Life in Culebrón

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 ...

Coming home from Torrevieja on Saturday night the fuel warning light came on on the car. Seventy kilometres of fuel left. Fair enough, we were near the coast, which is pretty built up, and we were on a motorway where there were service stations before our turn off. Even though the sign on the road said the services were open from 0 hrs. to 24 hrs it was obvious, as we pulled onto the forecourt, that the garage was closed. The pump had a bank card payment facility but it wasn't working. Error message - software failure. Whilst I dithered about what to do next a man, who had been shouting into his mobile phone in a rather disconcerting way, came over and asked if he could use my phone. His accent was a bit working bloke and it took us a while to tune in to his accent and forthright style. Basically, his car was old and it had lost all its lights. He was unable to continue his journey back to Albacete, about 170kms away, with his wife and kids on board. He'd been trying to...

When I lived in the UK I had a lot of credit cards. I made a hobby of moving non existent money between one account and another to try to keep the interest payments down. When I left the UK I cancelled the majority of my plastic but I hung on to a couple for one reason or another. Nowadays I hardly ever use my British plastic but, every time the banks try to take them away, I obstinately hang on to them "just in case". Every now and again one of the British card issuers sells or buys my account and changes something or other. Barclaycard recently did just that when they terminated an agreement with AMEX. As an incentive to use the new card they offered me a bracelet so that I could make small, contactless payments by simply waving my forearm at the credit card machine. Something to speed up buying the morning latte. Why not I thought? Well, because I live in Spain! I suspect I will never use it. I was a Barclaycard customer in Spain too. Barclaycard sold their opera...