Chatting with an algorithm

My sister-in-law is, apparently, learning French. She and my sister, who is learning Russian, were talking about Duolingo, the telephone and computer language learning app. I really don't care for Duolingo in Spanish—it's too strict, too dogmatic and often arguably wrong. I was once asked, in a schoolboy quiz, how many sides a threepenny bit had. I was on top of that obvious trick; everyone knew there were 12 sides, but there were two more—the heads and tails—making 14. I showed I'd caught onto their little trick by putting my answer as 12+2=14. "No," said the quiz setter—"12." An injustice that still rankles 62 years later. If that quiz setter were not dead, he'd work for Duolingo.

Lynn—for that's my sister-in-law's name—said that it wasn't the general stuff but the artificial intelligence bit that she actually liked. She said she had conversations and did spoken grammar exercises with Duolingo AI. I've seen the adverts, of course, but I've also seen adverts for penis rings and have never been tempted by those either.

But my sister-in-law does not suffer fools gladly, and if she thought it was alright, it probably was. So I decided to have a look at one of the (several) Spanish AI tutors. I presumed there would be a free version that did the basic stuff and then a paid-for version that would make the tea in the morning. Being of that sort of age where I am constantly reminded of the brecha digital—the digital divide—I asked a couple of everyday AI apps which they reckoned was the best-value AI Spanish tutor. The one I ended up looking at is called Langua, which seems to be related to Langua Talk which is one of those platforms where you can talk to a real tutor using a video call.

Have you ever noticed that on those programmes about the FBI, or in a sci-fi feature film, once something is said it's said. There is no need to repeat anything and there's no hesitation or deviation either. That's what talking to AI is like. It's like talking to a real person but it's very clear and precise. In the Spanish version of Langua you can talk to a man or a woman's voice and that can be in a range of accents and varieties - Mexican, Argentinian, Colombian, Uruguayan or Chilean and, of course, peninsula Spanish. It's the last one that I've been using and I think there are five, or maybe six, different peninsula voices. You can set levels of conversation from beginner to experienced; you can choose set conversation topics or just have a free-form conversation. You can get feedback in the target language or in your native language. I talked with it/her/him about the trials and tribulations of emptying a septic tank, for instance. It’ll do role plays and it produces flashcards (not that I know what they are exactly). You can also do grammar exercises with it. I've been surprised by its flexibility. For instance in the grammar section I asked it to practise the range of past tenses using the vosotros form (which I always forget), and it obliged.

The thing I've found most outstanding about it though is that it understands what I'm saying and even gives me quite a lot of humming and hawing latitude. So when I try to pronounce a word I always trip over, temporizador, for instance, and stumble with two or three attempts, it simply records the word when I get it right or the nearest I get before I give up. If I get a word wrong, it will transcribe the wrong word and then ask me about it later. Because it transcribes what you say as well as what it says, you have a written record of the conversation. This means the AI can provide an overall analysis for you or an analysis of a single phrase. Unlike a real live tutor, it remembers every word so that it will—if you ask—give you either a general analysis of your conversation or a detailed analysis of an individual phrase.

When you get fed up or completely lost, you can just stop. If you want to start again later, you can do so easily without feeling guilty. If it's time to give up altogether, have a cup of tea and then give it another crack—you can. I've only been using it for a few days and it's still surprising me. I suppose the novelty might wear off eventually but, at the moment, it's amusing, and interesting in equal measure. It's not free though. I chose their cheapest plan which costs about 20€ per month; so far I've never reached the cut-off point they told me was roughly 45 minutes per day. I only paid the money to give it a go because the free trial time was very limited. My original thought was that I'd give it up after a month but now I'm thinking I might keep on with it.

This is not a product recommendation as such—I’m very happy with what I've bought—but remember that my sister-in-law was singing the praises of Duolingo's version too. My guess is there are stacks and stacks of variations—all I'm saying is that I've been astounded by what the AI tutoring system I bought seems capable of doing and I'd wholeheartedly recommend it, or something similar, if you're learning a language.

Les Velles de Sèrra

I don't think I'm unusual in keeping my diary on Google calendar. It reminds me of the repetitive jobs, it reminds me of important appointments and it reminds me of birthdays. In fact it's probably one of the main banes of my life with its constant nag, nag nag. I also use the diary to jot down something interesting that I've missed. In that case I put a note to myself, at some appropriate time in the future, to check the details/dates/blood type of the missed event so that I catch it this time around. 

