Saleing away

Let's presume you're in Spain and you want a t-shirt or a bikini or a pair of trainers or a new phone. Even with the upheavals in retailing there are still real physical shops where you can go. Most of them will have the majority of their stock on show for you to browse. Occasionally you might have to talk to someone, to get your size in shoes for instance, but most people can do most of their shopping in, Bershka or Carrefour or MediaMarkt and a whole lot more, without speaking. You might need to make some sort of grunting sounds at the till but that's all.

It was not always so. Not that long ago shopping in Spain required a conversation. There was a counter and behind it there was someone to ask for whatever you wanted. They showed you things that you may or may not want and may or may not like - it could all become quite complicated. Also shops were pretty specialised. When we first needed electric bulbs for our new house I went to an electrical shop but it turned out I needed an ironmonger. And where could I buy inner soles or shoelaces? Sometimes the answer was obvious, bread from a bread shop and drill bits from an ironmonger, but it wasn't always so simple. 

Nowadays if you don't know where to buy something you just go to a Chinese shop - they stock everything but, in the dim distant past the answer, if you were in a big town, was the department store Corte Inglés. That's where I bought those inner soles and that was where you could browse pullovers or swimming trunks without needing an extensive Spanish vocabulary. Corte Inglés was nearly magical. It had things that you needed and things you wanted. It welcomed the well off and the ordinary person and it was swish with smart and helpful salespeople. It was a Spanish institution. I'm not sure what sort of financial shape it's in now but a few years ago Corte Inglés closed lots of stores, axed lots of jobs and tried to catch up with Internet retailing and the modern world. Britons might see parallels with John Lewis.

In that same antediluvian period the sales, the time that shops sold off old stock at reduced prices, were a big event in Spain. The Winter sales started on 7 January, just after the King's holiday (think Boxing Day) and the Summer sales started at the end of June. There were always scenes on the telly of people camping outside the door of big shops, and by that I mean Corte Inglés, and making a mad dash for the washing machine being sold at the price of a transistor radio or the Ágatha Ruiz de la Prada frock at a knockdown price. There were sometimes squabbles over goods, there was always pushing and shoving and a race to be won to get that special bargain.

Even in our time here the sales were still something special. There was no Black Friday, Amazon didn't do Flash Offers, there weren't year round discounts and Outlet Shops were few and far between but there were the sales. I've spent many a frustrating hour in Corte Inglés sorting through the brand names like Gucci, Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein,Tommy Hilfiger looking through the jeans or shirts for something that wasn't only left in sizes for someone with a tiny waist or a barrel chest. Every now and then I'd find something, a real bargain, and it all became worthwhile.

This year the January started last Sunday. Shops in most of Spain are still, generally, closed on a Sunday but last Sunday they were allowed to be open. Maggie had been doing her online homework and she wanted something from Corte Inglés so we went down to Elche where our nearest store is. As we passed L'Aljub shopping centre cars were queuing back down the surrounding dual carriageways presumably full of people setting out to find that sale time bargain. Corte Inglés was busy too. I had to go a car park level down to find a space. But the sales don't have that sense and purpose they once had. Instead of the jumble sale like racks of mixed clothing with bargains to be found for the persistent and determined it's now whole ranges marked down with a 40% off price tag. Sometimes they don't even give the sale price, there is a sign to say that the 30%, 40% or 70% will be knocked off at the checkout. Nobody has gone through items marking them down. Someone has given the stock control software a nudge and, when the sales are over, that change can be un-nudged. At least it gave one young lad the opportunity to impress his father with his mental arithmetic skills as he worked out the final prices. 

Corte Inglés has never been a cheap shop. 40% off a Calvin Klein pullover originally priced at 119€ isn't a bad discount but that 71.40€ price tag is still more than four and a bit times the cost of a similar cotton pullover at Primark. For me at least there's no adventure in that sort of pricing. I can probably do an Internet trawl to find something as cheap. The fun was in the hunt.

I really am beginning to sound like my Uncle Harry and his stories of fish and chips for a tanner or taking a girl out for a night on the town for half a crown. I suppose it comes to us all.

Pinoso Water and Rubbish charges

I was chatting to my neighbours the other day. We were talking about the plans for the solar farm which will run along the Southern side of the CV83 (that's on the right as you drive from Pinoso to Monóvar). In the way that these things do the conversation drifted and we ended up talking about our water bills. My Spanish neighbours, whose main home is in Petrer, were blissfully unaware of the system for billing in Pinoso and they didn't know about this years price increases either. I reckoned that if they didn't know then neither would other people. An easy blog beckoned.

I posted this same information in an entry on the Pinoso Community Facebook page back in September 2023. If you read that post you can save yourself effort and stop now.

Here in Culebrón, and I presume throughout Pinoso, households are charged for drinking water on metered use. The bills are raised by Pinoso Town Hall, because they maintain the water system, but the money is collected by an organisation called SUMA. The bills for the third and fourth quarters of the water year are sent out in April and the bills for the first and second quarters of the water year in September. The bill for the drainage charges are also sent in April.

