Climbing the walls

Ten years ago I saw the Pet Shop Boys at the old SOS 4.8 Festival in Murcia. I expected them to be terrible but they were just the opposite. They really engaged with the audience. At one point Neil was talking to us. He said how much he and Chris had enjoyed sitting in the Plaza Cardenal Beluga, in front of the Cathedral in Murcia, with a drink and a snack. "It's beautiful, isn't it, that Cathedral?" The home crowd roared its approval. He's right though. Whatever you think of its purpose Murcia Cathedral is quite a building.

Although the current building was started in 1394 the part you notice first, the frontage or facade, is Baroque in style. To my mind Baroque architecture means that it has lots of twiddly bits just like Baroque music is Handel, Monteverdi and Vivaldi. But, I have a duty to my loyal readership (hello Derek!) to be a bit more specific. Wikipedia tells me that Baroque Architecture is a highly decorative and theatrical style. It began in Italy in the early 17th century and gradually spread across Europe. It was originally introduced by the Catholic Church in an attempt to inspire awe in people in the hope of keeping them from falling into the clutches of the Protestant church.

It might be some sort of local allegiance but I think that Murcia Cathedral is my favourite Cathedral in Spain. Burgos is impressive, Cuenca looks nearly British, Jaén looks so solid, Sevilla is just so big and the position of Zaragoza on the side of the Ebro is so imposing but Murcia bears comparison. Santa María, for that's its name, is individualistic, it has a bit of style, a bit of character all its own. I think it's the asymmetry and that huge, solid, immovable tower off to the left that does it.

Back in September 2023 I noticed that scaffolding was going up on the facade and I thought how sad it would be for our house guests during the next few years. Everyone knows that getting a kitchen extension takes ages, and never gets finished on time, so I reckoned the Cathedral would be visually impaired for quite a while. It's true that the modern screens in front of big project scaffolding are usually interesting in themselves but it's clear that Jaime Bort's facade (there were lots of architects involved in reality but Bort is considered the main man) is probably just a mite more impressive. I suspected that the work would take years even though the timetable said a long year. In October one of the photos in my album shows the scaffolding and there's a caption - "The Cathedral in Murcia is having the facade tidied up. They are advertising that there will be visits up the scaffolding. I keep checking their website. I'll be there.".

And indeed I have been. I think it's a clever idea. As well as putting up the scaffolding for the workers to get on with the restoration, the scaffolders put up a second set of scaffolding so that we, the gawping public, can go up and watch the work on the facade. I've done it twice now. To be honest it's not that great a tour, I don't particularly care for the style of the guide, but that doesn't stop it being a worthwhile experience. The guide talks in something close to a monotone and his spiel goes someone like, "On this level we have four saints - he names the saints - he says that one has the face of the man who commissioned the work on the facade, Cardenal Beluga. He names more saints and the archangels. I read somewhere that, sculpture wise, there are twenty saints, three archangels, a guardian angel and the mysteries of the Virgin (heaven knows what they are) on the facade - the guide named them all. The most exciting he gets is when he asks if anyone knows the Patron Saint of Cartagena (Murcia is in the dioceses of Cartagena and the saint in question is San Ginés de la Jara) or, when he points out San Patricio, Saint Patrick, the Patron Saint of Murcia and makes a quip about shamrocks and black beer. There is very little in the way of those titbits of information, or interesting little stories, that are the bits people remember of a visit long after forgetting that both Santa Bárbara Mayor and Menor have their place on the facade. He doesn't say much about the restoration work going on. So far as I could tell the main thing they seem to be doing at the moment is chipping away some mortar that was added in a 19th Century, in a previous smartening up of the building, which was, apparently, a big mistake. 

They're still saying they'll be done in Autumn of this year but, if you fancy having a look yourself before then, you can book it up online on this link. 

P:S. The photo at the top is an old one. The scaffolding is now covered.

Funny ha, ha or funny peculiar?

If Britons, young Britons especially, still drink tea then "Shall I put the kettle on?" must remain a common question in British households. As long as I can remember, in houses where I have lived, one of the potential answers has been "Well, if you think it will suit you". Just in case you are not a native English speaker the English language uses something called phrasal verbs. To put on is one of them and it has several meanings. Two of the common meanings are to cause a device to operate and to wear. This means that "Should I put on the Television?" and "Should I put on a tie?" have the same basic structure, both make perfect sense, yet the meanings are completely different. The answer to the kettle question is a deliberate confusion of two of those meanings. It's not much of a joke though some of us find it weakly humorous.

Strictly Come Dancing is a British TV show. It's a programme where personalities are paired with professional dancers in a dance competition. Two of the names from the show, Anton and Giovanni, a judge and a dancer, have been able to exploit their semi celebrity status to feature in another British TV programme which follows them as they travel around Spain. In one episode they were talking to a Flamenco dancer who we'd been introduced to us as an 80 year old. Anton asked her when she had started dancing. Her answer was since she was 25. Anton countered with - "Ah, about five years ago then?". The woman put him right. "I'm much older than that," she said. The woman didn't pick up on the humour in Anton's comment. He did it again a couple of weeks later "You have six children - really? So that was before you got a telly then?". The person being asked the question didn't see the link about how she filled her leisure time. "No, we had a telly long before."

I can't help it. If a Spanish person tells me, for instance, they have a puncture I ask them if it hurts. They think I'm daft and don't understand what they said. Sometimes, when there is either the time or inclination to explain or to unpick the exchange we get into a conversation about the peculiarities of British humour. Spaniards know that there is something called British humour, it has a Wikipedia entry.

