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.

October and nothing to say

Nothing much to write. It's October, you may well have noticed, and the weather is a bit changeable. The usual weather pattern here is blue skies and sunny days all year round with a few days rain particularly in winter and spring. In summer the difference is that it just gets hotter and stays hotter longer. At the moment the maximum temperatures are only getting up to around 26/27ºC and overnight we get down to somewhere below 10ºC. Difficult weather to deal with. You put on a sweater and you swelter. You wear a T shirt and, in the shade, it's a bit nippy. At night it's cool. Only the Northern Europeans are still in shorts. Inside, in front of the telly, our house is distinctly chilly. We've had the gas fires on but not yet wound up the mighty roaring pellet burner. We've had some rain too. The sort of British rain that makes the soil claggy and leaves muddy footprints on the kitchen floor.

There's still a fair bit going on round and about in the fiesta line - hence the photo - but we haven't ventured very far recently. Bit short of cash to be honest. I haven't had any work or any pay for four months. The Brexit vote has destroyed the value of the pound against the euro and, with it, my pension income. If you consider that, as a very broad generalisation, over the last couple of years it has cost about £770 to buy 1,000€ one now needs £910 to do the same. I'm sure you can guess what that means to someone living here and paid their UK pension in sterling.

I'm back at work now though and counting the days to the pay check. Things are a bit different. I'm still with the bunch based in Murcia who sell my work to a state assisted school in Cieza. This year though I'm just working two longish days with them. In the morning I work in the school, with full classes of youngsters doing their compulsory secondary school education and, in the afternoon, I do classes with any age group willing to pay for English classes. My bit, with the school, is to try to make sure the teenagers hear some real English and actually get to speak a bit. It's fair enough. The youngsters are noisy but generally they are nice enough and they don't give me too much grief. They don't like to speak English though. In the afternoon I do the classes for the language school in the same building, in the same rooms but with a mixture of age groups. Fortunately this year I have more adults and fewer children.

A biggish change is that I also have some work with another business, Academia10, based here in Pinoso. I do three adult two hour classes with them. It's nice to be working close to home and with people who are keen to learn. You'd have to ask the learners, rather than me, but I think the classes have been going OK.

Spanish wise, the language side, things go along. I still do a class, in fact I do it at the place I teach myself now. I also go to a language exchange that happens in a local bar. My Spanish isn't bad at some levels but it still drives me to distraction and is the major fly in the ointment of my existence here. I make stacks of mistakes but I can generally maintain a conversation. Then again I sometimes can't speak at all. In one bar last week they brought me a coca cola when I asked for a coffee. Twelve years and I can't get a coffee!

Last night I was surprised when, as I drove up our track, a car followed me right to our gate. It turned out to be some friends who had spotted a couple of sheep wandering on the minor road to their house. They wondered if I knew who the owner might be. I didn't but I said I would call the police on their behalf. I was shocked when the local police number was answered by the emergency 112 call centre. I stumbled and stuttered confusing verb tenses, mispronouncing words etc. I had the usual excuses - poor mobile phone coverage, not being quite sure what the answers were to lots of the questions. If it had been in English though it would have been much easier. The sheep are now safe and sound though.

Just in case you're interested the political stalemate is still completely unresolved. In fact a couple of weekends ago a palace coup saw the leader of the Socialist party unseated. You may remember that the PP, the conservative bunch, won more parliamentary seats than anyone else but they cannot find a partner or partners to give them the majority to form a government. The unseating of the socialist leader was because he has refused, point blank, to support the conservatives. With him out of the way the socialists could now abstain in a parliamentary vote in which case the conservatives get to form a government, albeit a minority one. As you might expect this is causing furore amongst socialist ranks. Three hundred days without a government today. If they don't cobble together something the third general election will be in December.

I'm going to stop there. This is boring even me but it's written, so it's going to get published. I'll be back when I have something interesting to say so, Oates like, that may be some time.

Writing the hind leg off a donkey

I listen to a documentary programme on the radio. I listen because, often, it gives me a bit more insight into Spain. Sometimes the programmes are a bit esoteric. It's fine when it's something like the history of the Galician whale hunters of the 17th Century but less so when the title; is Who was Elena Fortún - the author of Celia?

There was a programme a couple of weeks ago about Zenobia Camprubí. It took me a couple of days to get around to listening to the podcast. It didn't sound like the acoustic equivalent of a page turner. In fact it turned out to be a pretty good programme. Zenobia was most famous for being the force behind her husband, a Spanish poet called Juan Ramón Jiménez, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956 just a couple of years before he died.

I recognised the name - the Juan Ramón that is - because the school where I work is named after him.

I  did a bit of research, well I skimmed the Wikipedia entry about Jimenez. His most famous piece is called Platero y yo. Platero and me. Platero is a donkey and the poem is about rural life and the friendship between a boy and a donkey. I read the fifty odd page poem the other day though most of it was way a bit too flowery for my rudimentary Spanish. And suddenly I understood why the school incorporates a very squared up drawing of a donkey in its paperwork.

