Flexible friends

Around 1975 I went to my branch of the Midland Bank and asked them for an Access card. Credit cards were pretty uncommon then. My bank turned me down as one of the great unwashed, a person without a job. There was another bank that offered Access at the time, probably the NatWest, and being persistent I went there to ask about getting a card. They suggested I applied for a Barclaycard instead. So I filled in the form, using a Biro, posted it off to somewhere and, several weeks later, got a nice shiny Barclaycard back.

22nd October  2020 and Barclaycard have just closed down that account. I can't use it after today. Not because I'm in debt but because they are cleaning up their European business before the UK finally abandons the Union. I forget what they told me about why they were closing me down. It was something to do with it becoming more expensive of trickier to do business with Europe when they ceased to be a member of the club.

I've had a Spanish credit card since  about 2006. I remember the people hawking their cards outside the Carrefour supermarket being amazed when I approached them to ask to sign up! At first it was a Spanish Barclaycard but Barclays sold the business on to Banco Popular, later Santander, who then sold a lot of the business to some U.S. risk capital group. It's called a WiZink card nowadays.

In the same way that I have a Spanish credit card I have a Spanish driving licence, pay Spanish taxes, I'm on the equivalent of the Council Tax list and we have a TV aerial which collects the Spanish TV signal. I know though that lots of Britons continue to behave as though they live a couple of thousand kilometres North of here. They have bank cards based on money in British bank accounts, they have British mobile phone numbers, imaginative solutions to watching broadcast British TV, as well as Amazon.co.uk accounts and the NHS still thinks they live in Acacia Avenue when they pop in to see the doctor on their trips "home". There has been an enormous kerfuffle as Britons, who have lived here for years and years, scrabble to get around to changing their driving licences, organising their "right to reside" paperwork and even register as living in the house they live in before the Brexit deadline. The fact that there's an advert on the Spanish Spotify channel advertising someone to sort out paperwork for British immigrants suggests that it's big business.

Apart from the slight twinge of losing something I've had for over 40 years I will miss the card not a bit but I do hope that today's change won't cause anyone here too much of a problem.

I'm English, not stupid

My mum tends to get cross with people when there is no need to. I think I may have inherited some of her angry genes. I do get fed up, though, of some Spaniards thinking that because I stutter over Spanish I don't have a clue about what's going on around me.

I wrote an email for some tickets to an event the other day. There had been a cock up in the process, at their end, so it was a reasonably lengthy email. I got a reply in Spanish. A couple of hours later I got a message with a similiar message in a close approximation to English and, at the same time, another email in Spanish to check that I was aware that the performance was in Spanish. Did the email writers think I was that Shakespeare writing monkey with the typewriter?

We're in the Carrefour concourse. Some people approach me to persuade me to sign up for a WiZink card. Now WiZink is the bizzare name that some people from the Banco Popular have thought of for a range of products that they label as basic and simple. Amongst other things they have bought the Spanish Barclaycard operation. I have a Spanish Barclaycard and Barclaycard keep telling me that very soon they will send me my new card. I tell the people on the stall that. I tell them that I am already a customer. "No," they say "you can win two flights to New York."  By now I'm surrounded by three people trying to earn their commission by signing somebody up. My Spanish, which has been fine up to now, begins to crumble. I repeat that I am already a customer, I even resort to showing my Barclaycard. They obviously know nothing about the relationship between WiZink and Barclaycard. My Spanish becomess incorrectly formed and badly pronounced. "The card is the same." I say loudly and I start to walk away. One of the Wizink people gets hold of my arm. I shrug them off and head towards the Carrefour entrance then I turn around and go back to them and say in clear and precise Spanish "I'm English, not stupid" before turning on my heel once again.

People do it to me all the time. My Spanish is imperfect, very imperfect, but I'm reasonably clued up about what's going on around me. Senility has not yet set in and I'm begining to get angry enough, or maybe fluent enough, to occasionally turn on the people who think that their lack of knowledge about something combined with their fluency in Spanish makes them right and me wrong.