A reminder turned up a couple of weeks ago that said check Les Velles de Sèrra in Elche. So I did. There were several newspaper articles and bits on websites that talked about reviving this ancient tradition. It turned out to be a bit like the scarecrow competitions in the UK or Día de la Vieja in el Cantón with large dolls or mannequins dotted around the streets. In the case of the Velles these were, apparently, mannequins set in a tableau with some sort of commentary on modern life.

I couldn't find any specific information beforehand on where the mannequins were but, when I left home, some 45 kms from Elche, I was optimistic that they would be in central locations. Luckily for us, as we turned up just after 2pm the tourist office was still open. I asked, in Spanish, if there was any information, specifically a map of locations, for Les Velles de Serra. Now my Valenciano is weak to non existent so I had no idea how to pronounce Velles de Serra and the woman behind the desk obviously thought I was asking about the Valencian Fallas which, in Valenciano, are Falles

"Ah, no", said the woman, "They're in Valencia, not here." "No, what I'm after are these scarecrow type dolls that are in the streets here today" "Ah, Velles, no, those came and went." "I don't think so, I'm pretty sure that they are today, I've read a couple of articles that say they happen today until 5pm." At this point the woman checks her computer, "Quite right, today." (Knowing that this is a stupid question) "Do you have a map or a website address with locations?" "I don't think so but my colleague who is in the bathroom at the moment may know." The colleague, a man, joins us. He tells me that I missed them, the Velles that is. The woman puts him right and tells him that the computer says they are on today. He suddenly remembers that he saw some of the mannequins in a school yard this very morning. "They may be on in the centre, or el Raval," he says. I ask him if there are any repetitive locations. He says no. I ask where el Raval is. The woman draws a circle on the map. Thank you, very kind, I say.

We walked around the centre by the Basilica, by the Town Hall, in the old Flower Market. We walked around the central bits of el Raval. We had a coffee in el Raval, the server had never heard of Les Velles de Serra. As hope faded and we headed back towards the parked car, by a purposely circuitous route, I noticed some mannequins outside a shop. The sign with them started with "Che" which I'm pretty sure is a very common sentence starter in Argentina. Good to see the Argentinians keeping their end up for a bit of ilicitano culture. Only a couple of hundred yards further on we found another mannequin tableau about the recent floods in Valencia and this one had a woman guarding it. She told us there were 36 sets of monigotes spread across the city but she didn't know where they were except that some were in some schools.

A bit of a disaster really then. Or maybe it was a triumph in that we found any. Either way the gap between promotion and information seemed somewhat surprising.

On fish 'n' chips

I went to the UK last weekend. I don't go very often but my mum moved, just before Christmas, into a care home and I felt nosey enough, or bad son guilty enough, to go and have a look at her new digs. A long weekend, Friday through Monday. My mum seemed fine and happy enough, given her 93 years and her circumstances, and it was good to see her. To make it even better I got to see my sister and brother and their partners.

I just asked Maggie how long she considers I've spent in the UK in the last 20 years and she reckoned a month. I think it must be more than that but I'd be amazed if it added up to more than three months. This means the UK is a bit foreign to me. Obviously it's not really strange to me because I'm British and lots of stuff just got coded into my DNA - be that sausage rolls, drinking tea, double decker buses, Boxing Day or the winter sound of cawing crows. Just after we'd arrived in the UK, in the bus on the airport apron, a group of young people, young people wearing sports clothes, with modern haircuts and rings in their noses were were talking about looking forward to a decent cup of tea and ginger nuts, or maybe chocolate digestives. I felt welcomed by that conversation.

One thing I always appreciate in the UK is about being able to speak English. Even if the person I'm talking has a different heritage I'm confident enough of my English to find it easy going. There are always new constructions, new words and new phrases that I've never heard before but it's simple enough to catch on to most and I can always ask if I don't know. I can overhear conversations without listening in and I can gauge whether making a comment on that overheard conversation is appropriate or not. I'm still miles from that confidence with Spanish.

Like all tourists some of my main interactions in the UK are with places selling food and drink and with a different range of prices. Paying upfront before someone pours my tea or prepares my Kurdish breakfast is still a bit surprising even if I've adapted to paying for the smallest item with a card or with my phone. I suspect that I will never adapt to drinking through a plastic lid atop a cardboard cup while crockery still exists. I was also surprised this time that I needed to keep my coat on in so many under heated caffs and pubs presumably as a response to high energy prices.