For quite a few years, in the recent past, Pinoso was a very wealthy town because the Town Hall charged an extraction fee on the marble dug out of the Monte Coto quarry. The quarry is inside the Pinoso municipal boundary but it overlooks the nearby village of Algueña. According to Levantina Stone (The biggest producer in the quarry) it's the largest marble quarry in the world. I seem to remember that, at the height of production, the quarry was adding 9 million euros to the town coffers though I know that the Town Hall usually quotes the maximum income as 6 million. Either way for a town with a population just over 8,000 people the income was quite a bonus. It kept local taxes and fees low and provided funds for all sorts of projects. As the building bubble collapsed so did the income from the quarry. The pandemic didn't help business much either. Nonetheless the income from the quarry seems to have levelled off at about two million euros per year. In the meanwhile Pinoso has noticeably cut back on lots of things to save money and increased charges in a number of ways to boost income. At a town meeting we were told that Pinoso's current annual budget is around 10 million, which, they said, is pretty average for a town of the size of Pinoso, but, unlike most towns Pinoso still has this extra, bonus, income stream. I noticed that the actual income for 2023 was nearly twelve and a half million and the expenditure eleven and a half million.

The Town Hall argues that the couple of millions of marble money has largely been propping up the price of drinking water and the collection and processing of waste. There are a whole bunch of factors at work adding complications (and cost) to these two basic services: changes in legislation about waste management, the way that some people misuse the general (green) rubbish bins, the reluctance of people to use the recycling bins, the amount of water available because of climatic conditions, the amount of water allotted to Pinoso, the huge increase in the price of electricity (for pumping water), the age of the water distribution system etc. Between them the two services are costing about a million over the amount of money that the Town Hall collects from local charges. The Town Hall's argument is that if people paid something much more akin to the real cost of the water and waste processing then the marble money would be freed up to provide more and better services. 

As always with these things there are multiple interpretations of the current situation but the Town Hall went ahead and increased the charges. Not that anyone has said this, so this is purely speculation on my part, but I think some of the thinking behind the water increases is that the current distribution system (the pipework) is crumbling and the investment needed to fix the system is beyond the means of the Town Hall. If the system is made profitable that makes the privatisation of the supply a much more tempting offer to private concerns. At some time in the future they may be willing to take on infrastructure improvements in return for a long term contract.

The changes were published as being applicable form 2024 so I suppose that we are now under the new regime. ADDITION It turns out that this wasn't true. There was one appeal against the water rate increase which was dismissed by the Pinoso Town Council at its January 2024 meeting. The Council said at that meeting that the new rates would be published in the Boletín Official and, as soon as they'd been published they would become current.

The rubbish collection charge will double from the current 60€ to 120€ per household

Household water is charged on a sliding scale. In the table below you can see that the first 10 cubic metres will be charged at 48 cents per cubic metre, the next 10 cubic metres at 78 cents and so on. There are different rates for businesses. The agricultural water supplied through the SAT network is not a part of this system.

Block of 0 to 10 m³/quarter 0.4800 €/m³ (Old charge was 0.18 €/m3)
Block of 10.01 to 20 m³/quarter 0.7800 €/m³ (Old charge was 0,28 €/m3)
Block of 20.01 to 40 m³/quarter 1.1500 €/m³ (Old charge was 0,35 €/m3)
Block of 40.01 to 80 m³/quarter 1.9500 €/m³ (Old charge was 0.5625 €/m3)
Block of 80 m³/quarter and any further use at 3.2500 €/m³ (Old charge was 1.3750 €/m3)

There are all sorts of little add ons to the bill for water meter rental, water filtration charges etc. but, as an example, last quarter in our house we used 22 cubic metres of water and the bill was around 22€. My dodgy arithmetic suggests that with the new regime that will rise to about 50€ or maybe a bit more.

Sweets

I know I shouldn't, and I have the belly to prove it, but I like to eat those sugary sweets from the pick 'n' mix when I go to the pictures. I'd never really thought about where the sweets came from, so I was a bit surprised when I bumped into an article that told me that the Region of Murcia, which begins where Pinoso ends, is one of the main centres of production of Spanish sweets. In fact, one of every three sweets eaten in Spain comes from Murcia. I find it odd that I didn't know. Somehow you can't help but know the importance of Novelda in spices and, at this time of year, you just bump into something about the production of turrón, in Xijona/Jijona (old blog about turrón here) or toys in Ibi. To hear that firms like Vidal, Fini, Dulceplus, Aunón, Jake, and 59 other sweet brands are Murcian-based was a bit of a surprise. 

The Vidal group, for instance, pumps out 75 million sweets a day, and they sold 200,000,000€ worth in 2022. They don't just sell in Spain; they have subsidiary companies in lots of countries, and they distribute to over 90 countries - exports make up 80% of their sales. It's nearly the same story for Fini - big production, lots of distribution, while another company, Jake, based in Molina de Segura, produces 60 million tonnes of sweets per year which sounds like a lot of cola bottles and crunchy strawberries to me. I was equally surprised when I read that kosher and halal sweets, vegan sweets and sweets for gluten intolerant people are a part of nearly all the companies' ranges. From various descriptions I read, there must be rabbis to check the kosher credentials, and imams ensuring that the cow gelatine in the halal sweets really is from halal cows, wandering almost non stop around Murcia, clip boards in hand.

