Miel de Caña?

The literal translation of miel de caña is 'honey of sugar cane', but we know it in English as molasses or black treacle. The production of miel de caña was, at one time, the principal industry of this region, and indeed as you drive around today you will still see small stands on untended ground where the cane is growing but neglected. In Torre del Mar, about twenty minutes drive to the west of here, a former mill has been restored and converted to use as (I think) a museum. Between Nerja town and the Nerja Caves, stands a large, derelict and ruined building which was a sugar mill. Here in Frigiliana, however, we have a mill which is still operational, producing the miel de caña which is widely on sale throughout Spain. El Ingenio, as it is called, is the last surviving cane mill in operation in the whole of Europe, and so understandably we are very proud of it and like to show it off to visitors. Unfortunately most of the year that isn't possible; you can't have people wandering around a working food factory for both hygiene and safety reasons. Three years ago we introduced a new fiesta to the village, Êl Día de la Miel de Caña, when the factory is opened for guided tours explaining the old machinery and the traditional production process. There are stalls selling products which have the molasses as an ingredient, and some of the restaurants put on a special menu incorporating the molasses into the dishes, savoury as well as sweet. Yesterday we had this year's Day, beautiful, warm and sunny with a clear blue sky. Historically the cane was harvested and loaded into panniers on the backs of mules to be brought to the mill. There it was chopped into suitable lengths and fed into presses which crushed the cane and released the sweet sap. The sap was then boiled to drive off excess moisture until it assumed its dark, viscous quality. The raw material, sugar cane, was an easy crop to establish even on poor ground. Essentially it is a grass and so once it has rooted you're home and dry. You let it grow to the stage you need, then you cut it. Like grass it continues growing, and so you can come back and back cutting it and using it. The twenty first century approach, however, is rather different. Mules and panniers have been replaced by LGVs and forklift trucks. Instead of cane there are pallet loads of granulated, white sugar to be boiled down into molasses, and so there is no longer any call for locally grown sugar cane, which is progress, but also a shame in a way.

Things I Miss

So, after eight years can I say that I have left everything about England behind? Well, no. Don't misunderstand me; I love Spain and I love living here. But everything comes at a cost.

The biggest cost is being detached from family life by being so far away. Both our daughters live very busy lives and have only a certain amount of annual leave so they are seldom able to get over to Frigiliana. As it happens, both are coming soon, one with her children in May, the other with a couple of friends at the beginning of June. Only, we won't be here. That's when we are travelling across Europe in smart trains as our 'big event' celebration of our golden wedding. 

We'd also like to see more of the wider family, and of friends we left behind. We have a full and satisfying social life here, so it's not that we feel lonely, just that we miss those relationships.

Spain's wines have improved enormously over the past ten or twenty years, and there's a huge choice, way beyond what you will see in the Spain section of a British supermarket. But you rarely find wines from outside Spain, and that's something else I miss - a good NZ Sauvignon Blanc, for instance, or a Chilean Merlot. Or wines from France, Argentina, South Africa. 

On the subject of the inner man, I miss the wide range of traditional British cheeses; I grew up to appreciate lovingly matured Lancashire cheese, creamy, heady and - the best aged - capable of blasting the top of your head off if not treated respectfully. Or Wensleydale, Caerphilly and Cheddar. Oh, we can get cheddar cheese here, but the result of factory scale production, at best a very bland, moist concoction described as 'extra mature'; so strong that you could safely serve it to a baby. We were in England last month and I bought some cheddar from a local farm shop, along with some Shropshire Blue and Cornish Yarg. What a cheddar! It almost brought tears to my eyes - tears of joy.

I'll often bring back proper Bury black pudding too, bought from Chadwick's stall on Bury market.

And on a completely different topic, there's a church in Guildford that I've discovered where I can submerge myself in a Sunday Mass celebrated in my own language. I'm happy enough in the normal way of things with the mass in Spanish at the little chapel by the side of the cemetery, but it's good to worship in English now and then.

There are lots of things I don't miss, but that's for another day; maybe.