I talk to a woman called Ana most weeks through a video call. I speak to her in Spanish and I was telling her about my trip. I was saying to her that my Britishness still jars with Spain from time to time. I was mainly thinking about my little verbal asides. For instance, only a week ago I was trying to buy a flat hose. The sort of hose pipes they have rolled up in a wired glass cupboard that say Fire Dry Riser. I went to the two agricultural supply stores that we have in Pinoso. It was pretty obvious, after the response in the first, that they wouldn't have one in the second so, when the woman said, "No, sorry," I wasn't surprised and quipped "What a shame, I so wanted to play at firemen." The woman serving on looked at me like I was a blathering idiot - and it wasn't my Spanish. I've been told that it's nothing to do with Britishness and that it's just that I'm a bit odd in my verbal ad libbing. In my defence I'd give the example that last Monday, when I joined the end of the "Non Priority" queue at Stansted Airport to get on a Ryanair plane, I asked a woman if she were the back of the steerage queue. She understood, she smiled a little, she didn't think I was blathering. 

Ana said she understood the steerage line too. To emphasise the differences I then repeated most of the stuff I've written in the last few lines - drinking through plastic from cardboard cups, paying for the smallest item with a credit card, living off takeaway food and ordering up an Uber. She said that those things were dead normal to her life in the Barcelona area where she lives. Alright I said, and I told her the hosepipe story. She laughed which rather confounded my theory of a different sense of humour. Finally, I said about the insecurity of speaking Spanish as against English and she told me that was nothing to do with my level of language competence but because I was a big baby.

Maybe lots of the difference I think of as a British/Spanish thing are more between the bits of England I visit and the Spain I live in. After all home is an almost unpopulated satellite village of a small town which is still, very much, in a bit of a time warp. 

Just after that video call I was listening to a podcast from a bloke called Ben, who lives in Madrid. He was talking about going out for a menu del día, the cheap lunchtime set menus so typical of Spain. He was talking about how the food was usually traditional offerings. He obviously felt the need to be a bit more precise about that. He went on to say that nowadays Madrid is rapidly losing the traditional places and is full of fast food and restaurants offering cuisine from all over the world - not just the long established Italian and Chinese places but lots of South American, Eastern European, Middle East and Asian restaurants. That's exactly what I'd seen on Mill Road in Cambridge the other day. Then, for good measure he mentioned the "midday pause" the two or three hours that businesses close in large tracts of Spain, and how that too was now very much a thing of the past in the big cities.

Oh well, what do I know.

Ouch!

You may have noticed that the tagline at the top of this blog has changed. It used to say old, fat, white haired. Through absolutely no effort on my part I've lost a fair bit of weight. In fact so much so that there was some doubt about whether my feeding tube could be removed today. Patri, the nutritionist, obviously thinks I'm not making enough effort to pile in those calories. I'd like to think it was my vivid description of what I'd eaten on the tapas trail in Yecla yesterday or the slightly inflated description of the nature of Shepherd's Pie, which swung the balance. Actually it probably wasn't as my Spanish was particularly stumbling and faltering today. 

The nutritionist didn't remove the plumbing herself. She had to call for a doctor. I could see why. It was specialist work. The tube I've had in since August last year looked exactly like that clear plastic stuff that blows bubbles in home aquariums. The tube was about 30 cms long had a junction at the end with a couple of hard plastic screw caps where I connected the bags loaded with liquid food and where I had connected syringes to push clean water into my stomach. At first the water was a way of keeping me hydrated and later it was just to keep the pipework clean. There was a plastic clip halfway up the tube to help make sure my stomach contents didn't leak all over the floor if I forgot to tighten up the plastic caps. Up against my stomach there was a plastic disc about 2 cms across to stop the tube sliding back inside my guts. Apparently inside my stomach there was a smaller plastic disc up against the inner wall. Getting the tube fitted had been a full on affair - pre-ops, general anaesthetic, mob handed operating theatre - the works. I guess they made a hole in my stomach and then pushed the smaller, interior, disc through the hole a bit like a button in a buttonhole. As the wound healed it closed around the tube; I suppose.

So the doctor comes in, says hello, checked I'd not eaten a hearty breakfast and tells me he's going to tug the tube out - it may hurt a bit he quipped. He wrapped the tube around his hand and jerked. Ouch. Ah, it didn't come out. I'll have another go. Jerk. Ouch. Hmm, I think we might have to find another solution. I'll have one last go. Jerk. Ouch. It's out. The nutritionist mopped up the blood from the wound and put a couple of those steri-strips, on to hold it together then a big dressing over the top and, a few moments later, I was on my way. The first time I've not had some sort of plumbing dangling from me in months.

