Good morning sir. May I see your documentation please?

I get pulled over fairly frequently by the police, usuallly the Guardia Civil. Normally it takes seconds - they see I'm wearing my seat belt, see that the car has been checked for roadworthiness or whatever and I'm soon on my way. Not always, they sometimes have big guns and give clear instructions about leaving the car s-l-o-w-l-y. I've been breathalysed either three or four times as well. Always 100% clear.

On the way to stay in a hotel in Cartagena last week I was being followed by a police car with speed cameras mounted on the roof. I signalled left and pulled into a parking bay. The policeman started gesticulating and shouting. Once out of the car in that flurry of tripping over things fluster he told me off for crossing an unbroken white liine in the centre of the road. I shouldn't have turned left.

Today we went to visit a bodega though here in Portugal they seem to be called quintas. When it got to the wine tasting I only took about half a mouthful of wine. I've got to drive I said.

Five minutes down the road and we were pulled over by police officers on a country lane - their uniforms had the letters GNR on them. "Documentation please," they said in Portuguese. I tried answering in English, no good, I tried Spanish - that worked. It turned out the poliiceman had been a lorry driver and knew our bit of Spain as well as Spanish. There were no problems with the paperwork. "You haven't been drinking have you?" he asked, almost as a throwaway line. I told the truth. I was lectured on the strength of Portuguese wine and sent on my way. Two police incidents in five days is a bit on the top side thouugh.

Interesting about the language too. I complain a lot about not being able to speak Spanish very well. Being here in Portugal where I have difficulty pronouncing the name of the town that I'm staying in has brought home to me how communicative I actually am in Spanish. It is horrible being so lost and having to be so British about speaking to foreigners - well modulated sounds, a slow delivery and simple words. Of course, just as everywhere else the foreigners put us to shame and usually manage English remarkably well.

Like the dentist's

Maggie wants a mobile phone. Well, actually, she's got a phone but she needs a Spanish SIM card and a contract to make her phone work. It's taken a little while for her to get around to it but this morning she sat at her half functioning computer (the connection is completely unreliable at the moment) and set up a contract to Pepephone, one of the newer and cheaper mobile phone setups in Spain.

Just one problem. The card has to be delivered by carrier and signed for. As we are in and out all the time and then Maggie is off to the UK for a couple of weeks opportunities for delivering or receiving the SIM card are very limited.

Pepephone uses a travel agency as a shop for its services. It just happens that we're in Cartagena for a concert so we thought we could ask if there was the possibility of collecting a SIM card directly.

We have now been waiting for over an hour, we're still waiting. It's nobody's fault the people are doing their jobs but it is a very, very long winded process.

Badly informed - as usual

People tell me I complain. I usually think I am commenting or, more often, guffawing, at the preposterousness of whatever it may be. For instance in Of no fixed address

Anyway, as usual, I was wrong. Just ask Maggie. Always wrong. My address wasn't the real problem. True I had to go to Elda about 25 kilometres away where I was sent from one office to a second but once I was in the right place it took only a few seconds to change my address with the Social Security, with the Health people.

Back at the computer I applied for my European Health Card only to have the application turned down again. So I rang the helpline. I enjoyed the music and the mix of information and encouragement to not go away as the minutes ticked away.

The woman told me that I'm not employed, I'm not a pensioner and I'm not unemployed so I can't have a card. I explained that I have a job. She couldn't find me on the system and it took a while before she did. Ah, your contract ended at the end of June she said. Well, yes and no I replied. I have one of these fixed discontinuous contracts so I presume that although I'm not being paid I am considered to be employed. Not quite apparently. I have the right to claim unemployment pay and I would not be added to the unemployment statistics but unless I actually claim the dole I have no right to a health card. I checked that there was no problem with ordinary health care here in Spain and that was fine. I can get sick at home but not whilst I gad about Europe.

