Agility

There are ways of doing things in Spain. If you want a lunch in a restaurant don't go in much before 2pm or after 4pm. If you go out drinking then, to fit in, you need to start on the spirits and mixer drinks after around 11pm. Drinking a hot drink whilst you eat food, with some leeway for breakfast toast and pastries, is tantamount to treason. Don't start filling your car with petrol or diesel before you've given someone the opportunity to come and do it for you as the majority of filling stations still have attended service. When your everyday doctor refers you to a specialist expect another appointment in the specialist department before you actually get to see the oncologist, cardiologist or whoever. In the bank or at the post office don't be too surprised if each person takes ten to fifteen minutes to get served (even if they are only buying stamps or paying a bill) and expect the employee behind the desk to look confused as they prod at the keyboard and stare in apparent bewilderment at the screen.

Lots of "official" things can be done online nowadays, at least partially, but don't be too shocked if you have to go and queue somewhere to start or to finish that online process. It may be possible to open an online bank account by staring at a camera with documentation in hand but don't expect that sort of new fangled thinking to work for local, regional or national government documentation

Like the rest of Europe Spain has started to vaccinate against Covid. There are 17 Autonomous Regions and each one has its own Health Service. Central Government distributes the weekly deliveries of vaccines but each Region administers the coronavirus jabs. Madrid, which includes the capital city and is the second most populous Region in Spain, started vaccinations at the end of December. Anyone with any experience of organising anything new knows to expect teething problems but the Madrid programme went well wrong.  Only putting 46 teams on the vaccination (two per team) wasn't a good start but then not working the couple of public holidays or the weekends in the first week didn't help. In fact Madrid only managed to use 6% of the vaccine available to them that first week. The, always good for a laugh, President of Madrid blamed Central Government, as she always does, but as Madrid's weekly supply of the vaccine is 48,750 doses my junior school arithmetic tells me that each of the 46 teams would need to have vaccinated 1,059 people per week, one every nine and a half minutes, to use all the supply. Meanwhile in Asturias, where they got 42,000 doses from Central Government in the first week they managed to achieve something like 80% of their target. Last time I looked our Valencian Region had done about 12,000 vaccinations or nearly 20% of the 60,000 doses it had on hand. I don't know anyone who's had one.

I did see a Tweet which said  that the recruitment criteria for 'jab nurses' are set by the EU and that the requirements were two years vaccinating experience, knowledge of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, completion of a Covid online training course plus other coordination and training skills. The Tweeter said it was obvious why there weren't enough people working. I have no idea if this was a Brexiteer making a point about the awful EU bureaucracy or something normal and maybe true. I could find no other reference to those criteria but I did find plenty of information about Regions setting up much shorter training programmes back in December so they were ready to administer the vaccines when they arrived.

If the vaccination rates don't go up then Spain will never reach it's 70% of the population vaccinated by the summer target. As you may imagine, because "all" the pundits and the reporters and the politicians live in Madrid this caused a bit of a media storm. One of the radio commentators I heard said that the problem in Spain was lack of agility. An unpreparedness to find a way, an unwillingness to depart from the tried and tested and I suddenly found myself with a new theory. The lack of Spanish agility.

From the big things, like the ERTES, the temporary lay-offs for Covid, the registration of people for the new baseline for family income, the Ingreso Mínimo Vital, the problems that people are having getting appointments with nearly all Government Departments, the inability or unwillingness to provide power to the illegal "shanty town" in Madrid, the difficulty with changing the way that education is delivered, right down to the tiny things like only being able to get a substantial meal at certain times of the day were all suddenly explained. It's not a lack of organisational ability (as many of my compatriots are happy to suggest), it's not about any laziness or "mañana" attitude but it is an unwillingness to accept that the system may be flawed. Once you have something in place it cannot, usually, be altered, tinkered with or improved to suit circumstances.

Well, it's a theory.