Apparently, Spanish kids eat, on average, 55 grammes of added sugar a day, twice the World Health Organisation recommendation, which probably helps to explain why 23% of Spanish 7 to 12-year-olds are overweight and 17% obese. Obviously enough, sweets are one of the sources of this extra sugar, and that's not really going to come as a big surprise to anyone. High fat and sugar content tend to get frowned on nowadays, so nearly all of the Murcian sweet producers have ranges with natural colours and sugars, ranges that are low in saturated fats and ranges that don't contain allergens. 

The whole thing reminded me of a, near Christmas, visit to a dentist in Cartagena, the second largest city in Murcia. Like so many Spanish businesses at this time of year, there were cakes and sweets laid out for free. "I suppose they're sugar-free," I said, in that British humour totally lost on the Spanish way I have, to the receptionist. "No," she said, "we like our sweets to taste of something."

Offensive language

English, at least inclusive English, doesn't talk about firemen any more - we say fire fighters. To complain about the driver who has just cut you up the complaint is that "they" don't know how to drive rather than that he or she is an imbecile. I suspect that the word imbecile is also a word to be avoided but that's a whole extra thing. This is going to be a bit tricky to do because my blogs about language are never popular, and because it includes some Spanish words. Not all of what I'm going to write it is absolutely true but it's good enough for a blog of this nature.

I've been told by Spaniards that Spanish grammar can be pretty inflexible when compared to English. In English, for instance, we can turn almost any noun (a noun is the name for a thing), into a verb, (a doing word). Well established examples are to to book with the same meaning as to reserve, or to sky as in to sky a ball. Nowadays we TikTok too. Spanish has just three endings for verbs - ar,er, ir - which, I am told, makes it more difficult to plunder and use words as verbs. The other side of the coin though is that the way that a Spanish verb ends tells you who is doing the the thing. Bailo means I dance and baila means she, he or it dances. So she drives badly is exactly the same as he drives badly. In turn that means you need no strategy whatsoever to avoid sexist overtones in lots of situations.

Unfortunately that's not true for Spanish nouns. Nouns. as I said are things: egg, bottle, cow and so on. Having gender means that somewhere, somehow, somebody decided that each noun is either masculine of feminine. So while in English book, list, and rubbish are neutral in Spanish a book is masculine and a list is feminine. Sometimes this can seem a bit odd. El pene, the penis is, logically enough, masculine but lots of the other words for the same thing, verga and polla for instance are feminine. It's the same with la vagina, feminine, but coño and chocho, with the same meaning, are masculine.

Lots of nouns, these thing words, have a feminine and a masculine form when they are used to describe a person. A very common way to do this is simply to change the article (A/AN and THE are articles) before the name of the thing. So un estudiante is a male student, and una estudiante is a female student. 

Another very common way to differentiate between male and female is to change the letters at the  end of the  word. So, un alumno is a male student, una alumna is a female student. Very often, though far from inevitably, the ending is o for masculine and a for feminine. An example is hermana for sister, and hermano for brother. This is where one of the big problems come in modern usage. I, that's me personally, have one brother and one sister. If someone asks me about my family in English I would say I have a sister and a brother. The traditional Spanish answer to the same question with the same family would be that I have two hermanos. The most direct translation of dos hermanos into English is that I am saying I have two brothers. That's because the Spanish grammar rule is that if you have a mix of male and female words then the male version takes precedence. Grammarians say this has nothing to do with men taking precedence over women - it was just a 50/50 chance decision!!!! Modern Spanish people trying to avoid this would follow the English language style and say that they had one hermana and one hermano to make it clear. Nonetheless, someone trying to give me a bit of a Spanish lesson told me that the poster I'd designed inviting girls and boys to come along to Santa's grotto was poor Spanish - they were adamant that by inviting the boys the girls would have known they were welcome too.  Just like we know that Neil Armstrong meant women too when he took his giant leap for mankind. In writing this can be got around by using the at symbol herman@s. As you may imagine this is not a popular option with lots of people; " For the love of Pete it's a symbol - not a letter!!"

Language can be very emotive. I remember heated debates on British Radio 4 about the use of can as against may or how to pronounce envelope. This male precedence gender rule in Spanish is much deeper. The way round it of inviting male friends and female friends, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen seems, to the traditionalists only just marginally less stupid than inventing new words. And we won't even touch on how to include non binary people. Doubling up on words makes sentences more cumbersome but more modern thinkers go for the importance of equality and inclusiveness and don't worry too much about having to say more words or the technicalities of the word itself. They presume that context will explain slightly odd words. Although cartero means a postman cartera has, traditionally been the word for a wallet. It hasn't stopped the person ringing the entryphone to deliver the mail describing themselves as a cartera. It's still not an easy struggle. The lower house of parliament is called the Congress of the (male) Deputies. I suspect it will be a while before the name gets changed.

And the traditionalist have an ally in something called the REA, the Real Academia Española, which is the august body which tries to control the Spanish language and publishes the "definitive" Spanish dictionary. It's actually quite a useful body in trying to coordinate the language through all the counties where Spanish is spoken - so that Mexicans can talk to Equatorial Guineans and Nicaraguans but it is also entrenched in the past and thinks that messing around with hermanos/as is tantamount to wordslaughter. You'll no doubt be super surprised to learn that of the 46 people who currently make up the RAE 38 are men. Four of those eight women were elected in the last two or three years. My guess is that the RAE is not a hotbed of progressive thinking.

