Life in Culebrón

I've complained before about our occasional tussles with "authority" here in Spain and how it's quite tricky to complain or fight back. It's not just the language. Some of the processes can be a bit Kafka, a bit Catch 22. You may remember that the tax people questioned my 2014 tax returns. It cost me 118€ to defend myself, not a lot but 118€ that I could have invested much more wisely in, for instance,  throwing the money in the dust and trampling on it. Their final response after a couple of months was "we will take no further action". They didn't say "whoops" or "sorry" or "here are your expenses" and I rather suspect that we will go through the same rigmarole for my 2015 returns in a few months. We also had some trouble with the Land Registry, the Catastro. The Land Registry sets the rateable value of houses and this figure is used by the Local Town Hall as a way of fixing the local taxes which, in the end, pay ...

I picked up four pieces of post from our PO box in the Post Office today. This is quite unusual. Often there is nothing. Two of the envelopes were from departments of the Spanish Government. One was my European Health Card from the Social Security people. I applied for this, online, last week. I did it as I brushed my teeth getting ready for bed. It took moments, it was easy. The card's only valid for six months but, next time, as a pensioner, it'll be for longer. No problem anyway. I brush my teeth every night. The other was from the Catastro, the Land Registry. It was an answer to my appeal of February 2017 when they said we owned half of next door and charged us much more IBI, the local housing tax, than we should have paid. A lightning 25 months to respond then. In that time I've sent several emails, been to their Alicante office (where I metaphorically banged on the table) and reported them to the Ombudsman. That's probably why they answered so quickly. Inste...

The Catastro, the Spanish version of the Land Registry, told me that article 18 of the Legislative Royal Decree of the 5th March 2004 (1/2004) says that any dispute must be attended within six months of receipt. I remember those things from when I used to work. We will acknowledge receipt of your communication within 24 hours and respond within 72 hours. Except that, this time, it was six months. I have a bit of a conversation cum reading sheet about drinks that I use with my English learners. The drinks sheet starts with tea. It says Britain is a tea drinking nation. It has variations on "A pint of sheepshagger, please" and it mentions how overpriced coffee has Italian, rather than Spanish or French, names. But it starts with the phrase Britain is a tea drinking nation. Now I have a critic. Every now and then a Spanish bloke, living in the UK, feels incensed enough, on reading my blogs, to put fingers to keyboard and play merry hell. He tells me off for lots of things ...

My Spanish is odd. I know a fair bit. I can talk alright but sometimes I can't. Sometimes I can get really flustered and cock it up completely. Sometimes I can laugh at my mistakes and plough on or I can get angry and sulky. Language, or problems with language are still, by far, the biggest stumbling block to my day to day dealings with Spain. In the last post I mentioned that the Consumer Office had suggested the only way to sort out our overpaid local taxes was to go to the nearest office of the Land Registry, the Catastro, 60 kilometres away in Alicante city. Nowadays, with most government offices, you need to arrange a prior appointment. That doesn't mean you don't have to queue but it does mean you'll get served. There are lots of systems for making an appointment online and even the most basic website usually offers some sort of email possibility. Not the Catastro though. You can get access to plenty of information online but sorting an appointment has to be d...

The Post Office sends me a text message when there is something that needs signing for waiting in our post box. This is often good. If we have an order on the way from Amazon or Decathlon it means it's parcel opening time. But it can be bad too. It's the way that the local police make sure that you have the notification of the parking fine and it's the way the tax office tells you that you've been fiddling your tax and you're in trouble. The one today was a Model 990 form from the Catastro, the Land Registry. My reading of Spanish isn't too bad. For instance I just knocked off a novel by Carmen Martín Gaite of about 260 pages in under a week with the usual few pages a day workday reading. But official Spanish is something else. The tax man and the local government woman don't see why they should use a common word when there is a long and unknown one available in the thicker versions of the dictionary. I got the gist though. The Registry said that our...