These contratos fijos discontinuos are designed for people who work in seasonal businesses. The job is yours when there's work but apparently the idea is that you go and draw the dole when the firm doesn't need you. Despite being entitled to unemployment pay people on these contracts are not registered as unemployed. A very odd situation and very easy for the firms to abuse I would have thought. Employ someone for eleven months until the summer holiday period, kick them loose with no need to pay them whilst they draw the dole and then take them on again when they have a nice tan. The other side is that people who have these contracts are unlikely to do much job hunting whilst they are temporarily out of work so they are a dead weight on the public purse. Apparently most of us on these contracts are women and lots of us work in food production, education and tourism.

Obviously my personal situation is a little strange. I'm sure that my boss would keep me working over the summer if I wanted to work. The truth is that it suits me and him for me to take a couple of months off. I avoid work and he doesn't have to employ somebody at a slacker time of the year. It has never crossed my mind to claim the dole.

I'd just better not get sick when we cross the border into Portugal over the summer.

Keeping schtum

Everyone knows that Brits in Spain wear socks with sandals, go bright red in the sun and swill beer. One of those conversational topics, designed generally to use comparatives in English, with students is about countries. We always agree that one difference is on the Tube. In London everyone keeps to themselves, reading or simply looking grim faced. In Madrid on the other hand the babble between passengers is drowned out only by the occasional impromptu musical jam session.

I was in Madrid the last couple of days and I'm sad to report that everyone on the metro is now glued to their mobile phones. For business suits and skaters alike their thumbs are dancing across screens catching or killing things. Earphones are everywhere to block out the surrounding world. Mobile phones, the great leveller.

Madrid looked very green too. Trees all over the place and that's without going anywhere near the Retiro. Busy of course but then, if you lived in Culebrón, most places would seem busy to you too. And expensive; it's not that paying 2.20€ or 2.50€ for a bottle of beer or 4€ for a tapa is too bad really but we generally pay about half of that so the final bill can be a bit of a surprise. And exciting - flash motors on the street, odd and stylish characters in equal measure, galleries, museums and events everywhere. And, best of all in the recently renamed Aeropuerto Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Maggie popped out of one of the doors with a cartload of luggage which means she gets to eat pork and drink wine and I get my playmate back.

Of no fixed address

The British Embassy has a Facebook page called Brits Living in Spain. Lots of their posts are pretty good. Today there was one about applying for a European health card online and true enough there was a simple online form on the Ministry of Employment and Social Security's website for workers and pensioners. I filled it in and sent it off. An email came back to say my address didn't match anything on their database.

My address is easy. House number, Culebrón and postcode.

Postcodes in Spain identify a town or village. Culebrón is 03658 but the post office told us never to use that as mail would be wrongly sent to the sorting office in Salinas. Better to use 03650 they said. Some organisations have address checking software that matches the village name to the correct postcode and make arbitrary changes. Maybe the Ministry of Employment and Social Security is one of those organisations. So the mistake could be in the postcode.

Lots of Spanish internet databases require a descriptive word which is the equivalent of things like street, avenue, drive or crescent in the address and most of them will not accept a blank field. On the deeds to the house the descriptive term is Partida - a word that has lots of meanings but roughly translates as place or zone. On the equivalent of the Council Tax Register the Town Hall gave our address the prefix Caserío which loosely translates to hamlet. If a database offers either of these terms I use them. Sometimes the firm or agency I'm dealing with simply adds its own prefix and, quite often, additional information too. Our electricity provider for instance uses Calle (street) Culebrón and then adds bajo which is normally used for ground floor flats. True enough we only have a ground floor. The phone company has made up a different address which includes the word Aldea (village.) So the mistake could be the first word of the address.

Actually my name is nearly as fickle as my address. Barclaycard changed the spelling of my name to Christofer and on my health card and social security card my name is Christopher Joh as they ran out of characters. Online the phone company has given me a second surname. None of this matters very much as I get hardly any snail mail and most identification just happens through my ID number. I don't suppose my name is the problem.

All this makes it difficult to correct my address so it matches their database though. I looked at my tax return thinking there may be a link between Government databases but they have a different variation - Calle Rio Culebrón (Culebron river street) which I suspect is somebody correcting what they assumed to be a Brit misspelling of the address. From Caserío to Calle Rio.

I was told I'd got my first application wrong by an automated system so I thought I may as well have another go. I banged off another form. Maybe I can keep going till we get a match.