I know what I think about trying to make language more inclusive but in conversations with Spaniards (when we're not talking about food) I've found very few who agree. 

Five in the morning or Mantecados and Polvorones

I often wake up around 5 am. Anyone of a certain age will know why. Usually, I find that I don't go back to sleep properly; I doze, and I turn things over in my mind. Typically, the things are of no importance - I remember a job to do, I wonder why my knee is aching, things like that. This morning it was mantecados and polvorones.

Mantecados and polvorones are typical Spanish Christmas biscuit-like cakes. They're supposed to taste different to each other, though I can never remember which is which. A website I just consulted tells me that polvorones tend to crumble more than mantecados and that polvorones have ground almonds in them, while mantecados (which get their name from their high content of manteca or lard) don't. The website says the shapes are different too and then goes on to say that both can be round (!) but that polvorones are square and mantecados are rectangular. On other websites I've read that mantecados have various flavourings while polvorones don't or that the almonds in one are toasted and in the other not - oh, and that polvorones are oval. Trust me, whatever the websites say, they're more or less the same.

So, I was thinking about buying some. My partner is not a fan. She says they are dry and tasteless. I remembered what a Spanish language teacher told me years ago when I was saying how tedious they were. She said the problem was that I bought poor-quality industrial polvorones. I always think that the word 'industrial,' to describe mass-produced cakes and biscuits, is such a good word - it brings to mind Jerusalem's Dark Satanic Mills. I need to find some decent, traditionally made ones.

Now, if you want a roscón for Reyes/Kings, you can buy an industrial one from any supermarket for a few euros, or you can take out a bank loan to order one from a cake shop. It's the same for turrón. All the supermarkets have their own brand, they also sell some varieties which bear no relation whatsoever to real turrón. But, if you want tradition and quality, you pay for it. It's a balance between the stress on your credit card and the list of ingredients on the label. The more natural it is, the better it will taste, and the more it will cost. I wondered, for this is the fevered state of my mind at 5 am, where you might get decent mantecados or polvorones. It's like the questions on the Facebook community pages, the ones about where you can buy a hammer or bread, the ones that cause a smirk.

As soon as I was up, I dashed off a WhatsApp message to a Spanish pal. Her response was, "The original polvorones are from Estepa in Seville. If you get them in a supermarket, look where they were made. And take a look at some online reviews because all that glitters is not gold."

So I did, and this is what I got as the creme de la creme: Mantecados de Felipe II from Vitoria in the Basque Country, Estepa from Estepa in Seville, El Toro from Tordesillas in Valladolid, D. Sancho Melero from Antequera in Málaga, Dos Hermanos from Castuera in Badajoz, and San Telesforo from Toledo in Castilla la Mancha.

I know that I'm going to have to go to a traditional grocer's to get any one of those. It's pretty obvious they are not supermarket fodder.

Classics at Christmas

In January 2006, when I started this blog, anything I wrote about things Spanish was new. With the passing years repetition crept in. Nowadays I often repeat things. I have almost no alternative. My only hope is that new readers will think the regurgitated topics are new.

I was playing with the idea of writing, yet another, Christmas piece, then I considered the number of seasonal entries I've written over the years. Thinking economy of effort and suchlike I decided to do a BBC and to trot out the old stuff again as though it were classic. I have to say that even just tagging up the entries bored me after a while. I hope they don't bore you right from the start and whatever number you plough through, before surrendering, you find something informative or amusing or, at least, readable.  

Click on the link to get to the older post. Sorry about all the repetition over the years and please remember that what was true in the past may have changed slightly over time.

Christmas begins The Christmas lottery

They think it's all over This one's about how the dates of Christmas are not the same as in the UK

Eating at Christmas A self explanatory title I think

And some lemons for the prawns This one is about differences between UK and Spanish Christmases

17 million Spaniards or 63% of the population earn less than 1,000€ gross per month and 4,422,359 are out of work. This is one of the blogs that has the largest number of hits. I suspect it's for the title which has almost nothing to do with the content. There's a bit about what a Christmassy day the 5th January is 

Bring me pine logs hither Mention of our venerable Christmas tree. in fact we replaced it for this 2023 Christmas

Seasonal snippets All sorts of Christmas things - for once the title is a good reflection of the content

Losing my grip Mainly about a Christmas lottery advert

Rather reassuring The Christmas run up story of years and years ago

Tales of turrón This one doesn't read badly after all this time - obviously enough it's about turrón

Stamping the Christmas cards Just what it says

Underwear, grapes and bubbly New Year's traditions

The goose is getting fat  Those not quite so obvious Christmas things

Drawing to a close  Christmas ends with the Three Kings in Spain

Not a dry eye in the house Christmas concerts and community

Jingle bells  I think it's a bit of a Christmas comparison in two countries

They think it's all over The things that happen in January as part of Christmas. I've even used the title before!

