from his young, temporary staff that he paid her a bonus and tried to hire her, then and there, for the next season.

At a festival the temporary staff on the bars aren't trusted to handle money but someone has to, so the bosses get someone to run a cash office in whom they have more confidence. These money handling trusties take the money from the paying punters and change it into little tokens which then become the currency of the festival. It's a doubly good trick because, as well as limiting pilfering, not all the tokens get changed into goods. If, for instance, the tokens are worth 1€ and they are sold in blocks of 10 with the charge for a beer being 3€ there will be a good number of people who buy three beers and have one useless token left over. It's not a huge intellectual leap for friends to pool the left over tokens or for people to queue at the cash office to turn the tokens back into money but both processes are a bit of a faff. The end result is that lots of people go home with a couple of plastic tokens and the organisers get to keep the euros that bought them.

The cost of a small glass of beer in Spain varies but it's still not that unusual to get a beer for as little as a euro, maybe 1.50€. In a decent sized city normal bars might charge around 2.50€ and, if the bar specialises in good looking servers and is trendy - sorry, straight fire - then you can pay a lot more. Nonetheless, even in posh restaurants, restaurants with Michelin stars and strange names, restaurants with oddly named craft beers, I don't think I've ever been particularly shocked by the price of beer; it's not like buying a beer in Paris. One of our local bars charges as much as 6€ for high alcohol (often Belgian) beer and I think that's as much as I've ever paid in anywhere normal. 

At festivals there will be a beer sponsor. They'll have all the bars and serve their, usually, very ordinary lager in plastic glasses at inflated prices. Nowadays the tendency is that you will need a token to buy a reusable plastic glass in a pretence of being environmentally friendly. Festival beer is as expensive as beer gets - 3€ or 4€ for a small glass is pretty usual. The first time it's a shock but by the fifth glass nobody cares much especially if the bands are good.

There are lots of ways to ask for beer in a bar. By name for instance or by the size of the glass. When Britons want a, nearly, pint sized glass (as in Pulp Fiction we have no quarter pounders or pints because we have the metric system) you can ask for a tanque or una jarra. A small glass of beer is usually a caña. The size of a caña varies - in Madrid it tends to be around 200ml but, in the Basque Country, a caña is around a third of a litre. In Castilla y León they have smaller measures that are called cortos, in Andalucia tubos are common and so it goes. Bottles are usually botellín or quinto for the 200 ml size and tercio for the 330 ml size. Again there are regional differences, in Cataluña for instance I think the 330 ml bottles are called medianas by the locals, and there are litre bottles or litronas. Young people and seasoned drinkers often order beer in litronas to share.

Recently we've been to see three bands in the music festival in Cartagena called the Mar de Músicas. With our allocated seats located I went to find the bar and I was pleased to find that the bar staff dealt in cash (and cards). Maggie's wish for a vodka was thwarted though - only soft drinks and beer. I order a couple of cañas and paid the 3€ each. Beer in hand I now have time to read the price list and I notice that they have a bigger, squashy, plastic glass which contain as much as a litre and the price is 7€. This sort of big plastic glass is habitually used for cubatas and cubatas are mixed drinks in the rum and coke, vodka and lemon style. At the Mar de Músicas, and at most festivals, you don't have to go to the bar. Men and women with beer filled backpacks wander the auditoria happy to bring it to you. Near us a couple of young women were ordering beer; they checked prices and quantities and eventually asked for a big plastic glass full of 7€ worth of beer and two smaller empty glasses. They were going to share. As they ask the price their question is "How much is a mini?". I'd forgotten that's what the big glasses are called. Spanish irony I presume.

Being old and pernickety

We went to see a band at the Mar de Músicas in Cartagena a few days ago. The Mar de Músicas is a series of musical concerts held over a couple of weeks in the Murcian city of Cartagena.