My partner says that Spanish humour is very slapstick, a bit unrefined. It's absolutely true that several successful Spanish comedy films of the last couple of years feature a lot of things like breakages, excrement and damage to male genitalia. I'm a bit out of touch with British humorists but back in the 20th Century people like Benny Hill, the Only Fools and Horses crew, Mr Bean or Morecambe and Wise were often quite physical and slapstick too. John Cleese hitting Manuel or thrashing his car is hardly subtle. On Spanish telly there was, for a while, a thing called The Comedy Club and, but for the fact that it was in Spanish, the stand-ups there could have been on any British stand-up show. A recent Spanish film was about a Catalan comedian called Eugenio, basically he told jokes in much the same way that I understand Jimmy Carr does and, if that's not right then maybe I could say that Bob Monkhouse or Dave Allen were joke tellers. I don't know much situation comedy on Spanish TV but that said La que se avecina is a popular Spanish sitcom and, for good measure, there's also quite a subtle pun in the title, that's where the subtlety ends.

So, because I quite frequently end up in the aforementioned conversation about British humour I thought there might be meat enough for a blog. The trouble is that when I started to look for differences I had some trouble finding anything that was significantly different, except for maybe a lot more word play. Wikipedia was very little help so I asked one of the artificial intelligence programmes for the difference. This is what it came up with before it started to ramble on about wearing sandals in winter.

"Spanish humour often employs a digressive style, leading listeners through various directions before reaching a conclusion. Physical humour, repetition, hyperbole, and satire resonate well with a Spanish audience while British humour leans toward irony, surprise, and sarcasm. British humour is renowned for its subtlety, wit, dry humour, self-deprecation, clever wordplay and innuendo while humour in Spain reflects the country’s passionate and expressive nature and thrives on absurdity, and exaggerated scenarios".

The first time, and I'm sure not the last, where artificial intelligence provides the words that I can't.

The photo by the way is Gila who used the same gag for years - "Hello, is this the enemy?

Megawatt hours and their smaller offspring

As I shaved I was listening to the radio, to the part they call a tertulia, that's the bit where pundits, usually journalists, talk about the latest news. They were talking about inflation and about electric prices. They had some boffin who knew all about the electric market. One little tidbit he dropped in at the end of his section was that every Spanish electric bill has a QR code which leads to a webpage maintained by some sort of Government quango, the "National Energy Commission". By using that code/website, you get a direct comparison between your last bill and the market in general. 

To explain it all properly would take pages and pages. It's quite complicated stuff, so I've kept this as short as my ponderous writing style will allow.

The Spanish electric market has two sorts of contracts for we household users. One is in the controlled market. The other is in the free market.

The controlled price varies from hour to hour. It's an almost incomprehensible pricing system; I certainly don't understand it. It's to do with supply and demand and with an auction between the big energy providers to decide on the price. There are only eight companies that offer contracts in the controlled Spanish market, they are the "Suppliers of Reference", and they are able to do so because they conform with certain government criteria. If you listen to the Spanish news and they tell you that today was the most expensive/least expensive day ever for electric prices, they are talking about this controlled price. If you buy a contract that uses the controlled price, you can never be sure whether your bill will be higher or lower even if you were to use the same amount of electricity under the same conditions.

Most people have a contract in the free market. "Anyone" can set up to sell electricity on to consumers in the free market. I presume it's more or less like that of any other business. If you're a supermarket, you buy your raw material, tomatoes say, from a producer, or their agent, at one price and sell them on to customers at a higher price. Normal capitalist economy stuff. Most supermarkets have tomatoes, the price varies from supermarket to supermarket and how they attract customers to buy them is up to each supplier. So with electricity, it's just the same. The companies that offer contracts to household users buy their electric off someone who generates it or from some intermediary, and then try to attract customers. How they package it up is how they sell their product. Most of the free market contracts have a fixed price for electric under certain conditions and for certain periods.

Electric bills in Spain have several elements. 

There's the power that you contract, the "potencia" - it's the thing measured in kilowatts. We have 3.54 kW. The more potencia you decide you need, the more you will pay each month. Often the cost of the potencia is lower at night and at weekends and more during the working day. 

Then there's the quantity of power that you use. The more power you use, the more you pay. That's why your partner/parent or children are always nagging you not to leave things on standby, to turn off lights, to raise the temperature on your fridge freezer, to buy a pressure cooker etc. etc. 

On top of this part of the bill, you pay a tiny, miserly, insignificant amount to the electric company to subsidise the bono social, which is the discounted price that is offered to people who might otherwise have problems paying their electric bill. Of course, you could see it as a subsidy to the electric companies, but let's keep clear of politics on subsidies and charity for the moment. 

The first subtotal on your electricity bill is made up of these three elements: power capacity, power used and the contribution to the bono social plus an electricity tax. I think this tax is to pay off a debt when the government subsidised the price of electric. I may be wrong. Maggie tells me I usually am.

The second part of your bill is made up of the "extras," which include renting the meter and things you may decide you need or not. One of the things we had on our free market, Iberdrola, bill was a sort of insurance against faults in the house wiring and for repair or replacement of certain white goods should they go phut. I'm sure that other suppliers have other extras.

Finally the subtotal for the energy/bono social/electricity tax is added to the subtotal for the extras and the whole lot then has IVA/VAT added to give us the total we will have to pay.

There have been lots of changes in the way that electricity is sold in Spain over the years. I don't think we had a choice of suppliers when we bought the house and if there was a choice of contracts I was unaware of that option. The company we contracted with was called Iberdrola and they simply renewed the contract each year. We were on the controlled price by default. When Putin started pounding the Ukraine the electricity price in the controlled market went crackers. Every day seemed to be a record high for the price of electric. We certainly noticed it in our bills. By now we were well aware that we had options and we asked Iberdrola what they could offer. I'd noticed, but not known why, the Iberdrola bill had, seamlessly and silently, transmuted into a Curenergia bill. Iberdrola sells in the free market while Curenergia is one of the Suppliers of Reference, selling in the controlled market. When Putin forced us onto the free market, we had to change suppliers to Iberdrola proper.