Pale blue dot Christmas lights

Fat chance The Christmas lottery - again

Fattening of geese Christmas cards and British supermarkets

So this is Christmas It seems to be an all embracing article

The ITV

I don't think that British people taking their car for an MOT  (The UK safety inspection) fret too much about it. It's just another job to be done, like deworming the cat. It's exactly the same in Spain. There's a technical inspection, the ITV, for cars and almost anything else that rolls on the road from trailers and caravans to lorries and tractors. The main difference is that the test in Spain can only be done done at specialist centres. If nothing has changed, in the 20 years since I last took a car for an MOT in the UK,  then any approved garage, service centre or workshop can do the MOT test there.

So the Spanish process is simple enough. I'm going to talk about cars. Different vehicles are treated differently with different test periods and different rules but they all use the same test centres. It can be slightly intimidating to be doing the test on a car while running alongside a four metre high 44 ton artic in the next bay along.

For the first three full years a new car is considered to be good to go. No need for a test. On, or a bit before, the fourth birthday the car needs to be tested. After that the test is every couple of years until the car reaches ten and, from then on, every year. 

The process is simple too. You show the vehicle paperwork in the reception office, pay the appropriate fee. Diesel cars cost more than petrol cars, there are differences between cars with and without catalysers and the least expensive test is for electric cars. I paid 44.53€ for the test on my petrol car. The fee paid, you and the car get sent to a sort of assembly line. The process starts at one end of a big shed and the vehicle processes through the shed with everything getting checked as you go.

The first part is all very hands on. Lights, headlamp alignment, horn, windscreen wipers, squirters, seatbelts - anything that the tester person can check with the car standing still. Sometimes the testers are very thorough, buckling up the rear seat belts, checking the quality of the wiper blades, and other times the checking of the smaller things is pretty cursory. It may be different testers, it may different test stations or it may just be the idea that newer cars need less checking. I tend to the latter because I noticed that the same bloke who guided my car through the test was much more thorough with a battered 19 year old Ford Fiesta, that went through a couple of cars before me, than he was with my four year old Arona. With the car still at the very start of the shed there's the emissions and noise check. Again there are different rules for different ages of vehicles. My 1977 MGB GT went through despite the slight blue haze from the exhaust. With the initial checks done you start to move through the shed. The rolling road comes first, to check the brakes. Then to the pit where there's an under car inspection - brake lines, exhaust, suspension joints, general health, bodywork rot and a steering check which involves riving the steering wheel from side to side and some other stuff that I forget.

None of this is particularly tricky. It's a perfectly sensible process and despite the usual moans from my compatriots that the Spanish test is a joke, in comparison to the, obviously, infinitely superior, British test, it's a straightforward process for checking compliance with European construction and use rules.

The funny thing is that, despite what I said at the beginning, for we foreigners it is actually a bit of an event. I know plenty of people who pay a mechanic to take their cars through for them. I know of one test centre that offers to take the car through for we foreigners. I think that, once again, it's the language. Not always though - it is also simply that it's a process that's a bit alien. My car has automatic lights so, in four years I've hardly ever used the light switch. I had to check the handbook to see how to put on sidelights, how the the rear fog light worked etc. Language wise though I have no real problem with conversational Spanish and my car vocabulary is OK too. Even then, sitting in a car with the tester standing outside and saying - left blinker (or turn signal, or trafficator, or indicator), both, brakes, dip, front fog, rear fog etc. - there is forced to be a moment when you either miss what is said or don't have a clue what they mean. The testers have accents, they mumble, they have shortcuts, they presume you know the drill, they've already done this forty times today and they are not at all emotionally involved in the process. This time for instance the tester bloke was much more interested in talking to me about my 20 year old Tag Heuer watch, and the Omega Seamaster that had preceded it, than he was in commenting on the steering castor angle. He was waving the paperwork around, with or without the all important windscreen sticker, as he talked about the beauty of Bulova Accutron watches to the point that I felt I had to interrupt to ask if the car had passed its ITV.

The Neighbourhood Association

Obviously it was going to be easy to "integrate". As soon as I was living amongst Spaniards my dodgy, evening class Spanish would improve by leaps and bounds through simple seepage. There were other things to be done to help that process. Bars, naturally, were an essential asset, as was cinema, watching television, listening to the radio, and reading newspapers (we're back in the days when dinosaurs still ruled the earth). Very soon, I'd be nattering away about football (something I can't do in English), politics or food with the best of them. At least that's what I thought in 2004.

One of the early strategies was to join the village Neighbourhood Association. We had some good times with the worthy citizens of Culebrón - a musical in Madrid, a couple of weekends in Benidorm and a day trip to Guadalest. There were also a couple of village meals each year - one just before the local fiestas, sitting out on the warm summer evenings under the pine trees by the social centre, and another in November inside the same building. After the November meal we had the Annual General Meeting. In my case, this meeting often involved large quantities of whisky, which were sometimes severely detrimental to my health. In drinking whisky and not some spirit with a mixer, I confirmed my foreigner status. 

The emotions stirred by these events were often contradictory - it was great to be in among Spaniards doing something authentic but the thought of maintaining conversations, often for hours on end, and knowing what to do, and when, filled me with dread. I usually wondered if it might not be better to avoid Spain all together and stay at home with cheap booze and satellite telly?