Spain was quick to open up theatres and cinemas and audience venues in general after the total shutdown in the Spring of last year. The venues adapted. Things, generally, had to be booked online beforehand, even for free events. The programmes started much earlier than is normal in Spain. The capacity of venues was drastically reduced and there were all sorts of restrictions about entering and leaving the venue and where you could sit. I have felt much less safe in supermarkets, where the tussle for the unblemished and tasteless tomatoes went on much as before, or in bars and restaurants, where friends and acquaintances greet each other effusively, than I have over the Covid time in a theatre or cinema.

Some of the Covid measures were a nuisance. I don't like giving my phone number and email address away nor having someone check my temperature but, the broader democratic freedoms aside, it wasn't really either onerous or even intrusive. In fact there were definite upsides. The cinemas closed for a while but for months after they'd re-opened they were more or less deserted and nobody crunched popcorn or commented noisily on the action. It's only in the last month or so that I've had to share the film with more than a couple of people. Cleaners roamed in mobs, the hand soap dispensers were filled to the brim, the hand towels were waiting, no sweets, no popcorn and lots and lots of space around the seats. Even in an empty cinema, with just the two of us, people would check that we were still wearing masks. It all felt secure. In fact there have been no outbreaks linked to cinemas.

Theatres have been the same with spare seats between patrons and whole rows of seats left empty to keep people apart. The productions have fewer people on stage than usual and musical performances dropped from full orchestras to quartets and wind ensembles. Even contemporary music concerts were carefully controlled with the audience seated on some pre-numbered chair with lots of space around. Security guards prowled to make sure that you stayed put unless your bladder demanded otherwise. My primary school teachers would have approved.

Now, as I type, lots of us, the old and the not so old, have been vaccinated, immunised maybe. We only have to wear masks inside or outside when we are in crowded spaces. The tables in the bars are closer, waiters are back to wiping down tables with dirty cloths and the lottery as to whether there will be hand soap and paper towels in the toilets is back to normal. We are forgetting very quickly how much effort has gone in to keeping us healthy and the infections, if not the deaths, are showing how blasé we have become about Covid. The TV is full of medical people complaining about full wards, high occupation of intensive care beds and the postponement of routine operations.

Covid has been bad, sometimes terrible, for all sorts of people and for all sorts of organisations. On a small scale I felt quite sorry for young people. Like very old people they only have limited time to enjoy their age. When I was at university I was able to take full advantage of my first taste of independent living. The problems of car loans, mortgages, finding work and all those boring adult things were still to come. It was a time for experimentation and new things. If I'd missed that brief slot it would have been gone forever. That's why I can empathise with the young people who feel aggrieved that they were criminalised for simply wanting to dance or to drink rum and coke with other drunken friends at 4am in the morning. 

It seemed to me that the authorities needed to recognise that this section of the population, in a rich, Western, democratically free country has high expectations. What they want may be trivial on the scale of things but then so are most of the things that most of us want most of the time. Young people's wants should not be less important than other sections of the community just because what they want isn't something particularly deep and meaningful. Nobody seemed to think that families wanting to share time together was valueless nor is there a public outcry when victorious sports people hug each other or when politicians rub shoulders at Very Important Summits. Shutting down the dance clubs might be an easy option but opening the dance clubs and keeping them safe should not be beyond the wit of a rich and well organised Western state.

And that's how we get back to the Mar de Músicas. We'd gone to see Califato ¾ which is a band from Andalucia whose songs mix traditional musical elements, from that region, with other styles from rock and punk to electronic music.

The band came on stage at the appointed time. This is a nearly unknown phenomenon in Spain. It surprised at least half the audience which arrived after the off. Most of the late arrivals seemed to need to pass directly in front of my view of the band. Meanwhile, not in any big way but in an annoyingly consistent way, the tallest man on the mixing desk chose to stand rather than sit. He was just in my line of sight. The beer trolleys and the people with beer packs on their back wandered around. They too seemed determined to pause in my direct line of sight. Lots of the audience moved chairs to be nearer their friends, their mask use was less than consistent and, rather as you would expect, they stood up to dance gripping on to their big plastic beer glasses. 