The Town Council in Pinoso

One nice thing about living in a small Spanish town is that it's pretty easy to be on nodding terms with most of the local councillors. Not that it's really such a great thing but at least it means you can appear integrated when you have visitors from the old country. I often think it must be quite difficult for them, the councillors that is, not the visitors, because they have no easy escape. I saw one councillor, for instance, obviously in a hurry and trying to buy a couple of things from a local supermarket yet he was being harangued by someone, most forthrightly, about something. 

There are thirteen councillors in Pinoso. As with all Spanish municipalities the number of councillors is determined by population. The way it's done, in most, is that there are population bands that determine the number of councillors. Pinoso has between 5,001 and 10,000 inhabitants so it gets thirteen councillors just like Banyeres de Mariola with a population of 7,255 people. It's always an uneven number. Madrid has fifty seven, a village with a population under one hundred gets three.

At the moment all of Pinoso's councillors are from political parties with a national presence. In the past some councillors were from local parties. The Socialists, the PSOE, Partido Socialista Obrero Español is in power with eight councillors and a clear majority. The centre right Partido Popular, the Popular Party, has three councillors and the extreme right, VOX, has two councillors. 

The voting system in Spain is based on political parties and lists. Each party puts forward a list with sufficient names to cover all the potential seats up for grabs often with a couple of supplementary names that may provide a bit of extra publicity. At the national level the party will put its "stars" at the head of lists in different locations. At the local level that list of names will be known to a lot of the electorate. At the regional and national level it's very unlikely that most people will know anything about the people on the list with the possible exception of that first, star, name. Only the politically very aware will know anyone further down the list. Who gets elected depends on a complicated mathematical formula that is designed to provide a form of proportional representation based on the votes cast. This means that the voting pattern in the local and national elections can be quite different because people choose to vote for the party nationally and for people they trust locally. For instance, last time around, in 2023, there were local and general elections but at different times. The hypothetical makeup of the Pinoso Town Council, based on the General Election results, would have seen the PP in power with seven seats. PSOE would have got four and VOX, two instead of the actual PSOE majority.

The term of office for a council is four years. The last elections were in 2023 and the next ones will be on Sunday May 23rd 2027. When the councillors have been elected the council meets to elect a mayor. If one party has a clear majority then it will usually elect the mayor. Where no one party is able to govern alone the parties horse trade until they have the necessary majority to elect a mayor and to form the governing council. In Pinoso with the clear PSOE majority the party elected Lázaro Azorín as Mayor. Once the makeup of the council is known then the councillors in the ruling party, or coalition, are given various responsibilities - education, health, employment etc. I've put the list with the current councillors and their responsibilities at the bottom. Some of the responsibilities were difficult to translate into English.

Lázaro, the mayor, has a second job, he's also a PSOE Diputado in the Congreso de los Diputados in Madrid. For we Britons he's the equivalent of an MP. Lázaro was number five on the PSOE's list for the 2019 General Election as a potential diputado from Alicante. The PSOE won sufficient proportion of the votes in the province for them to send four deputies to Madrid. Later, when the head of the list, Pedro Duque, Science Minister and ex astronaut, resigned (for tactical voting reasons in parliament) Lazaro, as next name on the list, became an MP. In the 2023 elections Lazaro was number three on the lists and he was elected on the proportion of the vote won by his party.

It is the council itself that decides on the payment levels, expenses etc. for the various councillors, though there are guidelines to avoid profiteering. I kept a note of the salaries reported after a council meeting in 2023. I wanted to make sure I was fair in mentioning those salaries here but I cannot find any reference to salary on the labyrinthine Pinoso Town Hall website. There's a section on the website called municipal transparency, transparencia municipal, but I find it somewhat less than transparent! Anyway, given that this information will probably have changed over the intervening years, and given that it may never have been correct, you should take this information as potentially inaccurate. I think that four of the councillors get paid a full salary, for a full working week, and four get paid a partial salary, equivalent to working about 10 hours per week. The full time salaries range from a bit above 48,000€ down to a bit below 34,000€ with the partial contracts paying around 11,000€ per year. 

So far as I know Lazaro waived his salary as mayor because he gets paid as a diputado. Actually he gets paid less as an MP than he would as mayor (a diputado gets a bit below 44,000€ a year according to Perplexity.ai) but they also get tax free expenses of around 24,000€ a year if their "constituency" is outside Madrid and quite a few other perks from taxi allowances to travel costs. Again, according to Perplexity.ai most common or garden MPs get paid between 4,000€ and 5,000€ per pay cheque remembering that, in Spain, most workers get 14 payments in a year.

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Pinoso Town Council

Lázaro Azorín Salar: Mayor.

