Life in La Unión

Somebody told me that we expats are to be denied the cold weather allowance on our state pensions. It gets pretty cold in our house in Culebrón in winter I can tell you but it's beginning to warm up nicely now. I'm a bit of a list writer. I always have been. I've kept a diary for years and a few years ago I took to adding a little note at the foot of the page with the maximum and minimum temperatures and a Today programme like weather summary - sunny and warm, cold and miserable. In La Unión I have nowhere to put a maximum minimum thermometer so that it stays out of the direct sunlight. Instead I started to use the maximum and minimum records from the state weather service for my diary log. There are weather stations where I work in Cartagena about 15kms from home, Torre Pacheco is 16kms away and San Javier Airport is 22kms away. Pretty close. Good enough to give me a fair indication of the weather in La Unión. Yesterday it was 25ºC and 16ºC in Cartagena, 23ºC and 1...

My mum is in Spain. She's come with her pal Sheila to see the Easter parades in Cartagena. Easter is a big thing in Spain. All over the country during Easter Week, or Semana Santa, people wear costumes that were the inspiration for the Klu Klux Klan. Big pointed hats and long robes mask the vanity of their wearers; costumes that prove penitence. Lots of people walk barefoot. Big floats or "tronos", heavy wooden constructions topped with life sized wooden carvings depicting Biblical scenes are carried here and there. Watching the processions is a spectator sport. Find yourself a tight corner where the carriers have to work hard to manoeuvre their tronos. Whether you pay for one of the street side chairs, reserve your table at a bar along the route or just bag some pavement space you get to pass judgement on the handling of the tronos. Whenever there is any sort of street event in Spain there will be street vendors and their barrows. The most typical fiesta barrow...

It was Father's Day on Wednesday and I didn't get farther than the local bar. I have the day off on Friday and I decided it was time to shrug off this lethargy; to do something. It wasn't a huge thing but I went to Cartagena and did a tour of the local exhibitions. At the Archaeological Museum they had some good and well seen photos on the theme of women in flamenco; at the Palacio Molina they had photos, some of which I thought were excellent and some very ordinary, by a group of professional photographers who once belonged to a now extinct local photo group; at the Byzantine walls museum some paintings by a chap called Miguel Ángel Quiñonero which I thought were laughable and at the MURAM there were some paintings gathered together under the title Spanish painting 1875-1935 some of which I really liked even if it was only for the completely over the top gilded frames. They let me down at the Old Town Hall where the exhibition was being mysteriously re-organised in mid...

I'm not doing much at the moment. Preparing lessons or drinking whisky whilst smoking and reading in the nearest bar doesn't provide much raw material for blog posts. I've become a bit of a Billy No Mates . I still go to the pictures but even that is becoming faintly depressing. I saw three films this weekend. All of them were dubbed into Spanish and the only one I understood in its entirety was Philomena. I suspect that I understood it because it has a British sensibility - like me. My classical music tastes are a bit plebeian too - very Classic FM. That's probably why my favourite bit of opera is the aria Nessun Dorma from Turandot. That's the tune that Pavarotti took it to number two in the BBC top forty back in 1990 when it was used as the World Cup theme song. I like the Jussi Bjórling version best but my reason for that is also a bit prosaic. I first heard it as Ken Russell's contribution to the 1987 film Aria. Not exactly a Glyndebourne experience. ...

Maggie tells me I'm a bit deaf. She says I have the telly and the radio on too loud and that I don't understand her. Me, I didn't think there was a problem. Maybe I have problems understanding Spanish and I hope a bit of extra volume will help. In fact I like to use headphones or earphones when I can. So today I went for a hearing test. I was a bit annoyed that they kept me waiting as the parking meter ticked away and when the woman beckoned me into her office with a "Come on" I wondered if we were going to have a conversation in broken English. But no, she let me speak in Spanish. Broken Spanish instead. The test was simply a range of beeps in each ear at different frequencies. "Perfect" she said. "For my age?" I asked. '"No, more or less perfect, a bit of loss of low frequency in the left ear but absolutely fine." It was a good answer. Hearing loss may have given me a good excuse for my problems with Spanish b...