At a normal concert with normal rules I'd have done what I always do when the off duty basketball player stands in front of me, when the stoned group of mates start to dance and tread on my toes, when the really drunk little man starts to unintentionally fling beer around with his drunken dancing and when I just feel uncomfortable to be wherever I am in the seething crowd. I'd move. But I wasn't supposed to move and being a rule following fuddy duddy I simply stayed put and seethed. Nobody was really doing anything particularly wrong, it just peeved me. 

Actually I didn't care for the antics of one of the band members either; some big fat bloke who seemed to delight in showing off his belly. I suspected that, were we ever to meet in a quieter setting, he and I would have found little to talk about and that he may have relieved the boredom by lighting his farts. Or, of course, he may be erudite and charming man. And, to top it off, I didn't understand a word they said. Again that's hardly surprising as the band's last album made heavy use of a spelling system called EPA (Estándar para el andaluz or, under its own, non official rules, Êttandâ pal andalûh) which is designed specifically to represent the Andalucian dialect in a written form. Not understanding what is said in Spanish always makes me cross.

The terrible thing was that the music was really good but I couldn't both seethe and cheer wildly so I chose to sulk.

Botillo and friends

Last week we went on holiday. We stopped off at a couple of places but our destination was Finisterre, the End of the Earth, in Galicia.

When you travel in Spain, which usually means that you will eat in a restaurant, the choice of food is simple. If you were to travel to Valencia for instance you would probably order paella, if you were to come to Pinoso the paella would be the rabbit and snails variety. Go to Cartagena you might try caldero. In Asturias the first choice would probably be fabada and in Cataluña you might try calçots. Eating the regional food is something that Spaniards do when they visit and it's something we mimic.

We were in Ponferrada, which is still in León but closing in on Galicia. There was something on the set meals list called botillo which turned out to be a reddish ball like thing full of bones, lumps of fatty pork seasoned with paprika all shoved into a gut skin and served with cabbage, potatoes and chickpeas. It is an experience I won't be repeating but the experiment is always worth a shot. 

Now, although she would deny this, Maggie is a bit of a picky eater. She doesn't like fish, she's not at all keen on most veg. and with severe limitations on what sort and style of meat. This can cause problems. For instance Finisterre has a fish dock. This means that its restaurants tend to major in things harvested from the sea. What's more that the offer is quite traditional. There must have been ten or more restaurants in a line and all of them did fritura which is, usually, several varieties of deep fried, and often battered seafood and fish, served by weight. It's a big thing in several Spanish seaside towns. Go to Santa Pola and watch big family groups devour kilos of fried squid and cuttlefish. As well as fritura Finisterre also does barnacles, razor shells, crayfish, lobster, clams, scallops, sea bass, cockles, mussels and so on. Now I wouldn't like to suggest that these restaurants don't have steak or chicken and chips but asking for those things is a bit like ordering egg and chips in a Chinese restaurant. If you're in Finisterre then the expectation is that you will eat fish. We ended up in a pizza and burger place having a conversation about why, using the same basic products, these restaurants choose not to vary their offer and so compete. It's not a huge leap to, for example, clam chowder, seafood pasta, ceviche, curried scallops, crab cakes or scallops with a bean salad. But that's not what Spanish restaurants do. All the eateries offer the same food and the same basic recipes. The repetition of set meals featuring codillo, empanada, pimientos de padrón, lacón con pimentón, callos con garbanzos and churrasco throughout Galicia was almost complete.

Spain is full of great cooks and splendid restaurants but the majority of them, at least the ones within our financial reach, offer cheap and plentiful food as their staple. There are places, lots of them, that offer something more contemporary, more adventurous, but they are nowhere near as ubiquitous as the chop and chips places which is a shame.

Swarming things that swarm on the earth

A few days ago, in Galicia, where we were, you needed a light jacket in the evening. Daytime temperatures were low but, with the sun, it was perfectly pleasant. A Coruña was the worst, weatherwise. As we joined the crowds to protest the homophobic killing of Samuel Luiz it was bucketing down. I know it rains a lot up North but I'd underestimated the Northern Europeanness of the Galician climate, my shorts got a week off and I had to buy more socks. Sandals and trainers with invisible socks were just too Mediterranean.