Silvia Verdú Carrillo: Culture and Youth, Staff, Treasury, Education, Waste, Agriculture, Police, Civil Protection and Traffic, Forestry and Quarries

María José Moya Vidal: Social Services, Equality and LGTBI+, Protocol, Health, Pinoso Social and Health Associations, Local Media

César Pérez Cascales: Senior Citizens, Archive and Library, Heritage and Historical Memory, Foreigners, Citizen Participation, Social and Health Care Collectives

Neus Ochoa Rico: Local development, Tourism, Trade and Commerce, Markets and Consumer Affairs, Cleaning of Public Buildings 

José Ángel Pérez Verdú: Parks and Gardens, Outlying Settlements, Roads, Water and Water Resources, New Building, Technology and Street Cleaning

Elisa Santiago Tortosa: Fiestas

Raúl Pérez Albert: Cemetery Industry, Housing, Street Lighting and Urban Development

2024 Population in Pinoso

This was such an obvious blog, but one that had been published on the various Pinoso Town Hall websites, that I decided not to do it. Then, in casual conversation to Maggie I mentioned that it was easy to remember that there are now 345 Dutch and Belgian people in Pinoso (it's a topic of conversation amongst the Brits here, the obvious increase in the numbers of these two nationalities). She replied that she'd seen the article but not really taken it in. So, I decided to take the easy blog.

Pinoso had, at the close of 2024 a population, according to the statistical department of Pinoso Town Hall, of 8,836 people or maybe 8,846 (as the various figures in their article don't quite add up) but we're only talking about 10 people so I've used the higher figure to work out the figures in the next two sentences. Of that population 6,758 are Spanish (76%) and 2,078 people are foreigners (24%). There are 3426 Spanish men, 1039 foreign men, 3342 Spanish women and 1039 foreign women. The figures do not include the possibility of someone choosing not to be classed as male or female. The foreigners include people from 65 nationalities though four countries - Japan, Gambia, Yemen and Zimbabwe - only have a single, I hope not too lonely, representative here.

The biggest group of immigrants is still we Britons (801) followed by Moroccans (235), Dutch (210), Belgians (135), Rumanians (81), Ukrainians (64), Irish (43), Germans (38), Chinese (28), Polish (27), Algerians (25), Bulgarians (22), Italians (21) and Pakistanis (20). 

I think I should mention, because someone said it against one of the Facebook entries, that there are quite a few Canadians!

The last time I did this, at the start of 2022 (so 2021 figures), there were 56 different nationalities living in Pinoso. At that time the UK was way out in front with 835 people or nearly 10% of the population, the next most numerous group were Moroccans with 199 people. There were 71 Dutch, 69 Belgians, 66 Rumanians, 51 Ukrainians and 41 Ecuadorians. 

Atishoo!, atishoo!

On a Tunisian holiday we ate lots of carrots and lots of strawberries. They were in season, they were cheap, they were tasty so the hotels bought barrow loads of them for their guests. It's the same with lots of garden crops. They come in shedloads, all at once. Suddenly you have cherries or plums or green beans coming out of your ears. With us it was only ever figs. We've never done well with our garden - most things are early for the next extinction event. The figs were an exception but most of our garden is either dead or dying. We had three trees: two big ones and a smaller one. The big ones produced two crops a year. I mean, seriously, in the UK I'd occasionally see figs in Waitrose and buy them as a bit of a novelty. It was a novelty that lasted for maybe half a dozen figs over a couple of weeks. What does any individual do with thousands of figs? There are only so many jars of fig jam or fig and cheese starters that any one person can eat and most of the possibilities make little economic sense - fig wine in an area awash with proper wineries? You can't even give them away because everyone else has mounds of figs too that they are fed up of freezing and pairing with cheese.

So most of the figs would fall on the ground and had to be raked up. They overpowered the compost bin. It was the same with the autumn leaves. I know we're not supposed to rake leaves up anymore, pile them around tree roots and what not, leave them to mulch down, but these big trees produced knee deep leaves. And fig trees grow quickly. They produce a lot of new wood each season so they'd have to be pruned and what's to be done with all those lopped branches?

I do most of the graft in the garden but it's Maggie who takes any notice of it. She'll try new plants, new flowers, she'll harvest any crop there is and put it to use. I just prune, weed, rake, dig, hoe, curse and bleed. One day Maggie asked me if I'd noticed the white spots on the fig leaves. I hadn't. It turned out they were Cerosplastes rusci, sometimes called wax scales; here they are known as cochinilla. 

