Things That Are Surprisingly Difficult To Buy

By Culebronchris

My mum came to visit. “You’re looking thin,” she said, though I’d actually put on several kilos. We were stocking up in Carrefour. “Can we get a nice piece of pork, some apple sauce and some stuffing?” I wasn’t sure about pork. It is very easy to come by, but would it be a nice piece, or at least my mum’s idea of a nice piece? As I understand it, Spanish butchers cut their animals up differently to British butchers. Apple sauce may be in the international section or maybe available as baby food but stuffing was off, I was sure that stuffing was off. “But everyone has stuffing with pork” she said. “We’ll be able to get it from one of the British supermarkets later,” I said but, as we were shopping at 8pm, they would all be closed now. I could see I was a big disappointment to my mum. Wasting away, still living off student food instead of a nice joint and now lying to her about the availability of Paxo.

Spaniards don’t eat sage and onion stuffing of course nor do they drink tea with cold milk. Britons who want to live in Spain but who wish to continue eating as they did in Tadcaster or Rochester will generally be able to do it. Certainly, nobody is going to make you eat paella with rabbit and snails. You can still have your dinner at dinner time if you want but if it’s Marmite, Branston pickle and pork pies that you hanker after you’re going to end up in specialist shops. Or living where there are so many of us that even the big supermarket chains find it worth their while to pander to our eccentric tastes. Though you would think that self-raising flour, chillies, limes, and coriander would be easier than they are.

Away from food, I’m still sometimes surprised by what you can’t buy. That’s untrue, there is nothing you can’t buy in Spain if you are willing to hunt, pay through the nose, get it delivered from the UK by someone with a van, or nowadays the Internet of course. If you must have Brylcreem, there’s a way. Therefore, I’m talking about things you can’t buy easily.

You try to get an electric kettle anywhere except on the coast for instance. We lived in Ciudad Rodrigo in Salamanca for a while and our kettle blew up. We scoured Castilla y Leon for a new one but we had to wait until we were back in Alicante. There is not really a Spanish word that most Spaniards recognise for kettle despite what wordreference.com says. I can see your come back here – kettles are unfair, after all Spaniards don’t use boiling water on tea so why would there be kettles in the shops? Pillows though are another thing. Spanish people definitely sleep and they use pillows but their pillows are as wide as the bed and they are sort of flat hard things or they’re shaped like a sausage roll. The pillow cases are different too because they don’t have sealed ends. That different solution to the same need turns up frequently. Let’s say you want to keep the land between your olive trees as free of weeds as you kept your herbaceous border in Stowmarket; piece of cake but you’re not going to be doing it with a Dutch hoe but with something that looks like a trenching tool.

I was teaching English for a bit. I wanted some file paper, lined A4 file paper. Squared paper, blank paper and spiral bound notebooks with double lined paper were all available. All would have done the job admirably and they were all very similar to what I was after but they weren’t quite right. It became a crusade. I got some finally but only in packets of 25 sheets at a time. Perhaps there is something of the national character expressed in paper items because I had some trouble with a diary too. My diary writing career spans 40 years and all I wanted was an A4 page per day diary. You can get them in any WHSmith in the UK for about a tenner but here I had to order it specially and pay 29€ and it had a floppy cover and it was spiral bound. Birthday and Christmas cards are the same, much easier in the coastal areas nowadays but still largely unknown to Spaniards.

The old tourist slogan for Spain used to run “Spain is different.” Nowadays when everywhere is more and more alike I think it’s rather comforting to know that getting knitting needles you understand is going to be an uphill struggle.

Chris Thompson: male, fifty something, white haired and portly. Born and bred in Yorkshire, moved around a bit and then spent twenty plus years in Cambridgeshire. Liked Spain from the moment he got off the bus in Barcelona some 28 years ago. Upped sticks in late 2004 and drove to Santa Pola in a brown MGB GT co-piloted by Mary the cat. Currently lives alternately in Culebrón, near Pinoso in Alicante and Cartagena, Murcia with Maggie the teacher and a newer cat called Eduardo. Fighting a losing battle with Spanish. http://lifeinculebron.blogspot.com/