Back in Alicante the sun was cracking the flags. The news was full of weather warnings for everywhere except where we were. Pinoso is quite high up and the temperature only got to about 38ºC but other places in the province got over 40ºC. On the journey back, and yesterday too, we had dust laden skies and high temperatures.

So we returned from temperate climes with greenery and rivers to the dustiness of Alicante. Yesterday was the first full day back so there were sweeping and garden tasks to be done. I don't like flies much at all but I really can't bear it when the little buggers land in the corner of my mouth for a quick feed. Horrid. They were doing it a lot yesterday.

After dark the flies go away but hundreds of other beasties come out to play. The room I generally use for my computer work opens directly onto a patio. Beetles, often caught up in the fluffiness of airborne seed carriers, process across the floor, the occasional lost ant runs around in circles, the moths settle on the wall not expecting the predatory small lizard and tens and tens of other small walking and flying and jumping things come and go. If it's true that 95% of all life on earth is plant then there must be an awful lot of plants.

I was typing. A small iridescent beetly shaped thing walked back and forth amongst the keys of my keyboard, a little moth had taken up residence below F6 and just above &, there was an ant too investigating the space bar. Something very, very small and white was negotiating the forest of the grey hairs on my forearm. The room was awash with life other than mine. I was tired, the blog wasn't going well. Time for bed I thought, I'll finish it tomorrow. As I headed for the toothbrush I saw something twiglike on the red cloth of one of the armchairs in the room. I presumed a cat had carried the debris in on its fur. I went to remove it and the cricket like beast, surprised by my touch, bounced into my face before disappearing under the bed.

A friend commented on my lauding of the heat in Alicante but I must say it's glad to be home, sockless and coatless.

Typically typical normality

In Spanish shopping centres, like everywhere else, the fronts of shops are, often, open. The idea is obvious enough. The shops want to make sure that there is no barrier to you buying something.

It's not the same in small towns. There shops not only have doors but they are also, often, locked. You have to ring a bell to get in. It's not for security, not in the jeweller's shop sense, but it is because the staff in lots of smaller businesses aren't exactly waiting, poised, for the next customer. It's not just shops. For instance you have to ring the bell to get into the Footwear Museum in Elda.

So I went to buy an inner tube for my bike. The fly curtain covered the front door of the shop. There was a bell. Once upon a time I would have found this odd but I've rung so many bells here that it's just normally normal nowadays. I rang it. Nobody came. I realised there was a note on the door. It said ring the bell. It also said if we don't answer telephone this number. I rang the number. Nobody answered.

I abandoned the bike shop and went to a tyre place. One of those Euromaster type tyre and battery chains. There the barrier at the entrance is of a different nature. The franchise in Pinoso is run by the sort of bloke you meet in a UK boozer when you'd hoped to have a quiet pint and read the paper. One of those blokes who speaks with a Haghill Glasgow or a Byker Newcastle accent and hasn't got his teeth in today. Or he could be a bloke who plays dominoes very loudly. Not that the Pinoso man was from Haghill, Byker, toothless or playing dominoes. I'm trying to paint a word picture to describe a sort of non stockbroker belt sort of person.

He was putting new tyres on someone's car but I'm not quite as British as I once was so I didn't wait till he'd finished to get served. "A question", I said. This is the phrase which is used all over Spain (in Spanish) to queue jump. "Do you sell inner tubes for bikes?". Apparently my pronunciation of inner tube (cámara) and mask (mascarilla) are similar enough for a moment of misunderstanding but I'm not quite as British as I once was so I simply repeated the word more loudly and with more roll on the R. Individual words became the order of the day on his side. Size? Valve? I was still on fuller phrases. Give me two, car type valve, how much? The answer to the latter was 9€. I handed over a ten and he returned the 1€ in a Barnes Wallis style bouncing the coin across the counter. I smiled, he grunted and all three of us said goodbye one to the other.