When I looked closely all three of our trees had these parasites on the leaves and bark, sucking away on the sap from the trees. At the local agricultural suppliers I only had to say the word higuera (fig tree) and the bloke was reaching for some sort of chemical to see them off. He told me that the chemicals weren't particularly toxic for humans,  so anyone could use them, but he recommended overalls, a hat, goggles and facemask while I sprayed. Each tree needed about 30 litres of two different chemicals. It was August and it was quite hot inside a boiler suit, a woolly hat, goggles and facemask especially with each backpack full of insecticide weighing in at close on 20 kilos. At the start it wasn't too bad but by the end, determined to finish in one fell swoop, I was swaying gently and on the point of collapse. I was probably quite close to being one of those four line stories on the National TV news, slightly longer on the local radio, about some sixty odd year old dying from heat exhaustion.

For a while the trees seemed to be saved. They recovered, they gave fruit, the leaves stopped dropping off and then, suddenly, one of the trees tree just lost the will to live. It died in a couple of weeks. I lopped off all the really weighty branches and left it as a climbing frame for the cats. Later it became a support for the solar powered fairy lights that Maggie likes to festoon the building with. It wasn't till a couple of seasons later that I noticed cracks in the trunk and branches of the other tree, boreholes and all sorts of signs that the tree was doomed. The destruction wreaked by the tiny parasites is truly incredible.

So the two big fig trees were now dead. Again, with the second one I lopped off lots of branches to leave it looking like one of those John Ford Sonoran cactus. Stark.

There was a bit of wind a couple of weeks ago. As always it blew some chairs over, whirpooled leaves into mounds in certain spots of the garden. The wind also blew the first fig tree down. 

I sawed, I spent ages splitting the trunk with steel wedges to make the remains manageable enough to cart away to a large pile of garden waste that I'm unsure what I'm going to do with. Probably it will go the way of the supposed witch in that Monty Python sketch - well it might when the controls on garden fires are eased up.

Tax and minimum wage - today's news

Something in today's news about income tax completely flummoxed me. I think I've got it worked out now. I may be wrong so don't take my ramblings as gospel but I thought you may be interested too.

The current Spanish Government is a coalition. That coalition can usually garner support from other parties to approve its legislation, but not always. Today, one of the news stories was about a row within the two parties that make up the Government. Yolanda Diaz, from SUMAR, has done a deal with the Unions to put the minimum wage up to 1,184€ per month. Because there are 14 payments in the Spanish year that's a total income of 16,576€ per year. At the moment the minimum wage is 15,876€. Yolanda Diaz also pushed through legislation which dropped the working week from 40 hours to 37.5 hours for the same pay. The majority party in Government, the Socialists or PSOE, argue that, as the minimum wage is now a reasonable income, it should be taxed like other incomes. SUMAR argues that as it is still a low income the workers on it should be offered more protection. In recent years the minimum wage has been exempt of the IRPF or income tax.

This news confused me because I know that Spanish income tax (IRPF) is paid in earnings bands with different percentage rates. The lowest rate, on taxable income between 1€ and 12,450€, is 19%. The next band goes from 12,450€ and 20,200€. The tax on that is 24%. There are other tax bands, the highest is for incomes of 300,000€ or more which are taxed at 47%. If the lowest tax rate was 19%, and that applied from the first euro earned, how could a wage be tax exempt?

I also knew that there were tax allowances. For someone under 65 it's 5,550€, increasing to 6,700€ for over 65s and 8,100€ for the over 75s. There are other tax allowances too, for dependants and for married couples. The bit I didn't know was that if the total taxable income was below the minimum wage then there was no tax to be paid at all. Even now that seems a bit odd as it clashes with the idea of the various tax bands.

And that's the change. Presuming that the legislation goes through, in the tax year 2025 even the people on minimum wage will be taxed. As we are just about to have the pleasure of paying our tax bills for the tax year 2024 the rest of this explanation uses 2024 as an example.

1. Exemption for incomes below the minimum wage

Individuals earning up to the annual minimum wage do not have to pay IRPF. In 2024, this exemption threshold was set at 15,876€, equivalent to the annual minimum wage. So, people on low incomes, particularly those earning at or below the minimum wage, are not subject to income tax.

2. The 19% Tax Band

The first €12,450 of taxable income is subject to a 19% tax rate under Spain's sliding scale tax system. Taxable income is calculated after subtracting personal allowances (the 5,550€ and so on) and other deductions. Because of the personal allowances and the exemption for incomes below the minimum wage, many low-income earners do not reach the taxable income level where this 19% rate applies.

3. How the exemption and the 19% tax band Interact

There is an apparent dichotomy which arises because the 19% tax band starts at €0. In practice, no one pays this rate on their first €12,450 of gross income unless their earnings exceed both the personal allowance and the minimum wage.

