Notes from Spain – raindancer required!

Here on the Costa Blanca we’re aware that there appears to be a water shortage. We’ve not seen or heard any official pronouncements about a ‘hosepipe ban’, however. 

Normally, we’re very impressed with how the water system is managed, considering the long hot months, the vast numbers of occupants of holiday hotels and homes, and the widespread agriculture in the area.

On very rare occasions, we find the water pressure has been reduced; at these times some householders higher up the hill tend to get no water. These restrictions are limited to a few hours at most.

Swimming pools can still be filled, and gardens are still watered – even the community gardens.

I don’t water the garden often, as the plants are well established with deep roots – oleander, bougainvillaea and roses mostly. The dish-washing bowl is emptied on plants in rotation, as is the receptacle from the air-conditioning outlet.

This year seems to be especially serious, the Alicante province having recorded the worst drought in 25 years, the lack of rainfall virtually half that of previous years. This inadequate rainfall has been noticeable since 2013. Forecasters don’t see any change for some time. The level of the La pedrera reservoir not far away has dropped, though it isn’t as bad as some places in Spain.

La pedrera reservoir

The effects are felt more inland, which affects agricultural communities, which rely solely on aquifers, whose reserves are constantly dwindling. The coast near us has alternative supplies, water transfers from the north or desalination plants. We’re also near the River Segura, which is diverted to countless irrigation canals. (A few years back, a hapless driver ended up in one of these canals; it cost him his life). Mountains are not far off, the plains sloping to the sea being highly fertile, with crops seeming to be constantly planted and harvested by hard-working farmers.

However, when it rains here, boy, does it rain! Torrential; the streets tend to flood very quickly. This is the main reason why the pavements have unusually high kerbstones, to channel the rain-water.

FFB - The Secret

The Secret was originally accepted for publication by Libros International late 2009 and I was allocated as the editor. Sadly, the publisher closed down and the book didn’t get published. The author Jan Warburton persevered and the book finally saw print in 2011.

Fran is the cousin of James. She’s had a crush on him for years. But he’s been besotted with Fran’s friend, Ellie – until they broke up and he went gallivanting off abroad. But now James was back – and Fran felt the old attraction.

Unfortunately, the spectre of Ellie persisted. All James wanted to know about involved Ellie and her mysterious reasons for shunning him.

This relationship drama is complicated by a gruesome murder and circumstances that conspire against them. What is the secret, though? Is it the sexy elderly man who shares a villa with Fran on the Costa Blanca? Or is it something in James’ past? Or has it something to do with Ellie’s sudden disappearance? Is it the murderer? The pages have to be turned – right to the end – to find out

James, Fran and Ellie are the proverbial eternal triangle, tossed about in the storms of the modern world, where nothing seems simple and where hearts can be broken and not easily mended.

Fran is a believable heroine, vulnerable yet determined, while James is a man who really doesn’t know what he wants until he loses it. Fragile Ellie seems to become a wraith, a ghost of a friend to Fran, as the past catches up with all of them.

This will keep the reader guessing until the final distressing pages.

***

The Secret was Jan’s first published novel, but she also ghosted an autobiography for black American soul singer/songwriter, Tommy Hunt; ONLY HUMAN, published by Bank House Books in Dec. 2009, which has consistently sold.

 

Originally trained in fashion design, Jan first worked for the House of Worth in Mayfair, London in 1958. She then moved on to wholesale fashion. Marriage to an army officer took her to Germany for three years. Later, back in civilian life, they moved to Singapore: ‘another amazing experience’, she says, as all this proved valuable ‘grist’ to her writing ‘mill’.

After a painful divorce, she survived six years with two children as a one parent family - a tough period, which she has drawn from in her fiction writing. She’s had many jobs; you name it, Jan has had a go! Her last was sales rep for a designer spectacle frame company, until redundancy finally allowed her to pursue her writing ambition.

She has a daughter Jayne, son Justin, and two beautiful granddaughters Abby and Alexia, all of whom she’s extremely proud. Jan has been happily married to Mark for thirty years, and they live in a converted barn in rural Yorkshire.

She has used her knowledge and experience in her latest books:

A Face to Die For

 

Joanna

 

Looking at You

 

Visit her website: www.janwarburton.co.uk

 

Cold Comfort-2

They’re doing it again! Griping about the winter fuel payments to ex-pat pensioners abroad.

I could understand it if a sound argument was being made. But it isn’t. It’s dressed up to appeal to be a vote-catcher in UK at the cost of the soft targets, pensioners abroad; politics of envy, judging by some comments, albeit misguided.