Later, cooking lunch, my phone rang. I answered. The person on the other end asked who I was. I told the truth and she apologised and hung up. Later I realised it was the bike shop person checking who'd phoned. Do people do that in the UK? Lots of people do it here; phone the missed call number that is.

All unremarkable really but all quite Spanish. 

Just to finish and because this tickled me rather than because it has anything to do with shopping. Today is the last day that you can turn the old Spanish currency, the peseta, into Euros. You've been able to do it whenever you liked for the past twenty years but today was the very last time and people were queuing around the block at the central banks in Murcia and Valencia. Strange behaviour.

Moving forward together

I'm sure you've heard my theory before that you don't learn popular culture; if you're born somewhere then the culture is yours be that food, music, TV programmes or YouTube influencers. You can't help it. The talk at work, the talk at school, the stuff your parents tell you, the memes and gifs that turn up on your phone, the little snippets you read in the newspaper all help to make sure that you know what's going on. That's how, I suppose, I learned about MOTs, Trooping the Colour, Premium Bonds, the Boat Race, laverbread, the RNLI Lifeboats, Spaghetti Junction, Engelbert Humperdinck, driving on the left and how to make tea. 

Changes in language are similar. Ordinary people are in charge. Words and phrases come and go. Some old academic bloke might argue that there is a perfectly good phrase to describe keeping a safe distance during a pandemic but everyone else is going to say social distancing whether he likes it or not. Somebody once asked me about how you decide that someone is competent in a particular language. What's the threshold for somebody to be able to say that they speak English, Spanish or Swahili? Some people have less education than others, some have learned more vocabulary, some have different ideas about how language should be used but who is to say which form is better than another? What says that the Radio 4 pundit talking about early 20th Century Art speaks better English than the geezer with the barrow having a beer in the Queen Vic? Where is the level? If an ordinary Spaniard doesn't know a word that came from a novel does that make the novelist highbrow or the non word knower lowbrow or are they simply different people?

This does mean that some things that come easily to locals require much more effort from we outsiders. I know a little bit about Spanish history and politics because I've made an effort to do so but it's much more difficult to latch on to everyday things. Consider, for instance, events; things like sports matches, theatre, concerts, guided visits, exhibitions and demonstrations. Sometime, shortly after we got here I had a bit of an email battle with one of the local tourist offices which had published a calendar of events. Most were without dates. Why bother to put dates when Mother's day is always the first Sunday in May and "everybody" knows that or when it's common knowledge that International Book Day is the 23rd April. I suppose that, among Britons, Christmas Day wouldn't necessarily get a date either but it does suppose that everyone shares the same knowledge. There was a time when Ramadan and Diwali would have passed unremarked in the UK but, nowadays, that isn't the case. The argument I made to the tourist office was that they needed to remember that not everyone in their town shared the same, Spanish, Catholic background. 

I was thinking about this yesterday just after I'd spent ages trawling through the Facebook pages and other tourist offices and town halls websites to see what sort of things are happening locally over the summer. Some of those things are repetitive, they turn up regularly  - like Burns Night, The Grand National, the Lewes Bonfire, Trooping the Colour, Turkey and sprouts, Glastonbury or Glyndebourne - whilst other things are one offs - concerts, weddings, race meetings, car rallies, election hustings, break dance competitions and so on. Some are things that you might anticipate and plan for. I don't know when Henley Regatta is or Royal Ascot or the Manx TT but it's relatively easy to find out and plan for them if you fancy getting involved. Here in Spain I might do the same for Holy Week in Malaga or the candle festival in Aledo. The flip side is that the only way to know that Villena tourist office is going to do a guided tour of the village of Zafra is to check their publicity. Checking Villena's website, well that and the other thirty that go along with it, is turning into a right slog.