For instance: A worker earning €15,876 (the minimum wage in 2024) would subtract their personal allowance (€5,550 for someone under 65), leaving a taxable income of €10,326. Since this taxable income is below the exemption threshold (€15,876), they pay no IRPF.

If their gross income exceeded the exemption threshold, for instance if they earned €16,000, they would begin paying IRPF on their taxable income above €5,550. That would mean they would have 10,450€ of taxable income. That figure falls within the 19% tax band (which goes up to 12,450€) so they would pay 1,985.50€ in taxes. (10,450 x 19%)

You can see that, in this case, a small increase in gross pay produces a significantly increased tax bill.

You can also see that there are two possible arguments about whether people should pay tax on their total income or not. The one that has won, at the moment, the PSOE one, is that the personal allowances and the tax bands provide a fair taxation system without needing any extra protection for those on the lowest wages. The PSOE reckons that only about 20% of the people on minimum wage will pay any tax in 2025 and those will generally be single people without dependants.

Singing along

Much to the amusement of Maggie, my partner, instead of resolving to go to the gym or to stop drinking alcohol in the New Year my resolution was to learn the words to Un beso y una flor. It's a song popularised in Spain by the singer Nino Bravo in 1972. 

I don't know about you but I was forced to learn things by rote in Secondary school on pain of serious bodily harm. 

Latin master to an 11 year old me.
"Alright Thompson;  present tense of to love in Latin"
I try.
"Wrong, lift one leg, stand on just one. Try again. Same verb, same tense."
I try again.
"Wrong, lift the other leg too!" 

Should you be concerned I can still trot out amō, amās, amat, amāmus, amātis, amant even when I'm dead drunk. I can also do "I wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats on high etc.," and "So shaken as we are, so wan with care, find we a time for frighted peace to pant, etc. That seems to be it though. There must have been more but they've gone. 

The Spanish used to say, la letra con sangre entra, literally, the letter enters with blood but which equates to our,  spare the rod and spoil the child. Both come from a time when adults were very happy to use severe violence against youngsters and when rote learning was one of the mainstays of any educational system. 

We do learn by constant repetition though, otherwise I wouldn't know tens, if not hundreds, of songs from the ones sung by adults in my childhood like Don't Dilly Dally on the Way or Daisy, Daisy through to all those pop songs of the 60s, 70s and 80s. I do remember making a bit of an effort to learn the words to Jerusalem too when I was at University having been unable to hide my ignorance as a group of about twenty of us did our best to be patriotic, or socialist, or part of the Women's Institute, from the top of a table in the Union bar.

There's a Spanish song, Mediterráneo by Joan Manuel Serrat, that has been voted as the best song in the history of popular music in Spain. You hear it from time to time but it's rolled out far fewer times than songs like Eres tú by Mocedades or Bailando by Alaska or Rafael's Mi Gran Noche. But the song that I've noticed is the one I'm trying to learn, Un beso y una flor by Nino Bravo.

I'm not much for sport but, during the Euros, I could hear that the England football fans were singing Sweet Caroline. I remember too that my mum complained that, in the place she lived until very recently, the residents often burst into a version of that same song. Somehow the song had moved from mere song to anthem. In exactly the same was I found myself swaying gently from side to side as the drunken crowd, out to cheer on the Wine Horses in Caravaca de la Cruz last year, burst into a spirited rendition of Un beso y una flor. I recognised the song and I mouthed a few of the lines that I remembered but the situation reminded me of that table top Jerusalem recital - lots of da, da, da. Some time later, in Pinoso, the town band played the song as part of a concert and, Rod Stewart like, the band's director handed over to the crowd to sing along - ligero equipaje tum, tum, tan largo viaje, tum tiddly. 

That means that on two separate occasions, twice, the song has cropped up as a sing along. It's not happened with any other song, except the Spanish Happy Birthday, so, every day, for just five minutes, as my resolution, I read through the lyrics. So far and we're now into the second month of the year, not a thing, I can't string two lines together. Absolutely useless. My addled brain seems quite unable to cope. But even back in the 60s with those Latin verbs and ancient poems my method was easy - persistence. Just keep going till Elliot or Chesterton or the future tense (amābō, amābis, amābit, amābimus, amābitis, amābunt) ceded before sheer obstinance.