All of the free market contracts offer different pluses and minuses. The different contracts might offer electric at a fixed price every minute of the day or expensive electricity during certain hours balanced out by lower prices at other times. They may offer a fixed unit price over several years. Lots of them offer green electric though I wonder how anyone can determine where the electrons moving along the cables came from and as Spain seems to consider nuclear power to be as green as solar panels, wind turbines and hydroelectric there may be different ideas about definitions. There are often side offers; buy electric off Repsol, and they'll give you a discount at their petrol stations buy from someone else and they'll give you money off at the supermarket. 

So, back to where this blog started. Prompted by the radio tertulia I looked at the QR code which referenced lots of providers. From that I looked at some providers online, I talked to a couple of advisors one online and one face to face - both tried to sell me a contract with the same supplier. That supplier was not one of the ones that the National Energy Commission suggested as the best value. Amazingly, as if by magic, my Instagram and Facebook feeds also started to fill with adverts for energy suppliers - they must have some sort of sixth sense. It became obvious that changing from one contract to another was dead easy, and so I did.

Whether the decision was a good one or not, time will tell.

Decline and Fall

Besides perfume and cars there are multiple adverts on Spanish telly for food. Particularly for fast food or franchised food chains - Foster's Hollywood, KFC, Domino's - or for quick to eat food - Casa Tarradellas pizzas, Yatekomo noodles. Now I'm not a discerning diner. I was a big fan of Spam, I like crabsticks and I still buy el Pozo meat products despite seeing the stomach turning documentary on TV. But I have to say that the adverts are putting me off a bit. The food is all so shiny and bathed in red or yellow sauce of dubious parentage. Eating with hands squidged over with sauce appears to be a positive thing.

I have a Spanish pal who is very set in his ways. From what I can tell he eats a lot of very traditional Pinoso food. If it's not local then, whether it's at home in a restaurant, he sticks to the tried and tested - grilled meat, stews, rice dishes and the like. I usually meet this friend around 12.30 so, a long hour later, I'm saying goodbye because I have to get home to finish preparing lunch. He occasionally asks what I'm cooking, Chicken and coconut curry I say, or cassoulet or even turkey fajitas and he looks at me as though I'm talking gobbledygook not just remembering what a cook book tells me.

I was telling this friend that we'd had a bit of a disappointment with a restaurant we'd gone to. We'd had some friends visiting who have a house on the coast. We'd planned to go to a local restaurant that does very traditional Pinoso food. Escalivada, pipirrana, fried cheese with tomato jam, bread with ali-oli and grated tomato, local cold sausages and the like to start. The main dish would usually be rice with rabbit and snails (the local paella), a rabbit stew or the big meatballs in broth. As the meal grinds to its inevitable conclusion, after the pudding, they give you mistela, the sweet wine, and perusas, the air filled cakes. Unfortunately the restaurant had a wedding reception that day, no room for us. We chose another restaurant, one we'd meant to try for ages. It was fine. It did lots of straightforward things like Russian salad, broken eggs, croquettes, prawns in garlic, patatas bravas blah, blah as starters. Mains were lots of varieties of fish, pork and beef served grilled or fried and there were also various rice/paella dishes. Nothing wrong with it. Absolutely fine. Eaten and forgotten.

So, back to my friend. I'm telling him about this. He says but surely the traditional food would be nothing new to your visiting friends if they have a house here in the province. I tell him that, on the coast there is plenty of food but that it's, generally, international. In fact I tell him here in Pinoso most of the restaurants serve food that would be equally at home in Brussels, Milwaukee or Nuneaton. He doesn't agree. He says it's easy to get paella on the coast. I know, from past conversations, that he goes to the same handful of restaurants time after time because that's where he can get what he's looking for. A self fulfilling prophecy. I try to explain what I mean. He's thinking of paella made individually, to order. He's not thinking about the stuff that served up in individual portions, microwaved hot as necessary, sold to tourists as the dish before the pork chop and chips.

Not that long ago the set meals, the menús, started with a choice of something like soup (fish, garlic, onion and seafood were favourites), possibly some pasta, maybe a stew like lentejas or cocido, maybe some boiled or grilled veg. The second dish, main course if you prefer, would be meat or fish, a pork chop, a chicken fillet, sardines, a piece of hake, maybe kidneys. The pudding would be ice cream, flan or fruit of the day. The food was hardly haut cuisine but it was something with identifiable ingredients. You could have coffee instead of pudding of course. The red wine was so rough it came with gaseosa (sugary, fizzy water) to make it palatable. White wine was a rarity and beer was beer - that's fizzy lager. The quality wasn't good but it was honest sort of stuff using cheap but straightforward ingredients cooked by someone who was a cook - it often involved using up yesterday's leftovers.

Nowadays the roots of the set meals are still the same but the choice is different. It's difficult to explain in a way but the style has changed, it's less honest. In the past the menú came with cheap ingredients - the cheap cuts of meat, only veg in season or something produced or hunted locally. Nowadays the ingredients are cheap because they are cheapened versions of what would once have been decent quality food - farmed, steroid fed, fish, chicken bred with oversize breasts and veg grown under artificial lighting in huge plastic greenhouses. The food is still rooted in Spain but it's not really Spanish. It's a bit like getting bangers and mash at the local pub in the UK with the sausages made with mechanically separated meat and potato out of a packet. Here it might be rice served with bits of pepper, chorizo and chicken.

It might be the puddings, the afters, the sweets that most highlight this change. The list of puddings after a Spanish menú del día is, no longer, three or four items. You will be offered any number of possibilities and every single one comes out of a packet that has been in the refrigerated display. More choice, less quality.

It's a real shame that those people chose that day to be married but I'd still like to wish them the happiest of lives together!

Neither one nor the other

I went to the UK, well England, a few weeks ago. I like England well enough but I don't visit that often. I probably go a little more often than once a year but I usually only stay three or four days. My visit in February was my first since May of last year. Both of my last two visits have been prompted by my mum being less well than usual.