Mind you finding out about local things isn't always such mind numbing toil. I was in Castilla la Mancha the other day and I went for a set menu in a restaurant. One of the dishes was called Galianos which I'd never heard of but turned out to be a pheasant and rabbit dish. I was pondering Galianos and its position in "the popular database". My guess is that many Spaniards wouldn't know what Galianos is either but I also suppose that the situation would be akin to me eating with my, relatively young, nephews. Imagine bubble and squeak or toad in the hole was on the menu. Ny nephews may never have heard of them, they're old fashioned foods after all. I have though so we could pool our experience. In return I presume they would help me out with what to order in a Korean restaurant on the basis that they have probably eaten Korean when I haven't. 

Some things we just know. Some things we learn. Some things we have to search out.

Warming up

Last night, well this morning I suppose, the windows started to rattle and the wind howled and the thunder thundered and the lightning lit the bedroom from time to time. When I got up a couple of hours later the sun was shining on the puddles on the patio and the cats were tiptoeing from dry spot to dry spot. It's a sign of the time of year. Like my feet hurting. Neither is new. I've complained about this, the feet that is, a lot. It stems from walking miles in flat bottomed sandals at Benicassim pop festival but the foot pain was always bad each summer long before the Benicassim debacle. Really the trouble starts as I move from proper shoes with proper socks to sandals and lighter shoes worn with those funny short socks. In Spanish the socks are called pinkies. Isn't that a great name?

So Summer, early Summer when it's still Spring, is big storms and uncomfortable feet. And flies, hundreds of flies, thousands of flies. No, not just flies really; all sorts of small flying and walking things with myriad legs. Some of them bite, some sting, some amuse the cats or sing long and loud into the night. The cats were keeping their distance from a small but very hissy snake in the living room yesterday morning. I escorted it out into the field opposite wearing big gardening gloves (me not the snake). The toads have stopped though; I haven't seen any toads for a while. Sometime in the winter I kept finding toads all over the place - they seemed to like the shower in the guest room especially but also just the corner under the computer desk. The wasps and bees are back too. The wasps are really attracted to water. If the hose isn't turned off at the tap it drips and forms a shallow puddle on the patio and that water attracts a large but mono-specific cloud of wasps (should that adjective be unispecific, unispecies, monospecies?). I hear that people who have pools find this waspish determination to drink water less than amusing. I don't know why the swallows, which are particularly talkative at this time of year, don't swoop down on these various clouds of fast food. Maybe they do, maybe that's why they fly acrobatically close to my head every now and again. And at dusk the chattering of swallows becomes the clicking whistling of the bats.

But I realised this is because it's now definitely summer. It's easy to tell when it's summer in Spain, in Alicante at least. It becomes warm on a regular basis. There is no doubt about it as there is in the UK. The shower is a good indicator of this. In winter I wait for the water to run warm from the distant gas water heater but, by now, if I'm impatient, even the cold water isn't cold enough to be unusable from the get go. The mirror doesn't mist up either but that might be because the window is open. And doors and windows stay open. I have to remember that we need to be security conscious and lock this and that.

Lots more motor traffic in the lane too. The apricot tractor went back and forth and back and forth with the trailer piled high with blue plastic boxes full of fruit. I suppose that's why people have to buy their shelves from Ikea now because nobody uses those orange boxes that I fastened together as shelves when I was a poor student. But there are lots more traffic movements in general. I suppose there are maintenance tasks even if they are not harvesting. I'm certainly locked in a struggle with the the Culebrón plant life. The weeds can grow faster than I can knock them down - I swear that some can grow 15cms from one day to the next. The mulberries fell onto the drive to be squashed underfoot, under-tyre, and turned into an oozing pulp that had to be swept away, now the nisperos are falling off the trees in significant quantities and just to add to the fun some sort of ball things, seed pods I suppose, are tumbling off the palm tree in dustpan flexing quantities. If my fight with the plants, on a garden scale is grim and unceasing then I suppose the farmers are locked into something even more titanic. Mind you their hoes are bigger than mine.

No doubt about it though. It's warming up and it'll soon be my very favourite time of year here in Spain, when the countryside just heaves and sighs as the sun beats down. And I can crack open the ice cold beer without any feelings of protestant guilt.