Un beso y una flor, Canción de Nino Bravo

Dejaré mi tierra por ti

Dejaré mis campos y me iré

Lejos de aquí

Cruzaré llorando el jardín

Y con tus recuerdos partiré

Lejos de aquí

De día viviré

Pensando en tus sonrisas

De noche las estrellas me acompañarán

Serás como una luz

Que alumbre mi camino

Me voy pero te juro que mañana volveré

Al partir un beso y una flor

Un "te quiero", una caricia y un adiós

Es ligero equipaje

Para un tan largo viaje

Las penas pesan en el corazón

Más allá del mar habrá un lugar

Donde el sol cada mañana brille más

Forjarán mi destino

Las piedras del camino

Lo que nos es querido siempre queda atrás

Buscaré un hogar para ti

Donde el cielo se une con el mar

Lejos de aquí

Con mis manos y con tu amor

Lograré encontrar otra ilusión

Lejos de aquí

De día viviré

Pensando en tus sonrisas

De noche las estrellas me acompañarán

Serás como una luz

Que alumbre mi camino

Me voy pero te juro que mañana volveré

Al partir un beso y una flor

Un "te quiero", una caricia y un adiós

Es ligero equipaje

Para un tan largo viaje

Las penas pesan en el corazón

Más allá del mar habrá un lugar

Donde el sol cada mañana brille más

Forjarán mi destino

Las piedras del camino

Lo que nos es querido siempre queda atrás

Al partir un beso y una flor

Un "te quiero", una caricia y un adiós

Es ligero equipaje

Para un tan largo viaje

Las penas pesan en el corazón

Más allá del mar habrá un lugar

Donde el sol cada mañana brille más

Forjarán mi destino

Las piedras del camino

Lo que nos es querido siempre queda atrás

A clean break

Being as how they're in season Walnuts are a common sight in Spanish supermarkets and homes around Christmas time. Apparently Britons and Spaniards open walnuts differently.

In the UK, in my youth, Christmas was about the only time of the year we'd have nuts, in shells, in our house. What joy, a reason to bring the crocodile nutcracker out of it's almost perennial hibernation and set it to task. The tail applied the pressure to the nut placed between the beast's jaws.

Now this, plier like, action, is fine for nuts with hard shells - Brazil nuts, hazelnuts and almonds for instance. It was complete overkill for monkey nuts and problematic for walnuts too. Instead of a nice clean break the intricately constructed walnut shells generally shattered when they suddenly lost their structural strength. The crocodile jaws would smack to producing a mixed pile of pulverized nut and shell fragments.

When you buy a net bag of walnuts in Spain they usually (not always) come with something that looks like a flat key. The idea is that you put the short end of the key into the crack between the two halves of the nut, the seam of the shell, and twist. The shell splits neatly and leaves the brain shaped half of the nut in one piece. I bet that's how Rowntrees got those nicely shaped nuts on top of their walnut whips.

Rise, take up your bed, and walk

Maggie tells me I should be explicit and say that I have been given the cancer all clear. She tells me that a sentence built into the story of the Imserso holiday is not good enough. That all the people who have shown concern need to be told clearly and succinctly. Clearly fine, succinctly - not likely given my style.

On 10 January I saw the oncologist at Elda Hospital after doing a PET -TAC at the Vinalopó Hospital in Elche a couple of days before. The oncologist told me that the results showed that the lesion that had been in my throat, in August, was no longer there - the cancer was gone. Every few months I will have to have another TAC scan and then go to see the oncologist to see whether the cancer has come back. I asked what chance there was of the cancer returning and he said 40%. That puts the odds in my favour.

I thought I was done there but Maggie tells me that I should tell you that I'm still having trouble eating. That, even now, I'm taking most food through a stomach tube but that I have started to eat more ordinary food, especially soft food, by mouth. My throat and mouth are not yet recovered - I have a sore throat all the time and my mouth is sometimes slimy, sometimes dry as a bone. My breath is less fragrant than it was. As my taste buds and saliva glands took a pasting from the radiotherapy (and maybe the chemotherapy) eating and drinking isn't a particularly pleasant experience. The treatment has affected my hearing and I'm quite deaf. There are other things which are not quite as before, including things like my facial hair hardly growing as well as changes to other bodily functions which I'm not going to detail here. Full disclosure only goes so far. Oh, and since the day when I was first told that I had cancer until today I have lost 17.7 kilos or two and three quarter stones. I'm very saggy.

By the way Positron Emission Tomography - Computed Axial Tomography (PET-TAC), is the process where the patient, me in this case, is put inside a big tube which allows the medics to take lots of images, a full body scan, that show the activity and metabolism of the body's organs using a radioactive "dye" which interacts with different types of body cells in different ways. People who know what they are looking at can interpret the images to decide what is happening to certain organs and, specifically in my case, to decide whether there was still cancer in my throat and lymph nodes and whether it has popped up anywhere else in other organs.