Nearly two decades later, I'd say we are still a long way from being anything other than foreigners who live here. We're settled in, we're comfortable. We don't get confused by Spanish road junctions, we know to push past the crowds of people at the theatre door etc, etc. Nonetheless, to Spaniards, we are, first and foremost, Britons.

As with so many things nowadays I don't quite remember why we left the Neighbourhood Association. I paid the annual fee in 2017 but not for 2018. Not all the events that go on in the village have anything to do with the Neighbourhood Association. Some are organised through the village pedaneo/a (think village mayor or mayoress). The person to do this job is selected by Pinoso Town Hall. There may be community input but the pedaneo/a is not an elected post. My vague recollection is that the activities organised by the Association missed a beat, it seemed moribund, and any local activity was coming through the pedaneo/a. Covid added to the hiatus. Then in September of this year, Maggie joined in a chance conversation, outside our front gate, and found out that the Neighbourhood Association had been organising trips and meals without us! We rejoined and in October of this year just in time to join the coach outing to Cartagena which was a hoot.

A couple of Sundays ago it was a village meal followed by the AGM of the Association. I was mightily impressed how we were received; there were lots of big grins, lots of pumping handshakes, lots of firm hands on shoulders and double kissing. We arrived at vermouth time. We know how we like our vermouth. We were able to say so. We had at least three offers to sit alongside someone as we sat down to eat at the long trestle tables. We didn't need to ask what we were eating; we didn't find anything strange in what we were eating; we knew the process, we knew the drill, we asked for what we needed if it wasn't there. We joined the conversation; we had conversations - there was no need to smile and nod and pretend we understood when we didn't. We had views on the quality of the food; we opened bottles of drink without thinking we needed to ask permission. All very straightforward.

Set three Spaniards to talk, and you get at least four simultaneous conversations. Turn that into thirty or forty Spaniards, who have had a couple of drinks, who are friends, who still have unsaid things to share and it can get quite rowdy. That's how the AGM was. Only a few people keep up with the flow. Most take refuge in the safe havens of optional conversation. To be honest, while it's all very endearing, it's not good if you're actually interested in the meeting. I realised that some of what was being said made it patently clear that there were certain tensions in the village. Tensions which we had been half aware of but which, especially after the meeting, were explained to us in Cinemascope and full Technicolor. 

I avoided the demon whisky. It was good to be back.

Good graffiti in amongst the pines

I'm not too keen on walking for fun. I especially dislike those uphill sections as they make me wheeze and cough. I have no problem at all with walking as a means of transport but I don't think of it as a pastime. Pop me down in a strange town and I'll trot around happily. Now most of my friends and pals don't agree with me. They think walking is healthy, fun and free. They even list it as a hobby; like collecting stamps, singing in a choir or spending hours watching Instagram videos. They buy sticks and specialist clothing and footwear. These people can be persuasive. They offer a destination with beer as an incentive. I am sometimes, very rarely, persuaded. I wonder what the fuss is about. Green and brown colour scheme, lots of pines, a bit of esparto grass maybe some rosemary and the occasional hare or hoopoe.

I am impressed by the solidarity of the walkers though. Often, when I've been tricked into walking in the countryside, maybe in a natural park or near some prehistoric site, there are signs to mark the way. Not necessarily those finger posts that tell you how many kilometres it is to the Bronze Age settlement or the spectacular waterfall but just little painted marks or piles of stones to keep you from walking off and becoming benighted as the wolves howl and the wild pigs attack to protect their young. 

Some of the marks are there because someone, town halls, provinces or regions, has paid for them to be there. They may or may not be maintained. Sometimes they are there because some association or even an individual thinks it's a good idea, a public service. They're the sort of people that love to be in the fresh air and presume that everyone else does. These marks can be really useful but they can also let you down because they are "unofficial".

There are other paths with marks which are homologated, standardised. These are the ones listed by FEDME, Federación española de deportes de montaña y escalada or the Spanish Federation of Mountain Sports and Climbing. These paths are the GR, PR and SL paths. There are homologation criteria for these paths, rules that say what the characteristics should be and how they should be maintained. The idea is that if you follow one of these trails you won't suddenly be abandoned to your own devices half way up some windswept mountain pass.

The three sets of marks that you will see along these paths are painted flashes on surfaces such as rocks, posts and trees . They are sometimes backed up with piles of stones, little cairns called mojones or hitos. They have colour schemes that tell you what sort of path you are following. Red and white markings for the GR, yellow and white markings for the PR and green and white markings for the SL.

The GR routes are at least 50 kms long are marked with a red and a white flash. 

The PR routes are between 10 kms and 50 kms long and are marked with a yellow and a white flash

The SL routes are less than 10 kms long and are marked with a green and a white flash

If the colours are painted as two (or more) parallel flashes the instruction is that you are on the right path and should keep going The marks can be combined: For example a white, red and yellow flash would show that the mid distance route shared the path with a longer route for that part of its length.

If the colours are arranged in a cross it means that you have gone the wrong way and should backtrack till you find the parallel marks. 

There is also a turn sign.