The above article is also online, here.
 
The online article is illustrated with a stock photo of a pensioner couple playing chess in the sun and another photo shows a relatively crowded beach with sunbathers. Not exactly winter images, but to be expected from this biased quarter, the Daily Mail. Right now, we walk around with coats and boots on, but that kind of photo would spoil the subliminal image the Mail wishes to purvey!

And of course the sensationalist figures don’t tell it as it is, maybe because it isn’t simple, or maybe because those figures seem better for the argument: the payment is £100 per person, not £200 as implied; or £200 for a single person if living alone, or £200 per couple. (Yes, it increases with age up to 80, and the maximum claimable is £300). These are the UK government’s rules, not ours; a UK government whose incumbents are paid for by the taxpayer, among whom are thousands of aggrieved ex-pat British pensioners.

There are a lot of reader comments on the Mail online article. A certain number pander to the myth that if you’ve emigrated abroad, you must be rich; others don’t seem to realise that we ex-pats have paid our taxes and many still continue to do so, but see no return for our investment in our country.

And of course the writer, James Chapman, Political Editor, cites the same old statistics -

“But in December and January temperatures in Spain can reach 17C (63F). There are almost 28,625 recipients in France, many of them in the south where temperatures in winter are often a comfortable 13C (57F)’ – figures which I refuted in my earlier blog here

The DM article states that ‘Mr Duncan Smith said countries where the average annual temperature is higher than the warmest region in the UK – the South West at 5.6C – will be affected.’ This is nonsense – ‘average annual temperature’? What months are involved in this temperature test, or is it the whole year? January and February? How many years is the average taken over? If UK is blessed with five years of warm winters, will the winter fuel allowance be stopped for UK residents since the average will be higher than 5.6C?

The sun is shining outside while I’m sitting typing this, at 4pm on 2 February, and the gas fire is on, because it’s cold. It will get colder. Tonight it’s expected to be 5.0C. Averages can mean whatever the user of the statistics wants them to mean (see the report above). Cold kills old people – usually around about 2am, when the body is at its most vulnerable. It has little to do with how much sunshine occurs in the afternoon.

Hailstones, Costa Blanca

Mr Duncan Smith is quoted as saying, ‘The winter fuel payment is intended to help British pensioners with heating costs.’ My wife and I, like thousands of other ex-pats, are British pensioners – and we’re also British taxpayers. Oh, thanks for your consideration, Mr Duncan Smith!

He adds, ‘From winter 2015/16, we are changing the rules so that it no longer goes to people in European countries with an average winter temperature high than the warmest part of the UK.’ Interesting, they’re changing the rules – and simultaneously attempting to block attempts by ex-pats to vote in UK elections (since, after all, we pay their wages via our taxes).

 
Change the rules, indeed! Does that go for MPs’ claims on expenses, too? You know, those MPs with generous pensions who don’t have to concern themselves about heating their home (any one or three of them).

Disraeli wrote, ‘The practice of politics in the East may be defined by one word – dissimulation.’ Well, it’s not only in the East any longer, it’s in Westminster. And it stinks.

‘Bitter almonds’

Spanish Eye contains 22 cases from Leon Cazador, half-English, half-Spanish private eye.  Its release date is 29 November, from Crooked Cat Publishing.

Most of these cases are based on true events…  The short story ‘Bitter Almonds’ was first published in magazine format in 2005: here is a very brief excerpt:

 

Bitter Almonds

“He needs his belief in human nature to be restored.”

 “You know, Leon,” Arturo Martinez said three weeks ago, “even with the water shortage, it looks like my crop’s going to be all right.”

I thought he was luckier than many fellow almond growers further north, like Xixona, for example, where there were real worries about desertification of the soil.

He was proud of his hectares of almond trees that he’d nurtured since inheriting them from his father twenty years before.

Arturo was a man of the earth in every sense. Not for him the trappings of modern wealth. I sometimes berated him over his wife, Carmen, using an old top-loader washtub and mangle. “She isn’t getting any younger,” I said, though I’m sure she wouldn’t thank me for saying so. “Surely you can afford to buy her a new appliance and save her all that drudgery!”