It's funny going back. I'm English, I'll always be English and my English is still pretty good - a bit old fashioned maybe but good. My language skills and my cultural knowledge make me feel comfortable in England. I usually know how things are organised, how to behave but if things have changed, or start to go a bit awry, I can ask, I can talk to people, find out what's going. Nonetheless I had, at one point, to hold out a handful of coins and ask the person on the other side of the counter to take the appropriate money. I am, of course, aware that simply using physical money makes me a bit odd but, in the heat of the moment, I couldn't decide which coin was which. There were lots of other tiny incidents to highlight that things are not as they were when I left and sometimes, despite being on home turf, I was slightly uncomfortable in some situations.

I lived in Cambridgeshire for about twenty years and I left a bit short of twenty years ago. For several of those years I worked for a charity. At one point I recruited my dad to help out with something, I don't remember exactly what, but it involved him phoning lots of people we worked with. He found that at least half of the people presumed he was me. On the phone it could only be accent. My dad died in 2000 but long before that he was in hospital in Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. I drove up from Cambridgeshire to see him. At one point the nursing staff needed to do something ghastly related to bodily fluids so they pulled a curtain around his bed and chased me away. I sat on the edge of the bed of the bloke next to my dad in the ward. We chatted a bit. "Where are you from?," he asked.  "From here," I replied. "No," he said, "not now, where are you from, where are your roots?" "I was born in this very hospital," I said. "Well you don't sound like you were," he concluded. I realised I was stateless. In Cambridgeshire I was broad Yorkshire. In Huddersfield I was from somewhere South. 

Something similar happens when I go to England. I'm definitely not from here but I'm a bit out of place there. 

I was amazed and unready to eat at British meal times. I mean everyone knows that Spaniards eat later but do Britons really eat so early? I saw people ordering lunch before noon. My sister tells me that she thinks that British people are tending to book an evening meal in a restaurant earlier than they used to. Her feeling was that, until recently a 7.30pm booking would be pretty normal but that now the same booking is a tad on the late side. I wouldn't expect most Spanish restaurants to be open before 8.30pm! I found it very odd even considering eating at 12 noon or 5pm. 

I went shopping in a supermarket and I couldn't find anything - the ordering of goods seemed to follow no obvious logic but I remember having the same difficulty when I moved from the UK to Spain. Oh, and then I was completely flummoxed by the "scan and pay" or "scan and go" options at the self service checkouts. A very pleasant woman helped me, in a slightly condescending way, with the multiple operations required to pay for a single lemon!

On the bus, even though there is a maximum fare of £2 people were still asking for their stop by name. When you get on a Spanish bus you just want tickets. The fare is the same for two stops or twelve. Mind you the community spirit on the British buses was great. All that clearing the way so someone in a wheelchair can get on or everyone thanking the driver as they get off is something I've never seen on Spanish buses

You can be more specific if you want to get a beer in Spain but really all you have to do is ask for a beer. There are sometimes supplementary questions from the servers in more upmarket bars but that's something fancy and new. In the UK it's always been, a pint of Ghost Ship (or Landlord or IPA and so on) please. Essential to specify both product and quantity (and nowadays to have a sizeable credit limit on your card) .

Strange as well that the cars and buses go on the other side of the road. I whirled around in the style of one of those robot vacuum cleaners when I had to cross the road as I was quite unsure where the traffic would be. In a taxi I had a momentary panic attack when the driver was obviously going to go the "wrong way" round a roundabout.

In the Dhaba I was pleased to be able to lean on my sister and brother in law to understand the menu.

Here though, obviously enough, to Spaniards I'm as English as five o' clock tea, pea soupers and fish'n'chips. Lots of people in shops, restaurants and bars will, annoyingly, speak to me in English despite my best efforts and I'm sure if they had a any spare socks they would offer me them to wear with my sandals.

The train in Spain runs mainly on the plain

This is a piece about days out on the train. As usual I got distracted. If you're not interested in the Spanish railway system skip the next four paragraphs

I was told, ages ago, that, where there are twin tracks, Spanish trains "drive" on the left. That is they use the left hand set of rails in relation to the direction they're travelling. The reason, so said my informant, was that the first railways in Spain were built by British engineers and without giving it a second thought the Britons built the system that way around. It turns out that I was lied to. It's partly true in that the first line on the peninsula did use a British Engineer but his line, from Barcelona to Mataró, opened in 1848, ran trains on the right. 

As the railways boomed the first big Spanish railway company - MZA - Compañía de los Ferrocarriles de Madrid a Zaragoza y Alicante - bought the Barcelona to Mataró line. They bought the direction of travel too. MZAs big competitor in the pioneering days of Spanish rail was the Compañía de los Caminos de Hierro del Norte de España and they chose to drive on the left. Nobody nowadays seems to know why, maybe simply to be contrary. To this day the majority of Spanish trains drive on the right though there are parts of the network where that's not the case. Not that it's an ordinary train line but the Madrid underground network goes left for instance. Mind you in Madrid, until 1924, the cars apparently drove on the left too!

It's not quite true but, today, in broad stroke the track, the stations, the signals - the infrastructure - is owned by ADIF and the rolling stock, the trains and coaches and wagons, is owned by RENFE. Recently some low cost operators have moved into Spain and they own trains and rolling stock which runs on the lines owned and operated by ADIF. They only operate on the international gauge lines. Mostly, if you're going to catch a train like train you're going to travel with RENFE.

The width of railway lines, the gauge, can vary from country to country and even from line to line. In Spain there are three types of train gauge - narrow, conventional and high speed. The narrow gauge railways use a metre gauge - for instance the Alicante Tram and the railway from Cartagena to Los Nietos use this gauge. The traditional rail network uses a gauge of 1,668 milímetros and the high speed trains use the gauge which is often called International because it's the most common gauge in the world. It's the one that George Stephenson first used, 1,435 mm, though he thought it was 4' 8½".