Fleeting success

Our neighbours have been putting up a new fence over the past couple of weeks. Facing each other across the footings for what would be the new fence Vicente, for that's the name of our neighbour, was complaining about the builders. I sympathised - one has to with builders. Even builders complain about, other, builders. Taking advantage of his sunny disposition towards me I asked him if he could spare a couple of the concrete blocks that were piled up in his yard. The question I asked was something, in translation, like "Are two of the concrete blocks in excess for you?" I got them and I went away well pleased with myself not only because I had the blocks, but also because I'd used a phrase that a Spaniard would use without having rehearsed it beforehand. 

I mentioned this phrase to my online Spanish teacher. I was bemoaning the fact that this, and other, fleeting victories over Spanish are wasted on the audience. I may be pleased with myself for having got the construction right but it's unlikely that Vicente noticed. If you're a native English speaker you might notice the mistake in "is a nice day" but you wouldn't notice the correctness of  "it's a nice day".

You, one, becomes much more aware of language when you're not comfortable with it. I often find myself repeating a Spanish phrase after hearing it on a news broadcast or in a song. Often it's not the intricate stuff that seems to be the hardest. For instance Spaniards find it really hard, when they are speaking English, to remember to use pronouns, the little words that go before a verb. They are not needed in Spanish so they get forgotten in English. It's common to hear was a teacher instead of he was a teacher and she is late often becomes is late. It's no big deal. It hardly matters. Even those people who speak spectacularly good English, think Eurovision Song Contest hosts, don't quite sound right if you start analysing what they say. Even if their grammar is good, the vocabulary right and the phrasing OK you, one, will still notice that their inflexion, their pacing and their tonality is just slightly off when compared to a native speaker.

Obviously it's the same the other way. There's a programme on Spanish radio hosted by a bloke called Nicholas Jackson who's from Manchester. I wish my Spanish were as good as his but he sounds like a Briton speaking Spanish. Even someone like the writer Ian Gibson, who has been here for years, still has an Irish twang behind his very colloquial Spanish. 

Young Britons brought up in Spain offer a strange case. At home, with carers or parents, their principal language is usually English. In the street, with friends, at work, at school their key language is Spanish. In effect English becomes, very much, their secondary language and lots of young British people grow to make the same mistakes in English as their Spanish peers - referring to their parents as their fathers for instance. They also, often, have a, relatively, limited English vocabulary and lots of trouble with English spellings.

My style of speaking Spanish is still very much an exercise in join the dots. I provide a list of vocabulary and I hope that the Spaniard I'm speaking to will be able to piece together what I'm trying to say. I've never liked performing - I don't dance, I don't do pass the cucumber, I don't even ask for street directions. Recently though, a couple of times, I've been quite pleased with myself because I've been less reluctant to speak. I put it down to speaking two hours Spanish each week through the online classes. Outside of the online sessions I don't really have Spanish conversations. Ten minutes with the neighbour, a sentence or two in a shop, a short exchange of phrases in a bar or restaurant. Mind you it's not all wine and roses. I still, sometimes, go to see a film in Spanish and, when it's done, if it weren't for the pictures, I'd have no idea what it was about even.

Ars Gratia Artis

Luis Garcia Berlanga was a Valencian born, Spanish film director who made some 19 films between 1951 and 2002. He was born on 12 June 1921, 100 years ago give or take, and his centenary is being celebrated all over Spain through lots of screenings, exhibitions and new books. I went to see one of his films, el Verdugo, The Executioner, at the Fundación Paurides in Elda on Wednesday evening. 

Now Elda is our nearest large town so I know it reasonably well but I'd never heard of the Paurides Foundation. The bit of town it's in didn't seem particularly salubrious. The woman who dragged her three kids past me as I was locking the car gave me a very fierce look as though I didn't belong. I double checked that I'd locked up securely. Google maps, on my mobile, refused to speak and was almost invisible in the bright 7pm sun as I searched for the venue. I found it though. The Paurides Foundation turned out to be a neighbourhood based arts and culture centre with a nice little auditorium of about 60 seats and a maximum Covid audience of 30. There were about 20 of us there to see the film. The screening was free as were the film notes.