The Times They Are A'Changing

I have a brother who still lives in England but we chat for around an hour every couple of weeks or so. In fact we probably chat more often now that we live in separate countries than ever we did when I still lived in England. He is a few years younger than I am, but still old enough for my granddaughters to think of him as old. We were catching up on Sunday evening. We are rarely online at the same time, so we each use Skype-out to call the other’s landline at local call rates. All this was brought to mind by the turn that our conversation took. Our childhoods are now part of history so far as school kids of today are concerned and we do have an increasing tendency to look back. My brother commented that our parents would have been largely unable to comprehend the world that their sons now inhabit. As a young man, I used to think of the changes which my own grandparents had lived through. Born in the final quarter of the nineteenth century they were witness to and part of the mass migration from the country to the fast growing industrial cities of Manchester and Salford. Canals with their horse-drawn barges were giving way to the rapid growth of railways. Later, horse-drawn trams gave way to motorised buses, especially in the urban sprawls. Gaslight superseded candles and oil lamps, and was then displaced in its turn by electric light. I could reel off a whole host of other ways in which their lives had changed by the time of their death. Now, though, I look back at my own life and the changes that they experienced seem to pale into insignificance compared to what my brother and I have adapted to. We sit at our laptops typing away whereas my mother handwrote everything; for calculating as part of her office work she used a comptometer, a state of the art calculating machine whose operators enjoyed an elevated status in office work, whilst my father used a slide rule. Back in the 1950s one of my older cousins was a member of the team which built the first proper computer (the Atlas) at Manchester University. It was constructed within a specially adapted building, designed to have a dust free atmosphere and constant temperature and humidity. It was valve driven, and when switched on for the first time ran for a whole twenty seconds before it crashed. Those precious seconds, however, had established that what they had designed in theory could be made to work in practice. Today we are surrounded by computers in all forms and sizes and don’t even think of them. as such. I remember, as many people do, the birth of the internet and its rapid expansion into what we have today. My father had a wind-up gramophone and a cherished collection of 78s (if you know what those were); I have a subscription to Apple Music which allows me to stream whatever music I want to listen to from the cloud to my laptop, my iPad, my iPod or my iPhone, depending on which is more convenient at a particular time. If I have a problem with any of these devices, I call in my twelve year old granddaughter and she solves it in minutes. Our parents lived through two world wars which devastated Europe, whereas I only know war from my small child years, and my brother not at all. Seventy years without any wars in Western Europe. From Salford, Southport or Blackpool were a day trip away. My wife and I pop back and forth to England without giving it a second thought, and our daughters think nothing of coming to stay for three or four days whenever they can get away. So - which perhaps is the point of this rambling post - as I sit here settled into a life which has its annual cycle of seasons and festivals and fiestas and regular goings on in the village, wondering what on earth to write about that I didn’t comment on last year, or the year before, or the year before that, it’s chastening to think how much change actually happens that I don’t really pay attention to.

A Room With A View

Right now we are in England. We arrived a week ago with a very special purpose; to celebrate our Golden Wedding anniversary with our two daughters, and later with our granddaughters. We didn't want a big party, lovely as it would have been to see the wider family and some friends. We wanted something small but special. So we booked two nights for the four of us at the Harte and Garter Hotel on the High St in Windsor.Mandy and Nicky shared a superior twin room and Mary and I wallowed in a Luxury Kingsize Room. This was the view from the room. Although the weather was cloudy and cold, we had a wonderful time. Friday evening we found a fantastic Moroccan restaurant that was buzzing with groups of friends out for the evening. Saturday morning I headed for a local Catholic church, having decided that after 22 years as a Catholic it was about time I made my first confession. This was followed by a stroll around the centre of Windsor and a very light lunch. Then it was time for me to drift through a lazy afternoon while the others went off to their spa treatments. We ate in the hotel restaurant that evening and it absolutely lived up to its promise. A surprise bonus was finding our daughters standing by with a bottle of champagne when we arrived in the bar for a pre-dinner drink. On Sunday we went round Windsor Castle and then down to a service in St George's Chapel, before another light lunch and then back to Clandon to await the return of our granddaughters from a weekend at Daddy's house. We can't leave them out of the celebrations, naturally, so Aunty Nicky will be over again on Easter Monday so that all six of us can go into Guildford to an Italian trattoria. I can think of no more fitting way of celebrating fifty years of marriage than in the company of the five most important people in my life.

Never A Dull Moment

Some of you may remember that in the local elections last year the outcome was a perfect stand-off between the three main parties - four seats for Partido Popular (PP), four for the socialist party (PSOE) and three for my own party, the Andalusian Party (PA). After negotiations and poker faced intransigence right up to the last moment (to be precise, less than five minutes before a new mayor had to be sworn in) PP agreed to the red line demands of PA and a pact was agreed to govern in coalition. Almost immediately after the swearing-in PP began backtracking on one point of agreement after another, making it extremely difficult for the three 'junior partner' councillors. This was largely something going on behind closed doors. At the beginning of this week though, José Antonio the mayor informed his (PA) deputy without any prior discussions that he was stripping him of his functions which would henceforth be carried out by a PP councillor. Paco held an emergency meeting with his two colleagues who agreed that this was totally unacceptable and the following morning they each resigned their own portfolios. The three PA councillors will now sit in opposition. So now the ruling party has four seats whereas between them the two parties in opposition have seven seats. However, historically there has been a great deal of animosity between PSOE and PA and so it is far from clear how effectively the opposition will oppose. On Thursday night, for instance, PP presented to a full Council meeting a budget for the coming year which included a 10% pay increase for the mayor, and the extension of a paid post to another PP councillor. PA voted against this budget before further discussions had been held over the salary proposals. PSOE who have consistently voted against each annual budget, and who declared in their election manifesto last year that if elected they would seek to reduce the money spent on salary payments to councillors........ abstained. I'm interested to see what happens next.