The nearest place to catch a train, if you live in Pinoso, is Elda/Petrer near the Elda hospital. At one time, on that same line, there was a station just outside Monóvar which still has the name plaque Monóvar-Pinoso on it. I suppose in much the same way that there is a halt at Sax which was re-opened a few years ago the possibility exists that that station could be reopened but, at the moment, it's just an easy target for graffiti taggers. After Elda/Petrer the next nearest "serious" station, for the traditional network, is in the centre of Villena near the Teatro Chapí. A bit farther afield there are stations at Alicante, Elche, Cieza and Murcia. The nearest High Speed Stations are on the outskirts of Villena and Elche. They are both in quite odd locations. The Elche one is in some village just off the motorway about 12 kms from the town centre but the Villena one is in full countryside down a winding country road. At least it means if you're willing to leave your car on a dirt road you can avoid car park charges travelling from there!

The high speed trains are called AVEs, (it's pronounced a bit like avay) AVANT (high speed trains for mid distance) and ALVIA which are able to use both the high speed lines and the conventional lines. I'm not sure what the speed records are for the AVE trains but I've been on plenty that have clicked along at 300k/h and the fastest I've seen personally is 308k/h.

From Villena you can catch a high speed train to Elche, Orihuela and Murcia in one direction but it's much more likely that you'd want to go the other way - towards Madrid. There is a mid point stop in Albacete and some trains stop in Cuenca. The ALVIAs may stop in other places. There are low cost trains on the route from Alicante to Madrid. RENFE's low cost service is called AVLO and a French firm called Ouigo runs the same route. If one of the cheap trains stops at Villena it's likely that it will be the same price or more expensive than catching the same train from Alicante to Madrid. The cheap trains are usually timetabled so that it's not feasible to go out and back in a day but it's no longer impossible. Parking costs in Alicante obviously add to the price and the cheap trains have all sorts of extra add on charges, big suitcases and the like, similar to the low cost airlines. You can get there and back from Villena in a day with the usual RENFE trains and with a bit of timetable checking you can often find a good price if you're willing to be flexible. RENFE has a very strange policy about when it releases train schedules and often you can't book things up more than six weeks in advance. The RENFE website is notoriously dodgy to use too but at least it's available in English. One of the nice things is that you always get an allocated seat. The RENFE website is worse than useless if you need to change trains and a good alternative may be to use something like Trainline or seek help from The Man in Seat 61. 

For a bit of a day jaunt my favourites would be out of Villena or Elda/Petrer (just different stops on the same line) on the conventional services. I usually use Petrer because you can park outside the station for free and it's closer to Pinoso but there's free parking to find in Villena too. You can go downhill towards Alicante and from Alicante you can go on to Elche, Murcia and Cartagena. After Alicante it's not a quick journey. 

There are, currently, three trains a day that go the full distance from Elda/Petrer or Villena up to Barcelona but there are lots of other trains that use parts of the same line and they're good for a day out. The journey up to Xativa or to Valencia is dead easy. It also used to be dead cheap but I've been a bit shocked by the prices I've noticed as I checked details for this post. Sometimes, to get the best prices, you need to book the tickets as singles because on a return ticket the outward and inward journey need to be on the same class of train. An easier option might be using trainline to make the booking though it will cost a few Euros more. If you go out of Petrer in the other direction, which means you'll go through Villena, you can go to Alcazar de San Juan which is a really interesting day excursion or to Campo de Criptana which is a very dull town except that it does have a lot of Don Quijote type windmills. The same train continues on to Ciudad Real - pleasant enough but hardly breathtaking - though the journey is so long that you'll need a thick book.

I was going to finish off with an old British Rail advertising slogan from the 1970s but then I remembered who did those ads so, not a word. My next thought was that there might be a Michael Portillo quote that would work. Then I realised that my ideas were leading me towards madness. So no clever signing off line.

Cieza in bloom

I didn't understand much of what she said. Well, maybe half. This drives me bonkers. Nearly 20 years, and I still have trouble understanding a tour guide. Maggie said that it was because of her Murciano accent and the residual noise all around us, maybe, but if the guide had been speaking English, I would have understood everything. Well, more than half anyway.

We were doing a coach tour of the floración, the flowering, the blossom on the fruit trees in Cieza. Like lots of places with almonds, cherries, peaches, etc., Cieza makes a bit of a thing about it. They have a big programme from country breakfasts and bike rides to photographic exhibitions, music competitions and visits to lots of local places of interest all tied in to the blossom.

I have to be honest and say I usually forget until it's too late. For some reason, Cieza, which is only 45 minutes from Culebrón, isn't one of those places I think of as a likely destination. What I should do, as soon as I see some sort of fruit tree with blossom, is check what Cieza has on offer and get us booked in.

The first time we ever heard of la Floración was when I worked in Cieza. I'd seen the posters but never taken much notice and, when I did, in 2018, it turned out to be the last weekend of the event. We got a map and traipsed around a route but we didn't feel to have done it justice. Then, last year, or it may have been in 2022, we remembered, too late again. The official event was actually over, but we thought there would still be something to see. There wasn't. We ended up driving aimlessly around back roads near Cieza, not quite knowing what we were trying to find.

This year I remembered. I booked up a tour on a bus which was nice enough without being roller coaster exciting. I understood enough of what the guide said to have enough information to be excruciatingly boring the next time we're driving visitors past trees in bloom.

I'll be able to talk about the different ways to prune the trees to make the harvesting easier. I can drone on about how spraying the trees with water, when frost is predicted, can protect the blossom by enclosing it in ice. I can talk about how a lot of the blossom has to be removed from the trees with big fans and by hand, to ensure that the fruit has room to grow and won't damage the tree. I can escape specific answers as to which tree is which by saying how the colours and size of the blossom are a general guide to whether the tree is plum, peach, nectarine or apricot but that there are so many varieties that the only real way to know what's what is to be someone who knows what was planted.

