Life in Culebrón

There are lots of English language Facebook pages dedicated to living in Spain and aimed at Britons. There are Citizens Advice pages, Civil Guard authored pages, one from the British Consulate and subject specific pages like After Brexit and more. They are all alive with Brexit problems. Twitter is also aglow with similar stuff. Originally it was pros and cons but now it's practicalities. Apparently, since January 1st, British people who live in Spain, but are in the UK, have been bumping into problems getting home. Some of it seems to be the teething problems of new requirements at the border - the officials don't recognise the documentation and stuff written in Spanish makes no sense to them - but it has left people stranded. One of the things that sometimes makes me snigger and sometimes exasperates me is the lack of understanding and failure to grasp the basics of the paperwork that most of us have here in Spain. I can't guarantee the accuracy of the rest of this post b...

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 ...

In Spain you have to carry ID at all times. For Spanish nationals they have an identity card, the DNI and for foreigners there is a TIE, the Foreigner's Identity Card. EU citizens, within an EU country like Spain, are neither Nationals nor foreigners. This means that EU citizens have to carry the form of ID in use in their country. Now we Brits are a little odd in that we don't have an ID card so Brits are supposed to carry their passport with them at all times in case the "Competent Authority" needs to see it. As well as the need to carry identification EU citizens, living in Spain, have to register. When the scheme was first introduced the registration certificate was a bit of green A4 paper but later it became smaller and more card like, something like the old UK paper driving licence. A couple of weeks ago the UK left the European Union. Consequently the registration document became a bit of an anachronism for UK citizens. Nonetheless with the transitio...

There seems to be a bit of a conspiracy to keep me on my toes as I reach the end of my working life. Most of it is positive enough. Pension paper mostly. Having found forgotten private pensions I've had to make phone call after phone call and fill in myriad forms. Because I live here and not where the pensions are I've had to talk with the tax people in the UK and fill in more forms to get myself exempted from UK tax. That Spanish tax process, for the calendar year 2018, starts in a few days time and has to be done before the end of June. I hope that having got the UK exemption means it will be easier, if more expensive, to sort out. Then there's the state pension. I did a blog about that . I hoped, I was told, it would be paid through the Spanish Social Security people in Euros but, disappointingly, it now looks as though it's going to be paid in the UK in Pounds. And what about Brexit. Now, to be honest what happens in the UK isn't very important to me. I ce...

Many years ago - strange how all my stories start like that - I was at a Conservative Club fundraiser in North Yorkshire. I have no defence, I was just there - no kidnapping, no drugs, nothing. I spent a long few minutes talking to a relatively powerful politician of the time, Baron Brittan of Spennithorne or Leon Brittan as he was called then. I was talking to him about voting and how it was a flawed tool. I argued that voting gives you one chance, every few years, to choose between a couple of, or if you're lucky a few, electable groupings with which you share some opinions. He argued that choosing a band and sticking by them was the mark of a strong democracy. We didn't come to an agreement but he did buy me a drink. It's the only tool that democracy gives us though, not the drink, the vote. The only other thing that might work is getting out in the street with a banner or a Molotov cocktail depending on your preference. I got a vote in the referendum about the UK ...

You may have noticed, I hope you've noticed, that I haven't posted for a while. That's because we haven't been in or around Culebrón for a long couple of weeks. Indeed we went for a remarkably enjoyable cruise around the Baltic from Southampton. The boat spent a lot of the time at sea and so, for days and days, we were without affordable Internet access unless you consider £80 for a couple of weeks WiFi to be reasonable. Once back in Spain it's taken us a while to get back onto an even keel. (Sorry). The majority of the passengers on a Fred Olsen Cruise Ship do not have jobs. They have sizeable pensions instead. So, the very Anglo, second question of, "And what do you do?" isn't much use to pigeonhole individuals in an Orwellian, doctor good, shelf stacker bad, sort of way. It was substituted instead by the "Where are you from?" question. I suppose Huddersfield scores fewer points than Berkshire but I don't think it's as reliabl...

I got up early this morning to check the result and, rather as I'd feared, the UK had voted to leave the Union. I wasn't in the least surprised but I was shocked. To me, on a day to day basis, at the moment it means very little. My only real concern is about the exchange rate. I get a pension paid in sterling. As the pound loses ground against the euro I get fewer euros to spend for the same number of pounds. Of course, when the two years and three months are up, then I suppose I'll have to relearn Fahrenheit and furlongs but at least I will be able to recover my blue passport, rest assured that a cucumber is a vegetable and eat curved bananas till the cows come home. The concerns of  expats of my age are mainly around health care and pensions. Reciprocal arrangements within the EU mean that pensioners get free medical care in Spain and there is no problem with the UK state pension being paid here with all its rights intact. In all likelihood something reasonable...

Our voting papers arrived on Friday. That's a good start. Huntingdonshire District Council blithely denied me the right to vote in the last General Election when they failed to get the voting papers to me. "We send out a lot of overseas voting papers, some are forced to get lost", was their pathetic excuse. Anyway I put the cross in the box, Maggie did likewise and the forms went in the post today. Just an interesting thing about posting the ballot papers. You can see, if you look at the photo, that the envelope reads No Stamp Required yet, in the "Quick Guide to Postal Voting", which came with the ballot paper, it says, "Seal and post envelope B. If it's posted in the UK, this will be free." When I got to the Post Office I asked for stamps for the envelopes and the woman in the Post Office told me there was no need. I insisted and explained that the instructions were quite clear. I presume that she has said the same thing to lots of other Br...