Well, I said it was brief…

From time to time news reports echo the Cazador tales, and this is but one of them, from the Costa Blanca News of August 23, 2013:

 

Sadly, forest fires are an annual occurrence in Spain, sometimes caused by carelessness, not arsonists. Carelessness can be criminal, however. To learn how this pertains to Arturo Martinez, and what happens, please read the book…

Paperback worldwide postfree here

Kindle UK here

 

Kindle US etc here

On a pinnacle - Guadalest, Spain

About 25km inland from Benidorm is the enchanting town and castle of Guadalest. If you’ve never been there, it’s really worth a visit, as it has one of the most photogenic views in the Costa Blanca area. You can get there by car or an organised coach trip, travelling past lush and fertile valleys originally terraced and irrigated by the Moors. The best view of the craggy fortress and village is from the almond terraces and olive groves on either side of the twisting road.

Hundreds of people go time and again, and yet it never seems overly crowded; I’m speaking from experience, we take our visitors regularly, and they never seem to tire of the place. Its popularity is understandable when you realise that Guadalest is the second-most visited place in Spain for tourists, after Madrid’s Prado Museum - over two million visitors in all.

Strangely, if you watch the film My Life in Ruins, which is set entirely in Greece, you’ll catch some views of Guadalest, and other nearby parts of the Costa Blanca!

The water used in Benidorm’s many hotels actually comes from Guadalest; one of its main attractions is the breath-taking idyllic reservoir viewed from the castle walls.

 

 

By rights Guadalest should be an expensive tourist trap, with plenty of shops selling the whole spectrum of keepsakes and ornaments, from the ridiculous to the sublime. Yet it’s still magical and the prices, surprisingly, are better than you will find on the coast.

Like an eagle’s nest on a pinnacle, Guadalest stands out like no other Spanish town. There are countless attractive mountainside villages, and both Ronda and Cuenca are spectacular in their own way, but Guadalest is one of a kind.

Surrounded yet not dwarfed by the Aitana, Serella and Xorta mountain ranges, Guadalest has been named as a ‘Monument of Historical and Artistic Value.’

Way back in AD 715 the Moors settled here, endowing the place with its name. They didn’t plunder or molest the inhabitants in the area but lived alongside them, as was their way for hundreds of years until the Christian kings in the north started to fight their way south to eject them.

Jaime I conquered Guadalest in 1238 but it wasn’t actually occupied until 1245. There were ongoing battles with the Moors until their leader’s expulsion in 1275 and the ruling that no Moor could change his dwelling-place without the permission of Christians. Yet more uprisings of Moors occurred – even after their final expulsion in 1492 – by those who had stayed on. One of the bloodiest and last uprisings was as late as 1609; these battles are celebrated boisterously and noisily every year, particularly in nearby Alcoy.

In 1644 and 1748 Guadalest suffered earthquakes. The ground here trembled yet again during the War of the Spanish Succession when the town’s powder reserves blew up – whether accidentally or deliberately isn’t known – which prompted the place to be abandoned as a stronghold in 1848.

In its day it was quite formidable, the local population living within the castle walls, with only the single access through the gate of St José. The narrow streets are typical, providing shade in the sweltering long summer months and shelter in the blessedly short cold winters. The two hundred inhabitants devote their lives to tourism and agriculture.

Wend your way through the quaint shop-filled streets up the steps and through the St José Gate and immediately opposite is the entrance to the Orduña House which charges a modest entrance fee. Here you can view original and interesting furniture, paintings and kitchen utensils. Perched on and overlapping the rock edifice, the house offers some spectacular panoramic views. The library is perhaps the most attractive feature, with over 1,200 volumes. The house also provides the only access to the castle above, which is definitely worth venturing for the added perspective the viewpoints provide.

Next to this house is the church where scrolls were found mentioning the baptism of 190 Moors. The watch tower – Peñon de Alcalà – perched on the top of this rock could only be reached by a rope-ladder. The town square has the small but imposing town hall and below it a twelfth century dungeon, which is open to the public. You will also encounter several museums, ranging from modern sculpture to designs on pin-heads, from belens to torture chambers!

There are plenty of cafés and restaurants where you can stop and eat, all reasonably priced, the favourite meals being paella, stuffed peppers, rabbit in garlic mayonnaise and oven-cooked vegetables. The shops offer an amazing choice – beautiful local handicrafts, ponchos, shawls, stoles, china, porcelain and fine lace-work. These colourful shops stretch from the lower, outer part of the town all the way up to the high square, some 590 metres above sea-level.

The Guadalest dam is 73 metres high and 270 metres long and was built between 1953 and 1964. Nearby, and usually part of any organised tour to Guadalest, is the Algar river and waterfalls, both of which are refreshing and attractive and most certainly worth a visit while you’re in the area.