We also found out that the future of the floración is in danger. One of the reasons is why farmers, all over Europe, are currently invading cities with huge John Deere and Massey Ferguson tractors. The price paid to them for their crops bears no relation to the prices for the product in the supermarkets. The farmers feel they are being diddled. More prosaically though the problem with the floración might be that there will be no pretty coloured blossom to see.

Hail is one of the big threats to a successful harvest. Hailstorms are not infrequent in this part of Spain and often they come at just the wrong time and destroy the harvest. In order to protect the trees and their fruit the growers have started to put marquee-type plastic meshing above the trees. Effective they may be but nobody is going to be keen to look at hectares and hectares of off-white plastic anti-hail meshing.

Hither and thither

I like to do things, to go places, to get out to Spain. To concerts, to parades, to fairs and fiestas, to restaurants and landmarks, to open days, exhibitions and guided walks. There always seems to be lots going on all over the place. I've never been quite able to decide whether this is because there are a lot of things on offer or because I've got into the habit of hunting them out. It may be a combination of both. It may also be because of where we happen to be based. Pinoso is surrounded by other towns and, as everywhere does things, the cumulative effect is impressive.

When we first got here there were a whole load of new cultural experiences to tap into. A lot of the information came from posters. It was both comical and frustrating that the posters often failed to give basic information - when or where - for instance. That's because the posters were a gentle reminder to a local audience. As the event hadn't changed in years, everyone who mattered, the locals, knew when, where, what, why and how. The posters weren't for bewildered foreigners. This was in the days when I used a bit of paper and a pen to remember the forthcoming events. Now I'm much more likely to take a photo of the poster. More usually though the information bypasses the poster and comes in a different way. Everywhere has a website, an Instagram account, a Facebook page or a WhatsApp channel. I've signed up to lots. Some of them are so prolific that I feel overwhelmed with the amount of information they pump out - Alicantelivemusic, for instance, sent me 12 Telegram messages yesterday. I do read them, well, not always, but generally. The alternative inertia might be an even more alarming alcoholic obesity achieved by never leaving my armchair in front of the telly.

Each week, well most weeks, I do a bit of a search. I have a long list of webpages, and especially Facebook pages, to check. I'm not particularly rigorous about the list; I skip some, I double up on others and there are reams of emails to check from concert promoters, festival organisers and any number of town hall tourist offices. The truth is it's deadly boring. It's painstaking and it's dull. I enter the events on my online Google calendar so they travel with me from laptop to mobile phone. I know, even as I one-fingeredly type the entries into my calendar, that I will never go to the Haydn concert, because it costs 35€ and it's on in Moraira, nor will I go to the new and up-and-coming band because they're on at eleven at night in a noisy club full of people fifty years younger than me. But, despite moaning, constantly, about what a pain it all is, every time I look through my photo albums and see some mad fiesta, the reminder of some guided tour we did, the incredible costumes, the photos of hundreds of people escorting or carrying on their shoulders a sumptuously dressed wooden doll kilometre after kilometre to some hillside chapel then I know that the search is a small price to pay for the experiences.

Just to give you some idea, this is the basic weekly checklist I start with: 

Pinoso, Alicante Telegram, El Buen Vigía Alicante, Trips in Murcia, Fundación Mediterránea, Fundación Paurides, Los secretos de la fachada, La Llotja, Paranimf Alicante, Eventos Murcia, Museo de la Universidad de Alicante, Turismo Región de Murcia, Bancatix Murcia, Teatro Romea, Gran Teatro, Teatro Chapi, Teatro Principal,Teatro Concha Segura, La Romana, Villena, ADDA, Yecla, Cigarreras, Agenda Cultural Alicante, Petrer, Elda, Monóvar, Jumilla, Teatro Vico, Elche, Aspe, Novelda, Alcoy, Sax, L'Escorxador, Facebook in general, and Instant ticket.

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If you don't know what I'm talking about, or you don't believe me, my photo albums are accessible at the top of the page. On PCs and laptops underneath the subheading about an old, fat man. On my Android mobile phone, the albums seem to be listed in a drop-down menu called home. Either way, they are clickable links named for the month and year.

The house taken by the cold

In my diary I often use the expression sunny and blue to describe the daytime weather in wintertime Spain. Hardly a cloud in the blue, blue sky and a temperature anywhere from the low teens to the low twenties. This year it's been particularly warm. But warm is relative. In the sun, in a pavement bar, in our garden, it's warm, but in the same spot, half an hour later, in the shade it's chilly. Our incoming water pipe passes along a North facing wall and often, during the winter, it would freeze up and leave us waterless till around noon when the day warmed up. Nowadays it has layers and layers of lagging and duct tape and we no longer need to venture out either smelly and tealess.

Our kitchen door opens onto a patio. l leave it open as I'm cooking lunch and I'm fine, temperature wise; not so good chef-wise. Our living room, on the other side of the kitchen though is distinctly chilly and, before Maggie comes home from a hard morning at the office, I put on some heating in there. It's not freezing cold but it is the sort of temperature where, even with a thick pully, the heat slowly seeps out and you suddenly realise that your hands and your nose are numbed by cold.

We know lots of people who are quite well off and have all sorts of ways of keeping their Spanish homes warm; they have modern and innovative heating solutions. We also know of people who tough it out in outdoor clothing inside or who live in igloo type blankets surrounded by the blasted wasteland of their sitting room. We're pretty traditional though and we pay to heat the house without ever having got around to the best way of keeping the house warm, which is to insulate it properly. We have big, thick walls and badly fitting windows and doors. Our living room has a very high ceiling so the air we've paid to warm quickly escapes through the layers of concrete and tiles above - there is no foam or fibreglass to impede its dash to the great outdoors. We'd be that house in the, UK, advert without snow on the roof because it isn't properly insulated. Mind you so would be all the other houses in the area. The winds that whistle under the exterior doors to our living room and kitchen will blow out a candle. When we heat the living room and then open a door into the adjoining bedroom or extension we get a good anabatic (or is it katabatic) wind because of the temperature gradient.