Should you ever, mistakenly, wander away from the safety of the asphalt and concrete, with shop windows to look in and signs of civilisation all around, you may come across these strange markings. But don't forget, as Phil Esterhaus used to say, "Let's be careful out there".

For the want of a nail

Last century, when Windows 98 was cutting-edge technology and when mobiles were big and analogue, I was in Mexico. I'd gone into a locutorio, a place to rent a computer with an internet connection for a few minutes. The Mexican keyboard layout was quite different to the British keyboard I was used to. The QWERTY letters were as they should be but the symbols were in different places. What's more the keyboard had done a fair few miles and lots of the keys were as highly polished as as the stairs of the spiral staircase in a medieval castle. I needed the @ symbol for an email address and I had to resort to Ctrl C and Ctrl V, cut and paste.

I was reminded of this the other day when I had to use a computer with a British keyboard layout - I spent ages staring at the strange layout when I wanted a / or a #, but the final nudge to write this blog came when the passport office refused to accept my address as being Caserío Culebrón. They didn't like the tilde, the accent over the i and o. Nowadays, living in Spain, I'd never consider buying a computer with a British keyboard layout for all the faffing about trying to put tildes and Ñ into words by resorting to tricky keystroke sequences. 

Spanish needs the tildes to show where the stress in a word goes and, sometimes, just to mark the difference between two words that are spelled the same way but have different meanings - tú for you and tu for your for instance. Or cártel for the drugs organization and cartel for a poster. If English used tildes, we'd be able to tell whether "I read the Times" is something we do habitually, present tense, or something we did yesterday, past tense.

When I first started to learn Spanish, the Spanish alphabet had 29 letters - 26 were shared with we British but CH, LL, and Ñ were three extra - 29 in all. By the way I'm just using capitals to make the combinations stand out more. The decision to remove them the CH and LL was taken in 1994 but some websites say that the letters weren't finally retired till 2010. Even with the CH and LL gone that still left 26 letters because of the ñ/Ñ.

Changing LL and CH didn't cause much fuss. They're just two letters together. Nothing really changed except for the way some words were presented in dictionaries and indexing systems. The Ñ is different. If it had been removed from the dictionary, then something like 15,000 words would have had to be spelled differently and the Spaniards (and other Castilian speakers) were dead against that. I'm sure you know the sound maybe because of the very famous Spanish word, mañana, or because of the name of the country, España.

The Ñ didn't appear in the official Spanish dictionary till 1803, but its history, as an independent, and particularly Spanish letter, goes back well over 1,000 years. Latin doesn't have the sound that the Ñ represents so there is no Latin letter like the Ñ. As memories of the Roman Empire faded in memory and as Romance languages like French, Italian and Castilian Spanish developed, so did a guttural, stressed, N sound. A way of writing the sound down had to be found. The French and the Italians eventually chose GN, the Catalans chose NY, and the Portuguese chose NH. At the time I'm talking about the only people who really wrote things were monks. They were responsible for copying and translating texts as these changes were going on. We know that, in Spanish, the Ñ triumphed, but for a long time, there was no standardization, and two or three ways were used to record this sound, sometimes in the same document. One method was to use a double N. The monks weren't just copying things out with a cheap biro - they were carefully crafting each letter on expensive parchment. The double N used both space and time. The monks found a simple solution, they put a little mark over the N to show that the sound should be read as the guttural N.

In the 13th Century, Alfonso X or Alfonso the Wise, the scholar king who is intimately linked to the reconquest of Murcia by Christians, ruled that the Ñ should be used to represent the guttural N sound. And when Antonio de Nebrija published his first grammar of Castilian in 1492, he too included this letter in his alphabet. The same Ñ is used in a couple of other local languages on the Spanish peninsula, in Galician and Asturian, and it was also used when lots of aboriginal South American languages, such as Quechua and Zapoteco, were first written down. We do exactly the same when we're faced with a name written in Arabic or Japanese script and reproduce it using the 26 letters we have at our disposal.

Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in the World. Next up, as mother tongue; it's probably Castilian Spanish. More people speak English than Spanish, but for a lot of those people, it's not their first but a second language. Despite this, in the digital age, there was a real threat to the survival of the Ñ. In 1991, the forerunner of the European Union wanted to standardise computer type keyboards, and, because of the dominance of English in the digital world, the suggestion was for the inclusion of just the 26 "English" letters. The Spanish Government was having none of it though. When the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1993, the Ñ was enshrined and protected in this bedrock EU document as a cultural heritage.

It's an important letter. There are lots of Spanish words that change meaning completely if the N is changed for an Ñ. A favourite is año for year and ano for anus - one to bear in mind at Christmas card writing time. Cono for cone is not the same as coño which can be a quite strong word to describe an essential part of female anatomy as well as a good all round sort of curse word. There are lots of less exciting examples like cuña, wedge and cuna for cot/crib or mono for monkey and moño for a hair type bun. It goes on.

I wonder what the passport office would have done if I were a British citizen called Muñoz, Peña, or Zuñiga, all of which are pretty common Spanish surnames - ridden roughshod over my identity I suppose and changed my name. After all Michael Portillo pronounces his name in an English not Spanish way despite its origin.

