Life in Ciudad Rodrigo

I don't know if you have heard the singer Tom Waits (if you haven't you should) but his voice is so gravelly he sounds like he smokes 50 Woodbine a day. One time, when I saw him in concert, a young woman walked up to the stage and hurled a bunch of flowers at his feet: "Thank ya babe", he growled. And he didn't sound stupid. Tonight a man yelled "Bravo!" and he didn't sound stupid either. The word exploded from his lips; if I'd been the performer on the receiving end of the acclaim I would have been overjoyed. We were watching an amateur choir from the teacher training college at the University of Salamanca who had battled through the snow to get to Ciudad Rodrigo. They performed songs from a dozen or so zarzuelas. A Zarzuela is a type of music, a bit like light opera, where the spoken acting, songs and dances (often rooted in folk traditions) are used to move the story along. We'd gone because we were off work for the town's patron saint...

Saint Sebastian is the Patron Saint of Ciudad Rodrigo. He's the one from the Derek Jarman film with all those naked Roman soldiers having a bit of a laugh as they shoot him full of arrows. He is usually shown in paintings tied to a tree and looking like a pincushion. That's what the statue of him that normally lives in the Parish Church of Ciudad Rodrigo has him looking like too. Apparently though he didn't die from all the arrows, he was left for dead but he miraculously recovered. Unfortunately for him, full of Christian vim, he decided to harangue the Roman Emperor Diocletian as he passed by and the Emperor had him beaten to death and thrown into a cess pit. According to tradition he died on 20 January so in preparation for the big do on that date a brass band, lots of people dressed in capes or wearing a medal (which I'm guessing marks their membership of the "brotherhood" of San Sebastian), some young people dressed in a sort of page boy get up and a bunc...