I'm in a back bedroom at the moment, it's nearly 6pm and it's 17ºC. Not that cold but I have a butane gas heater burbling along behind me with one of it's three elements alight. We have similar gas heaters in the living room and kitchen. They are dead useful for providing radiant heat very quickly. Sit close to one in a frozen room and it's like standing by the village bonfire. It may be cold around you but you're immediate space is nice and cosy. They produce a lot of water though and you have to be careful not to die asphyxiated.

In the living room we also have a hot and cold aircon unit. I turn that, and the gas heater, on about half an hour before Maggie gets home for lunch, and the 3pm news, so that the room feels relatively welcoming. When we settle down for the evening we turn on the pellet burner. This was Maggie's idea. She didn't think that the log burner which we had before (and which had replaced the original wood burning fireplace), produced enough heat. She didn't like the filth it produced either. It wasn't exactly cheap to run but, to her credit, she worried most about the serious injuries it caused me from time to time when my log chopping kit of goggles, to avoid early onset blindness, and impact absorbing clothing failed to protect me from the flying splinters. I always worry for, the shirtless, Charlie Bronson as he chops wood in the Magnificent Seven. So the log burner went and a pellet burner replaced it. The pellets are, I think, produced from wood and other biomass, and they are the fuel fed into a small crucible to burn in a controlled environment. It produces lots of heat, ours is rated at about 11kw. It also produces a decibel level similar to the noise the old class 55 Deltics made passing through York station at speed. It can turn the living room into an oven but, although it's supposed to have a few burn speeds it's basically binary - on or off. We control the temperature by opening the doors to the unheated spaces!

Other than that there are a couple of, strategically placed, fan heaters or fan and convector heaters which we use to heat small spaces for short periods. Every now and then I think back to the comfort we enjoyed in the carpeted, curtained, insulated and centrally heated house we last lived in in the UK.

Saturday night, or Tuesday afternoon, at the movies

I've always liked going to the pictures, to the cinema. It's not just the film but the experience. It's true you can see the pictures and hear the words on Netflix or Apple TV, or even on the broadcast telly, but it's hardly the same. The cinema is total immersion, a darkened room with one focus of attention, and a screen that dwarfs even the largest television screen. I also like that it involves popping out of British territory and into Spain.

I used to go to the pictures in the UK too. A huge advantage that we Britons have, in relation to film viewing, is that we speak English. This means that the films produced by the US film makers aren't seen as being foreign, even though they are. Italian and French and Iranian films, those that come with subtitles are foreign. I don't think I ever saw a dubbed film in a cinema in the UK, foreign films always came with subs. Not so in Spain. Here nearly all foreign language films (which obviously embraces Hollywood product) are dubbed. Historically films in Spain were dubbed because of high illiteracy rates, because of the work it provided and because it allowed what was said on screen to be controlled and censored. Now it's just a sort of tradition or expectation. 

Dubbing and subtitling still change the words in foreign films (and TV series). It's no longer a political or church censorship but words are sometimes changed to reflect a Spanish worldview - a BLT becomes a cheese sandwich for example. Hearing Colin O'Farrell or Margot Robbie speak with a Spanish accent is unnerving: even more so when the voice is a particularly recognisable one like Samuel L. Jackson or Morgan Freeman. The same dubbing artist usually sticks with the same star for the whole of their career and some dubbing artists are quite famous. The same voice artist may do more than one actor. The Spanish voice of Cillian Murphy, Ethan Hawke and Leonardo di Caprio is David Robles for instance. One of the strangest things is when a Spanish actor makes an English language film because, when the film is shown in Spain, their Spanish voices will be dubbed back into Spanish by a voice actor. It is quite surreal to hear well known actors, like Antonio Banderas, Javier Bardem or Penelope Cruz, speaking Spanish but with someone else's voice.

My film count in 2023 was 59 films in cinemas: 31 of them in English and 28 in Spanish. Seven so far this year. For me the films dubbed into Spanish, from say English or Norwegian, tend to be easier to understand than a film shot originally in Spanish. Equally some sorts of Spanish language films are easier to understand than others - anything with low life criminals is going to be, for me, much harder than a family comedy. Films with Latin American roots, particularly from the deep South, like Uruguay and Argentina, I find particularly difficult.

There is no cinema to speak of in Pinoso. In summer there are a couple of outdoor films and on most of the first Fridays of the month the Pinoso Platform Against Gender Violence shows a film in the Local Associations' building, the old Casa de Cultura, but if you want to see a film that is doing the rounds then you are going to have to travel.

The closest cinema is probably the Cine PYA in Yecla but the PYA, interesting cinema though it is, isn't really what you'd call a modern cinema experience. For that the nearest cinema is the ten screen Yelmo Vinalopó, next door to the Carrefour supermarket. There was another cinema in Petrer but the pandemic did for it. The Vinalopó seems to have stopped getting anything but the potentially most profitable films and recently it hasn't even been getting the mid range Spanish films. Prices vary a lot from day to day and depend on whether you can get any form of discount. I usually pay around 6.50€ but I get pensioner rates. Even at its most expensive I don't think the Vinalopó gets over 9€ for a ticket. On Tuesdays the Vinalopó, like all cinemas in the Yelmo chain, shows films in Versión Original Subtitulado en Español (VOSE) - original language with Spanish subtitles. Usually that means English with subs but not always. Bear in mind that the Italians and Koreans make films too and they usually make them in their home language. One of the, often unexpected, difficulties with VOSE films is that if even if it's basically an English language film there may be sections in, say, German or Arapaho, and the subtitles for that will be in Spanish for a Spanish audience. 