It reminded me of that James Burke programme from the 1970s - Connectons.

Day to day

Last century I passed a fair bit of time in schools. Firstly I had to study in them. My secondary school, between 1965 and 1972, was quite a violent place as I remember. Bullying from other pupils and downright violence from the staff. Later, between 1996 and 2004, I had an office in another school though I couldn't say I really took much notice of my surroundings. I was working in what was called Community Education - adult education, youth work and community development - and it just so happened that our office was there close to the classrooms and other facilities that we used for some of the programme. The only time I remember venturing into a classroom during school hours was to have a word with someone who organised the Duke of Edinburgh's Award for us. She was a teacher at the school and I went to hunt her out in her room. Noisy as I remember it, and much less formal than when I went to school but everyone seemed to be working with purpose.

I'm working in a school again now and this time I'm actually with the youngsters for at least some of the time. I have nine lessons a week with nine different groups. They are full classes with around thirty pupils in some, a few more in one and a few less in others. I think one of them is a special needs type group though, to be honest, I'm not sure. They do pretty well with the English and they seem keen which is all I need to have a good time.

The school is interesting. It's a very loud place. It's very informal. I'm at one with the dress code in jeans and t shirt and I may be a bit over finicky in having a shave before going to work. At times when the pupils are on the move, in fact every time, it seems a bit chaotic but I've never seen any violence or any bullying other than the sort of fleeting and unthinking attacks that young people unleash on each other without pre meditation and without malevolence. I'm sure it's there but I haven't seen it. I have, on the other hand, noticed lots of acts of kindness and friendship between the students which surprises me.

The youngsters don't show me any respect but they don't show the opposite either. Tens of them greet me every day as I wander the school and some even try to pass the time of day with me.

The noise level in the classrooms is pretty high and the real teachers who hold my hand in the lessons occasionally make someone change seats or leave the room. I presume this means the youngsters must be misbehaving in some way but I never notice. I do notice the ones who don't participate at all though. There are several who just stare at their shoes or draw elaborate pictures in biro. There seems to be no expectation that they join in at any level.

The academy, the afternoon sessions are a completely different kettle of fish. These are paid for private lessons. Most of the youngsters are there because their parents believe that English will be good for them. This may well be true but English is less appealing than the park, their friends or Sponge Bob on the telly. I sympathise. They go to school all day, they have homework to do and then they are expected to do more studying. So it's a bit of an uphill struggle and some of the little dears sorely stretch my patience. The adults and older teenagers in the academy are perfectly nice.

One thing I have probably noticed about the Spanish Education is the apparent use of books. In the school my role is to model real English so I am expected to talk and listen. I am not expected to work to any particular scheme or pattern but I get the idea that most courses start at page 1, exercise 1, go on to exercise 2, exercise 3 etc. The youngsters are certainly keen, conditioned maybe, to fill in the gaps in the exercises. In fact it seems much more important to fill in the gaps than understand the language that goes into the spaces. This involves a lot of pencil sharpening, rubbing out and the modern versions of tipp-ex. I was told yesterday that I will be given a timetable for working through the various books - you know the sort of thing. By the end of January you will have completed Unit 4. Apparently parents don't like to see the books that they have paid for not getting filled up with writing, rubber detritus and tipp-ex. Progress can be measured by the number of pages completed.

I'm sure that such an innovative methodology will turn out legions of capable English speakers.

Driving home the other way

Now that I work in Cieza my route to work has changed. It's about about 60 kms each way and the journey time - that is the time from when, with seat belt fastened and radio playing I accelerate away from our front gate to the moment I park up outside my workplace - is about 45 minutes. Even with my primitive arithmetical skills I can work out that means I average just 80kph or 50mph.

On the way to Cieza from Culebrón the left from our track onto the main CV83 would be an illegal manoeuvre involving crossing a solid white line and hatched areas. Should the car around the corner be Guardia Civil that would be a 300€ fine and goodness knows how many points off the spotless 15 of my licence. Would I do that or would I be more likely to make the legal right turn, cross into the village, turn around in front of Eduardo's and rejoin the CV83 heading out towards Pinoso? The choice, as that voice on Blind Date used to say, is yours.

Towards Pinoso then, at the roundabout just before the town off to the right skirting the industrial estate and the open land where the bullocks are chased around by the local lads at Fiesta time in August. I've wondered about stopping a couple of times to take a snap up the hillside there because with the morning sunshine the houses on the hillside in the Santa Catalina area look very colourful and jolly. Left at the next roundabout then and skirting the North of Pinoso before clearing the town and heading out towards Jumilla. Careful of the speed limit through Casas Ibañez - lots of stories there about speed traps - and across the border into the Murcia Region. Off to the right the Sierra del Carche and its 1372 metre peak. All along the road small hamlets, cultivated land - lots of vines and olives and almonds - a modern bodega and quite a lot of fallow or maybe unusable land.

