La Vida Alcalaína

¿Cómo se llama?  (what´s your name?) is one of the first phrases used by most people learning Spanish (after "two beers please" and "Where are the toilets?").  This innocent enquiry does not, however, prepare you for the complexity of the Spanish system of personal nomenclature. Surnames The Spanish have two family names or surnames, called  apellidos .  A married woman does not take her husband's name, so there is no such thing as a maiden name. A child takes the first apellido of each parent, so the offspring of Mr Pérez Romero and Mrs Rodríguez García will become Pérez Rodríguez.  In 1999 a gender equality law allowed the mother's name to appear first if desired, provided all siblings adopt the same order and it is recorded in the Registro Civil. SPAIN´S COMMONEST NAMES With so many very common names, or in small communities, the maternal and paternal apellido can occasionally be the same.  This, combined with the custom ...

The Spanish are avid gamblers.  They will bet on anything from backstreet cock-fights to Premier League football, and spend more of their income on betting than almost any other country - around 15%, an average of €480 per person, totalling €1.9 billion a year.  Nothing as trivial as an international financial crisis puts them off.  Maybe it's some sort of Catholic fatalism; it is often observed that Spaniards believe their destiny is shaped by luck rather than by careful planning (although the Germans spend almost as much, which would seem to quash that theory). While some forms of gambling are outside the law, the State is in control of the most popular form, the Lotería Nacional . Tickets are sold at face value at official outlets of Loterias y Apuestas del Estado  (ours is on the Calle Real), or via street-vendors who get 10% commission.  A recent  proposal to privatise part of the operation was abandoned after the government realised that the...

Earlier this year I wrote a post about  Quesería El Gazul , which makes delicious cheese and yoghurt from the milk of Alcalá's extensive goat population.   At last week's  World Cheese Awards , held at the BBC Good Food Show in the NEC Birmingham, one of Jorge Puerto's gourmet products was judged one of the world's  Fifty Best Cheeses .  The competition is the world´s largest, and the shortlist was selected by two hundred international judges who sampled over 2,500 submission from 34 countries. Jorge Puerto with cheeses from the El Gazul range In all, twelve Spanish cheeses appear in the top 50, compared with eight from England (including last year's winner from the Cornish Blue Cheese Company), eight from Switzerland, six from Italy, six from the USA, and only three from France.  The conventional wisdom that the French make all the best cheeses seems to be up for debate - though they did produce the overall winner, Ossau Irati AOP...