There's another Yelmo on the outskirts of Alicante, on the Pinoso side, at the very "white elephant" Puerta de Alicante shopping centre. That Yelmo does get most of the Spanish films that are doing the rounds but it gets almost none of the even vaguely arty Spanish films. To be honest though if I'm going to go a bit further to see a film I'd go to the ABC, in the L'Aljub shopping Centre in Elche, simply because it has a better selection of films. Prices at the ABC are a bit higher than at the Yelmo, partly because they are in a successful shopping centre, but there are offers. Their "day of the viewer" tickets, on Wednesday, are just over 6€ but their regular price is nearly 9€. The ABC has it's VOSE films on Thursday. All of the cinema chains have websites where you can buy online so you can check prices. Sometimes, often, web prices are better than the box office prices. 

There are a couple of single screen cinemas in Alicante city, in the Centre, the most reliable being aAna which tends to the non blockbuster films that are doing well. In Elche there's an arthouse cinema, the Odeon, which is dead cheap.

There are plenty more cinemas which are a bit further from Pinoso and I'm not going to try and list them all but I will mention the ones we occasionally go to. Kinepolis in Plaza Mar 2 is on the wrong side of Alicante for us but it has a pretty full programme and they have English language stuff on several days of the week. Going the other way there are cinemas in the shopping centres outside Murcia - The Thader - next to IKEA - has a Neocine which is a local Murcian chain. Neocine leans towards popular rather than arty films as does the Cinesa in the much more popular Nueva Condomina - the one with Primark - shopping centre. There are a couple more Neocines in Murcia City and there is also an arthouse cinema, the Filmoteca, quite near the Cathedral. 

Plenty to go at even if they are a little way away.

The peasants are revolting

There are plans to build a solar farm pretty close to our house. I've mentioned it before. The main development is going to be alongside the main road, the CV83, that's the road from Monóvar to Pinoso. The larger part of the development will start just past the Culebrón roundabout, on the left hand side of the road going towards Pinoso, and run up towards the generating station on the other side of the the road opposite the old go-kart track/Bar La Perdiz. There's a secondary part of the development a little higher up the hill from our house too. 

Now, to be absolutely honest I'm not that bothered about the panels. Like nearly everyone I think solar energy is much better than coal, gas or nuclear plants. It's not as though the unploughed field alongside the CV83 is particularly picturesque and from our house we already have views of a bunch of falling down buildings, out of place brightly coloured monocapa houses, goat sheds and any number of telegraph poles, posts and cables. I'd much rather have the solar panels than a bunch of those white, box shaped houses that are springing up all over the area and which always remind me of the buildings associated with a sewage works (my apologies to you if you live in one, I'm sure they're lovely inside). I was/am though a bit upset about the underhandedness of the development. Nobody told us about it specifically and the information that announced the project, over three years ago, was written so as to hide its location (poligono blahdy blah, parcela blahdy blah). I'm sure that, while they are being built, the noise and construction traffic will all be very unpleasant with scant regard for us and our neighbours.

One of the main objections to these rural developments is that these projects build on virgin rural land kilometres away from the urban areas where the power is going to be used. Rural dwellers pay the environmental price for providing power to urban dwellers. It's a good argument and one that has been used in places like Teruel and Soria for ages. The slogan usually runs something like "Renewables yes, but not like this!" 

The usual pattern is that some big investment fund buys a bunch of cheap rural land somewhere, slaps windmills or solar panels onto it, cables up all the evacuation lines and does all the donkey work on the planning applications, design and what not. The money people then sell the development on to one of the electricity providers as a going concern at a big profit. The money people are happy, the electricity generators are happy because they can flaunt their green credentials, the Government is happy because the EU, worried about the tension between Algeria and Morocco, blockages in the Suez Canal, Yemeni attacks in the Red Sea or the Russian response to sanctions, is happy. In fact the only people not happy are the tiny percentage of Spaniards who live in the countryside. The modern argument is that the space for the panels should be located where the power is necessary. So panels on urban roofs, on brownfield sites etc.

Some of our neighbours were very upset by the project and, to show solidarity, I sided with them and raised an official complaint against the scheme. Now to be honest I did almost nothing. The neighbour contacted the pressure group that is fighting other developments around the nearby settlements of Monóvar and Salinas and they got a paralegal to write up the official complaint based on failings in the process, its closeness to a protected area and its visual impact. All I had to do was to put my signature on the bottom of the document. It was interesting though how difficult the process was. For a start the paralegal was necessary to draft the sort of language necessary. Apparently you can't just write to someone and say it will look ugly, it's too close to my house, it will destroy the habitat of the midwife toad, it's not in the right place etc. No the document has to be legal, quoting constitutional clauses or relevant laws. It's a legal process from the start and it requires an over complex legal vocabulary.

Actually even with the document written it was still a pain presenting it. I have a digital signature which allows me to prove who I am on on official websites and my Spanish is passable in the sense of being able to read the information. Neither was much help though as the website for presenting the complaints is about as opaque as a web page could be. There was none of that helpful stuff you get on most official forms where there are guidance notes about filling in each section. The way we got around that, because the pressure group in Salinas has come up against this overcomplexity before, was to present the documentation at a town hall. Any old town hall in the Valencian Community will do for a project in the region and, because I couldn't get an appointment at Pinoso Town Hall before the deadline, I went Salinas Town Hall with a seasoned protestor.

My appeal, all our appeals, were initially rejected on the grounds that none of us had a legitimate interest. It's nothing more than a delaying tactic. This second part of the process had to be online and after a couple of frustrating hours I was just about to give up (which is obviously the purpose behind the rejection but shows which side local government is on). I was rescued by someone else involved in the same paper chase mentioning where they'd got to in the process before being stymied. The details are unnecessary but if I tell you that changing the word RECURSO, in Castilian Spanish, to RECURS, in Valencian Spanish, cleared the way it perhaps illustrates the nitpicking and intentional stumbling blocks which littered the route.

I have no doubt that the appeal will be rejected.