Life in Culebrón

My Spanish driving licence includes the category to drive small lorries and big vans. I almost never drive small lorries or big vans, the last time was to help a pal move from London to Edinburgh and that was last century. I'm loathe to lose the right though. I justify the expense because my sister and brother in law have a motorhome that requires such a licence. I know their insurance company won't let me anywhere close to it but I self deceive myself that there is some need to keep those classes current.  In Spain, there is a legal difference between professional and non-professional drivers. Professional drivers, like professional vehicles, are subject to tighter restrictions and more frequent testing than non-professional drivers and vehicles. This means there are differences in the renewal periods for driving licences. In my case, for instance, as an amateur, my car licence lasted 10 years until I became 65 years old, and then, as the curvature of my spine increased, the v...

Second-hand car prices being what they are in Spain, and because I could, I bought a car from new. I was actually in a situation where I could have paid outright (pension lump sum), but the dealer offered a better price, even with all the interest, on a finance package. The finance period had to be 48 months or more. When the last instalment left my bank account on September 14 this year I grinned. The car was mine. Or so I thought. I have an application on my phone called Mi DGT or My DGT (DGT is Dirección General de Transporte - something like The Ministry of Transport ). Apart from being a bit on the clunky side, the phone app's OK. It holds my driving licence and most of the official documentation on the car. At the top of the details about the car, there is a red band and a warning sign. Basically, it says I'm not the owner of the car, VW Finance is. I've been waiting for the red notice to go away since I paid the last instalment, but today, for the first time, I bothe...

I was wearing green flares and a pink shirt with a big collar when I took my first driving test. I was a callow youth of 16. That first licence only allowed me to drive a three wheeler (and probably ride a moped) but, when I turned 17, I passed the car driving test and got a bunch of other classes of vehicles added to my little red driving licence booklet. So I've had a licence for well over 50 years now. That original "full" driving licence included specific classes for vehicles such as invalid carriages, road rollers and trolley vehicles. Later, probably when I got one of those folding green and pink two part driving licences, the classes changed to the ones that have been stable now for years. - two wheelers in class A, cars and light vans as class B, goods vehicles class C and class D for buses and the like. British photocard licences were introduced a couple of years before the new millennium and I think the design has remained basically the same till the present day...

If you need to go to a bank in Spain think about it taking a good part of your morning. You may be lucky. Correct desk. Person not at breakfast. No wait. No complications. I'm sure it will happen one day but even when it's been a relatively problem free run it has seldom taken me less than twenty to thirty minutes. It doesn't matter where it is, as soon as there's a physical or virtual queue it's going to take time. Obviously the Post Office falls into this category. Yesterday I had a package to post. I went to the Post Office. Because the number of people who can be inside the office is limited the queue was in the street. I stayed for a while but after 20 minutes nobody had gone in and nobody had come out. My mask was getting tacky; I gave up. I popped back twice more in the next two hours. The queue was going nowhere. The main man in our post office isn't the sort of person to get flustered. He doesn't hurry. I thought I may be able to sidestep the que...

I was in the UK for a couple of days a little while ago. I noticed the car number plates. Actually I notice car number plates as a matter of course. No idea why but I do. I particularly noticed that Britons still have a liking for those personalised plates. I can understand that to a point. If you're called Simon and you have money to burn and you buy 51 MON then that's pretty good but, for the life of me, I couldn't work out why people had paid (presumably) good money for the strange letter number combinations. Why is LFC 24V in an auction with a buy now price of £ 1750 and a bid of £ 750? Anyway, in Spain, you have no choice. You get the next number and letter combination in the sequence. You can't buy and sell number plates. Up to the year 2000 the plates used to indicate where the car was registered with one or two letters to identify the province. Not any more though; now it's just a sequence of three letters and four numbers. I thought the sequence w...