There was an intro from the bloke who seemed to be in charge which I think was mainly to give the latecomers time to arrive - Spaniards call it courtesy time, Brits call it lateness. I missed some of the little jokes in the film, not all of them, but I had no problem keeping up with the main plot line. I winced as the end of film discussion was hijacked by one of those blokes who is keen to prove that he knows more about the film/director than the organisers. All very much par for the course for any film club type event. With a bit of luck I'll be back next week for at least one of the other two titles they are showing.

What was most remarkable about this event was that it was completely unremarkable. As I was driving away, in my unscathed motor, I though how I've got used to there being quite a lot of free or inexpensive cultural events going on left right and centre in nearly all of the towns, large and small, round and about. Even here in Pinoso, a town of only 8,000 people, we have, from time to time, free concerts, cheap or free theatre, book launches, poetry and writing events, guided visits and almost anything else cultural you could think to shake a stick at. I've heard lots of complaints that arts and culture are underfunded and undervalued in Spain but I actually find the opposite. What I don't like is finding out, after the event, that I missed something I really would have liked to see. You have no idea how guiltily happy I was that Yo Yo Mar had been Covid cancelled in Alicante; imagine if I'd missed him because I didn't know he was on until after the date!!

Making up for lost time

We went to see some street theatre last week. It wasn't good. Blokes talking in funny voices wearing tight trousers and red noses as they tripped over imaginary obstacles. What was good was that it was on.

We couldn't get past the barriers that marked off the performance areas because we hadn't pre-booked our tickets but it didn't matter much as there was a bar beside two of the three spaces we went to and we were able to sit at the bar, non alcohol beer in hand, and half watch the performances. 

If there is still a limitation on the permitted number outside a bar (for ages it was 30% of capacity then 50%, keeping a couple of metres between the tables etc.) it is no longer noticeable. We're all still wearing our masks. I sometimes wonder, as I wash the car down in the local petrol station or tramp across some field looking for cucos, why I'm wearing a mask but I still do. The tea leaves suggest it won't go on much longer. I decided not to add a pack of ten of the FFP2 type masks to my supermarket shop the other day - I'm sure my hoard will see me through. Anyway, I digress. I always do. It's what makes it so easy to maintain a conversation on the video Spanish classes. I'm flitting from one thing to another and the hour is soon gone. 

So, we're in the bar and watching some unfunny clown. There are people all around us. They are greeting friends with hugs. It's warm and sunny and just like Spain as the summer begins to gear up. There is a pretence to mask wearing but lots are below nose and everybody is back to corporal greetings. Actually that's not quite true. There's a code to it. What people do is to tap elbows or bump fists as some sort of neoCovid greeting and that ritual over they then cheek kiss and/or hug. Some people, standing within centimetres of me, keep bumping into my plastic chair. It's a bit annoying. Everybody pays lip service but really, in the common consciousness, the virus has gone away. Even in the health centre the other day, when I went for my second jab, they took my temperature before letting me cross the threshold but forgot to direct me to the hand gel and I forgot too. I alternatively snigger and feel aggrieved as the news story about the ever so naughty young people who've been dancing and drinking at some "illegal" do without masks are followed by shots of politicians dancing and hugging each other after an election victory or back slapping at some meeting in Brussels, Ankara of Medellín. Rules, as always, different for the haves and the have nots.

As everything begins to open up, as the theatre programmes look fuller, as there is more and more advertised music, as some guided walks are happening again I'm back to spending hours looking at the things on offer. I trawl through town hall and tourist office websites and search out websites for this and that annual event. Maybe I'm trying to overcompensate for the things we've missed. There is so much being advertised that Maggie is already getting a bit fed up with my enthusiasms. I do the  - well, whilst we're in Alicante for Axolotes Mexicanos (indie band) we could pop in to the exhibition at the MUBAG (art gallery) and then go on to the English language film at the Kineopolis - and Maggie looks at me,  rolls her eyes and says - or we could sit on the terrace with a nice cool drink.