Strangely, I haven’t included Guadalest in my fiction yet. This is clearly an oversight. I feel that Leon Cazador will be called to resolve one of his cases here soon.

Spanish Eye - first 22 cases of Leon Cazador, Private Eye

due out from Crooked Cat Publishing 29 November 2013

 NB – ‘belen’ – nativity tableau

 

 

Wishing you a happy and peaceful Christmas!

Dateline Friday, December 14 – Town Hall square, Torrevieja, Costa Blanca, Spain


This was the tenth annual Christmas Carols in the Square event.

My wife Jennifer and I, along with many members of her choir, Cantabile (above), joined other choirs and citizens from the area to sing thirteen carols in front of the floodlit church and next to the splendid Belen diorama. Included were two Spanish carols, ‘Campana Sobre Campana’ and ‘Fum, fum, fum’. The music was provided by The Phoenix Concert Band.

Lots of Christmas hats and antlers were in evidence! A census wasn’t taken, but we reckon there were Spanish, English, Welsh, Scottish, Belgian, German, Dutch, Ukranian, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian in attendance to celebrate the nativity. Also present, representatives from the town hall and the Salt Queen and her Dama, Nuria Zaragoza and Elsa Martinez respectively (below).

The collection amassed €985 for the local charity Alimentos Solidarios, which provides meals for those in need.


There was no religious message, save that implicit in the nativity; Mass followed for those who wished to attend.

The international community of Torrevieja and environs is a beacon for co-existence among all peoples. Yet again it was wonderful to be a part of this event. The world is a better place than we sometimes wonder when we learn about the horrors and destruction, natural and man-made.

100th Published Short Story

The COSTA TV TIMES weekly magazine out here in Spain has published my hundredth short story. Entitled ‘The Museum of Iniquity’, it’s a fun murder mystery, which also happens to use 36 titles from the plays, short stories and books of Jeffery Archer!

There’s also a plug for the anthology A Fistful of Legends.

On the trail of 'last chance' Morton

This week’s Costa Blanca News has run a full-page article about my western writing.

Here is the page (Expertly joined by my old pal Neil from two scans ).


Inevitably, a few things got lost or altered in translation from interview to page. Needless to say, I don’t write ‘how is y’all’ dialogue, contrary to what is suggested… The article states that I have ten westerns under my belt, when in fact I’ve only got four – though my latest sale is my tenth book printed/accepted. (I’ll just have to get busy and write those other six pronto!) Also, when I studied ten BHWs and analysed them, I thought that I could write one too – I didn’t think I could ‘do better’. Such quirks make for a better article, I guess!

The Costa Blanca News is sold north and south along the Spanish costas. As to whether it will galvanise any readers into buying Black Horse Westerns, well that's another question without an answer...

Breaking news: Credit Crunch Saves Costas

CREDIT CRUNCH SAVES COSTAS
By Nik Morton

They say every cloud has a silver lining and it seems that this is true even where the credit crunch is concerned. The Costas of Southern Spain are likely to benefit, at least, according to a scientific study published today.

Avril Loof, 37, of the Tectonic and Seismic Institute, Valencia, says that the recent collapse of several building consortiums in Spain means that her team’s calculations will have to be revised.

‘We first encountered the Tipping Point issue about five years ago. If the trend of building had continued at its 2003 pace, we predicted that the massive weight of concrete would have a catastrophic effect on coastal Southern Spain.’

The northern plates of the Iberian peninusla are pushing against the Pyrenees, raising the earth about 1mm every year. ‘But,’ says Loof, ‘in 2003 we noted that the rise was accelerating and measuring just over +2mm.’

None of their computer models could account for this phenomenon, as there was no increase in seismic activity. In fact, quite the reverse. The frequency and strength of the earth tremors in Spain and Portugal had lessened every year.

‘There was one inescapable conclusion,’ she says. ‘The massive weight of concrete being poured on the land along the coast was tipping the southern part of Spain into the Mediterranean. Our studies over five years had pointed to publishing a cautious alert this year, with particular emphasis on the La Manga area. However, in the last eight months, as building work has drastically reduced, we have recorded a settling for the first time.’

Apparently, settling is where the tectonic plate readjusts and stays more or less static. It remains to be seen whether the peninsula plate will seesaw again when the building industry recovers from the current financial difficulties.

‘In the meantime,’ Miss Loof says, ‘this hiatus offered by the settling has given us time to conduct further important tests. The problem has not gone away. Perhaps lighter concrete may be the answer.’