I like trains. Even the old slam door commuter trains didn't put me off. I'm just an old romantic and I think Orient Express rather than standing room only, overheated or freezing carriages, uncomfortable seats and the detritus of empty coffee cups that were the usual stuff of my UK train experiences. The other week when I caught the train from Madrid back to Cartagena we passed through Murcia station. Peering out of the window through the nightime double reflections I thought the station architecture and the bar looked interesting. I made a mental note to have a little excursion there one weekend. I bought the tickets online yesterday and made the trip today. A diesel multiple unit out and a carriage and loco set up on the way home. I travelled from and to Torre Pacheco which is an unremarkable little town just outside Cartagena. When I bought the tickets I was quite surprised how many trains there were each day between Cartagena and Murcia and I was even more surpr...

The External Health building in Cartagena looks disused. I first went there a couple of weeks ago. I pressed the bell but I was so sure that the building was abandoned that I had started to walk away before someone answered the door. They took details and made me an appointment for today. Today in the same building a toothless chap wearing jeans and a faded polo shirt asked me what I wanted. He didn't look like medical staff - no white coat, the unmistakable badge of anyone doing any job in the health service. He must have been the caretaker because he knew what I had to do. First the registration on a lob sided, thousand time copied form and then a short wait for the doctor. Usual advice - avoid the water, drink whisky without ice, don't eat veg. Big change to my lifestyle there then. Covering myself in DEET and taking anti typhoid and malaria tabs will be novel though. To get the tablets I need to go to another doctor for a scrip. Usual Spanish system. Why do thing...

I often despair of the Spanish ship spoiled for the ha'p'orth of tar. Nothing serious but enough to make us non competitive in a competive world and, incidentally, to drive me to distraction I bumped into it twice today. I went to find an exhibition. We've just had a new Primark open in the local shopping centre. As part of the opening hoo-hah the shop got ten local atrists to take a Primark garment and turn it into a work of art. Ignoring Bangladeshi slave workers I decided to go and have a look. The blurb on the centre's website didn't give an exact location but it's not a huge centre. When I got there I couldn't find the exhibition, There were no obvious notices. I looked in the shop but there were just people scrabbling through piles of clothes as far as I could see. Anyway I was pretty sure that Primark wouldn't give up expensive sales space to art. I wandered the centre but couldn't find anything. Eventually, overcoming my terror of talki...

One of the English exercises I use asks students to finish the sentence "If Meucci hadn't invented the phone....." It's about third conditionals I think. The idea is that the students come up with phrases such as - if Bill Gates hadn't invented Windows we wouldn't have needed four fingers to unlock an unresponsive computer. If that's not a third conditional do forgive me. Grammar isn't my strong point. Nobody, except his mum, knows who Meucci is but if I ask who invented the submarine then anyone who lives in Cartagena knows the answer. It was Isaac Peral and he was born in the city. In fact he didn't really invent the submarine but he did design the first one that had all the basic ingredients of the conventional submarines we know today. His submarine was launched in 1888. It did well in its sea tests and he was asked to build a bigger and more powerful version. Unfortunately for him some internal disputes in the Spanish Navy meant that the p...

There are reasons, lots of logical reasons, for me to live in La Unión. I've rehearsed them all in my head dozens of times over the last few days. Basically it's financial, a nicer flat for less money still relatively close to my teaching job in Cartagena. Now that now that I'm fending for myself I just couldn't afford the sort of flat that Maggie and I shared in Cartagena. There are other reasons too though I'm not sure that I've convinced myself yet. La Unión is a town in Murcia. The town exists because of the mining. The Romans and the Carthaginians dug silver, lead, iron and zinc from the hills and valleys around Herrerías and el Garbanzal and shipped it out of the port of Portman. With ups and downs, that continued till the final shut-down of the last mine in 1991. Somehow most of the money that La Unión produced enriched nearby Cartagena rather than La Unión and although it has a couple of very impressive buildings there is nothing like the wealth of s...