The road is relatively straight with almost no traffic and the car tends to settle at something comfortable. It would be easy to find myself exceeding the 90kph open road speed limit. There are a few bends just before and past the failed Venta Viña P Restaurant and Los Olmos, the very strangely located kart racing track, hotel and restaurant complex. After a while the road straightens and drops with a great view out to the Sierra de Sopalmo - a big wall of hills and, in the distance, the A33 motorway.

Up to now I've been heading basically East but somewhere around here I want to start heading South on the A33 which runs down to Murcia City. Until quite recently I would have used one of the  trunk roads, the National or N344 to make that journey but, in 2012 the first 30kms or so of the Motorway, the Autovía, A33 between Blanca and close to Jumilla was opened having cost some 122 million euros. Eventually the A33 will connect motorways coming out of Andalucia and Murcia with motorways in Alicante which will make all sorts of routes faster but will principally create an inland route to cut the corner on the way up to France. There is a snag though. Although the Pinoso road is the principal East West road in the area the road builders, in their wisdom, chose not to add direct access to the motorway. Instead I have to drive a few kilometres on the old, and now very quiet, ex main road or I can cut the corner and go through the village of Encebras. I like the Encebras route despite the 20kph speed limit, which I obviously keep to, because there is the vague chance of seeing somone on foot. I did pass a tractor the other day but otherwise no vehicles so far. And Encebras has street lighting which always strikes me as bizarre for a village that can have no more than 50 inhabitants.

I do about 18kms on the motorway. Nice black tarmac and clear white lines with very little traffic. So far the journey has taken about 20 minutes. The motorway bit takes another ten minutes or so. Suddenly there's a built up area just off the motorway, the village built around the old, 1868, railway station for Blanca. It's 10km to Blanca but there's Spanish railways for you. Apparently 800 people live in Estación de Blanca but all I notice really are the Blancasol agricultural co-op and the bar where the Guardia Civil park up for a mid morning coffee. It's quite a strange road layout to get onto the RM402 which connects the motorway I've just come off with the motorway I want to join, the A30, heading out of Murcia for Albacete and on to Madrid. There is a marked change too from countryside to messy urban in this bit of Murcia and that means much more traffic.

I have to take a bit of a left turn across traffic which is quite an unusual operation on a free flowing Spanish road. It's much more common to send you right into a little semicircle to allow you to turn left by crossing traffic from a stop sign. The junction is marked by a strange, single, abandoned block of green and white flats built in the middle of nowhere. The junction also has unexpected adverse camber and leads into a another slip road which is both the exit and entry to the A30. That can be fun at times. Some eight kilometres heading back North now, off on the Cieza turn, a couple of roundabouts and into the entrance to the town. Bonica Cieza it says on a big sign just there, a very Murcian way to suggest that the town is pretty. Certainly the local inhabitants seem to stick up for it and what I've seen looks nice enough. Down past the park and a big sort of esplanade which is always full of people out for a bit of a stroll in the evening, full twist around a roundabout and then a right turn onto the bit of wasteland that surrounds the school where I do my English teaching. Then it's just a case of parking up and avoiding any large shards of glass from any newly broken beer bottles from the night before.

The route home isn't an exact repeat but my guess is that you've taken as much as you can now so let's pretend it is.

My new job

Forgive the indulgence of this entry.

I started a new job a couple of weeks ago teaching English with a language school based in Murcia city. They didn't give me a job in the city though but asked me to work in a co-operative grant maintained school in Cieza which is a very pleasant but lengthy 60km drive from home.

For three mornings a week I work in the school, with classes of youngsters. Their ages range from 12 to 16. I am there to do the authentic English bit - real structure, real vocabulary and real accent. Mainly speaking and listening rather than writing or reading.

For four afternoons a week I work in the same school buildings alongside a team of three or four other English speaking Spanish teachers. Indeed I work in the same classrooms, but this time for the academy, the private language school which sells English classes. The age range there is from six year olds up to adults.

I'm far from settled. The students seem nice enough and nobody has hit me or abused me directly as they did when I worked in Fortuna. First impressions are that the school is good and the staff have been perfectly friendly. On the other hand I still haven't worked out how a lot of it works or even got all of the various text books and other materials that are the basis for the ten different groups that I work with in the afternoons. Teaching full classes of ordinary schoolkids in a school is something completely new to me too.

All in all I have nineteen diffferent groups and getting to know them all is not something that comes easily to an old man with a failing memory. The teaching has been fine, I've even enjoyed most of it, but the record keeping has been driving me crazy. The records are necessary to ensure that I don't cover the same thing twice with the same group. Planning has also taken much longer than I like, and probably than it should. The truth is though that simple maths says that with so many groups even ten minutes per week on each means I'll be doing over three hours of unpaid work. All I can hope is that it will all become easier and faster as things settle down.

Or maybe I'll just decide that working isn't really for me any more and give it all up, sit in Culebrón and try to live off my small pension and the sweat of Maggie's brow.