Life in La Unión

I've just had a really enjoyable holiday in Sri Lanka. At times it seemed like hard graft as we trudged kilometres or puffed and panted up steps but it will give me stories to bore anyone who will listen for years to come. Teaching English has made me very aware of my native tongue. I am more and more amazed by the power of the English language. In Sri Lanka, in Qatar, people addressed me in English and I spoke to them in English. Sometimes there was some confusion but the truth is that I have more difficulty speaking Spanish in Spain than I did speaking English in Sri Lanka. You'd have to ask the people I spoke to if it were the same for them! I haven't done the research but my impression is that Sri Lanka isn't incredibly poor. We certainly weren't besieged by outstretched hands or made to squirm at our wealth amongst bodies disfigured with disease or hunger. On the other hand it was pretty obvious that we were from a different, richer, more caring and bette...

Being alone is shrinking my world. Basically for four days of the week my life is ruled by work - well that and the laundry. Then I have a splendid long weekend but with nobody really to share it with I'm staying close to home. Even this weekend, a bank holiday weekend with Constitution Day on Friday and Immaculate Coception on Monday I haven't done anything special. Sofa time as my students call it. Telly time. Christmas has just about arrived in Spain. Most towns have their lights on now and the shopping centre car parks are more dangerous than ever - car park design is not a Spanish skill, add a touch of driver indiscipline and you have a sure recipe for bumps and scrapes. On the telly Christmas means seasonal ads. Perfume mainly. But there are at least two institutional adverts. One is the Freixenet sparkling wine advert which I've only seen so far by looking for it on YouTube and the other is the commercial for the big Christmas lottery draw. This year ...

More than once I have used the example of Spanish filling stations as one of the sure signs that Spanish business is badly organised. There are plenty of self service places, like the one in the photo, but usually as you pull up on the forecourt someone comes to serve you. I wonder why, with self service pumps, they pay someone to do a job that they could get me, the customer, to do for nothing? When I ask Spaniards about the reason I often get something about keeping people employed. Given that we seem happy enough to live in a capitalist system that answer just adds to my grave doubts about how Spaniards approach business. A couple of times, usually at night, we have pulled up at service stations where the lone employee is firmly locked inside the petrol station and a prepayment system is in operation. You have to hand over your money before they allow you to pump fuel into your vehicle. I went to a local petrol station today, late morning. Nobody came to serve me and the pumps...

I'd just been to the flicks. Gravity, good film I thought. The cinema is in a shopping centre and the car park was mayhem - people and cars everywhere. The centre was ablaze with light. The Seventh Circle of hell but with writhing vehicles rather than contorted bodies. A Spanish chum riding in my car a while ago told me that it is a mortal sin, or at least 300€ worth of fine, not to signal whilst moving between lanes on motorways. I sniggered. Spaniards are not big on turn indicators. I picked my way through cars going in each and every direction. Going against the direction arrows in a car park is normal behaviour, moving without lights too, not signalling is as common as acne on teenage faces. I was about to move through a gap when I noticed that a supposedly parked car was rolling slowly forward. I waited and watched as the car bumped gently into a wall. The driver had been too absorbed in his wasap (that's WhatsApp to you and me) to notice till he felt the jolt. I lau...