Beside the road

Especially in the dark they can seem like little islands of human activity lost in the fastness of the night. They're usually nameless, at least at first. There's probably a bit of confusion as you drop off the motorway because you're not quite sure where to park up and the car controls, that you haven't used much, at least for the past couple of hours, prove a little awkward. You don't know quite where you are even though you know where you've been and where you're going and when you do finally get inside, into the artificial light, it's all a bit bright after hours of only peering into oncoming headlights. 

The Spanish call them restaurantes, or bares, de carretera. Like Transport cafés in the UK they have a certain aura of mystique. Sometimes it's for the decor, I remember being told about Casa Pepe at Despeñaperros, famous for its Nationalistic and Francoist decor, but generally the idea is that whilst these places may be a bit rough and ready some of them are culinary gems. This one does the best croquetas, that one has the best paella and the other has the best tortilla de patatas in Spain. Do a bit of Googling and you'll find any number of Spanish newspaper articles suggesting which are the best Restaurantes de Carretera. The newspapers may think they know the score but we all know that these places are really the preserve of long-distance lorry drivers, traffic police and the locals who live nearby.

The other week we were flying out of Barajas, the Madrid airport, Aeropuerto Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas if you prefer. The flight check in was at some ungodly hour and the timing made using the train infeasible. We had to drive, to drive overnight. Like most people on a long journey, we decided to stop to take on and to expel liquids. That journey reminded me of the strange world of the late-night cafés and restaurants sprinkled around the major arterial roads and motorways of Spain.

When I'm driving a decent distance I never think to plan where I'm going to stop. It's take pot luck, based on bladder control, my ability to keep my eyes open, and the Área de Servicio signs. Nowadays far too many of the signs take you to a petrol station with a tiny area set aside with a few stools and tables. The fare on offer usually includes such gastronomic delights as sweaty ham and cheese rolls in paper bags, overpriced Coke and coffee from a Nespresso type machine. Sometimes there are just vending machines. The 24hr tag is a cleverly baited trap.

Our first stop this time was at around four in the morning. It was one of those vast barn-like spaces decorated in muddy browns and greens with a huge bar topped with display cases, full of cakes and pastries or anchovies, octopus and Russian salad depending on the time of day. The bar area looked like it hadn't had a refit since 1987 and the lights, although I suppose they are no longer fluorescents, were just as unforgiving and did the job of picking out the sweat stain discolouration under the armpits of the distinctly off-white shirts worn by the serving staff, just as well. There were also other sales areas piled high with overpriced cheese and cold meats and, as we were in Albacete province, boxes full of miguelitos and showcases of Albacete knives presumably aimed at the forgetful traveller returning home to the bosom of their family. It was definitely a type. If there had been a rotating rack with music cassettes left over in the corner I wouldn't have been that surprised.

The clientele were a bedraggled crew. They were generally young men wearing expensive sportswear that still managed to look cheap. They had those shaved side footballer haircuts and a sort of slovenly look. They were almost certainly local. Not at all threatening or menacing but it must require a certain lifestyle to pop out to a not that happening motorway service area at four in the morning for a chat with pals. There were a couple of young women too, a bit on the heavy side and with bomber jackets and ice blue coloured jeans which reminded me, like the decor, of the 1980s. 

On the way back our stop was much earlier. maybe around 11pm. Again we were lucky when the random stop proved to be an eatery popular with locals from a nearby town. The place was brightly lit, had a sort of cafeteria look to it and had that loudness of Spaniards at table. 

Just after we sat down a couple of local police officers turned up joined minutes later by four Guardia Civil traffic officers in two cars. This is a sign of a good choice. The police hovered around the bar presumably swapping stories of derring do but the centre of attention in the main room was a group, probably an extended family group, of at least a dozen people tucking in to a mountain of snack type food, sandwich rolls, burgers, plates of tapas etc. They were finishing off. One lad, as wide as tall, was wearing lots of rapper style gold chains and a silk jacket with a DJ name emblazoned across the shoulders. He was hoovering up the remains of food from everyone's abandoned plates. This place too represented a style; modern, loud, a bit brash but not at all sanitised or internationalised and instantly comprehensible to any passing Spaniard from food to serving style. None of your self service here.

Maybe there's a PhD here for one of our renowned British Hispanists. "The role of roadside bars and restaurants in the formation of modern Spain". Or not.

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

As always I've written about this before; when I was on an overnight coach. This is from 16 years ago. I notice it is much more concise! I have become more garrulous with years and kilos.

It's 4 am. The bus is parked up in a service station. The cafeteria area smells faintly of sick and bleach. The man who's been sitting next to me on the bus may well be Ethiopian or Somali - he looks like he's from that bit of Africa - but as he speaks neither English nor Castilian I'll never know. There are Moroccans too - lots of Moroccans - and South Americans, mainly Ecuadorians. In Albacete a man with henna in his beard wearing one of those long shirts and the obligatory nylon anorak got off. A few Spaniards too. No one looks rich. In fact, most look definitely poor. Like the plump woman in the tight ski pants, tight top and high heels to match her yellow accessories. The ensemble screams market stall. Four continents at least - Continental drift. The struggling poor. In the middle of the night, on a bus to Madrid.