Neither one nor the other

I went to the UK, well England, a few weeks ago. I like England well enough but I don't visit that often. I probably go a little more often than once a year but I usually only stay three or four days. My visit in February was my first since May of last year. Both of my last two visits have been prompted by my mum being less well than usual.

It's funny going back. I'm English, I'll always be English and my English is still pretty good - a bit old fashioned maybe but good. My language skills and my cultural knowledge make me feel comfortable in England. I usually know how things are organised, how to behave but if things have changed, or start to go a bit awry, I can ask, I can talk to people, find out what's going. Nonetheless I had, at one point, to hold out a handful of coins and ask the person on the other side of the counter to take the appropriate money. I am, of course, aware that simply using physical money makes me a bit odd but, in the heat of the moment, I couldn't decide which coin was which. There were lots of other tiny incidents to highlight that things are not as they were when I left and sometimes, despite being on home turf, I was slightly uncomfortable in some situations.

I lived in Cambridgeshire for about twenty years and I left a bit short of twenty years ago. For several of those years I worked for a charity. At one point I recruited my dad to help out with something, I don't remember exactly what, but it involved him phoning lots of people we worked with. He found that at least half of the people presumed he was me. On the phone it could only be accent. My dad died in 2000 but long before that he was in hospital in Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. I drove up from Cambridgeshire to see him. At one point the nursing staff needed to do something ghastly related to bodily fluids so they pulled a curtain around his bed and chased me away. I sat on the edge of the bed of the bloke next to my dad in the ward. We chatted a bit. "Where are you from?," he asked.  "From here," I replied. "No," he said, "not now, where are you from, where are your roots?" "I was born in this very hospital," I said. "Well you don't sound like you were," he concluded. I realised I was stateless. In Cambridgeshire I was broad Yorkshire. In Huddersfield I was from somewhere South. 

Something similar happens when I go to England. I'm definitely not from here but I'm a bit out of place there. 

I was amazed and unready to eat at British meal times. I mean everyone knows that Spaniards eat later but do Britons really eat so early? I saw people ordering lunch before noon. My sister tells me that she thinks that British people are tending to book an evening meal in a restaurant earlier than they used to. Her feeling was that, until recently a 7.30pm booking would be pretty normal but that now the same booking is a tad on the late side. I wouldn't expect most Spanish restaurants to be open before 8.30pm! I found it very odd even considering eating at 12 noon or 5pm. 

I went shopping in a supermarket and I couldn't find anything - the ordering of goods seemed to follow no obvious logic but I remember having the same difficulty when I moved from the UK to Spain. Oh, and then I was completely flummoxed by the "scan and pay" or "scan and go" options at the self service checkouts. A very pleasant woman helped me, in a slightly condescending way, with the multiple operations required to pay for a single lemon!

On the bus, even though there is a maximum fare of £2 people were still asking for their stop by name. When you get on a Spanish bus you just want tickets. The fare is the same for two stops or twelve. Mind you the community spirit on the British buses was great. All that clearing the way so someone in a wheelchair can get on or everyone thanking the driver as they get off is something I've never seen on Spanish buses

You can be more specific if you want to get a beer in Spain but really all you have to do is ask for a beer. There are sometimes supplementary questions from the servers in more upmarket bars but that's something fancy and new. In the UK it's always been, a pint of Ghost Ship (or Landlord or IPA and so on) please. Essential to specify both product and quantity (and nowadays to have a sizeable credit limit on your card) .

Strange as well that the cars and buses go on the other side of the road. I whirled around in the style of one of those robot vacuum cleaners when I had to cross the road as I was quite unsure where the traffic would be. In a taxi I had a momentary panic attack when the driver was obviously going to go the "wrong way" round a roundabout.

In the Dhaba I was pleased to be able to lean on my sister and brother in law to understand the menu.

Here though, obviously enough, to Spaniards I'm as English as five o' clock tea, pea soupers and fish'n'chips. Lots of people in shops, restaurants and bars will, annoyingly, speak to me in English despite my best efforts and I'm sure if they had a any spare socks they would offer me them to wear with my sandals.

Maintaining stereotypes

Everyone knows that Germans don't have a sense of humour. Everyone knows that people from the United States are fat, that Jamaicans have dreads and smoke ganja all the time or that we English are very formal and reserved. And everyone knows that those generalisations are all totally untrue. Jada Pinkett Smith is American, Usain Bolt is Jamaican and all those people vomiting on the payments in Magaluf are British. Bear that idea in mind as you read.

Here are some things that Spaniards do or don't do. The converse is that somebody else typically does do, or doesn't do, these things.

1. Spanish men don't wear shorts once summer is over and until the summer weather comes back. A warm day in February doesn't count.
2. Spaniards don't put butter on the bread - not on sandwiches and not on the plate to go with the bread roll at table. It is true that, in some parts of Spain, Spaniards put butter on toast, with jam.
3. Spaniards do not drink warm drinks - tea, coffee type drinks - with food except with toast or the pastries at breakfast.
4. Spaniards don't put milk in tea. This means getting a standard type British tea is a bit of a struggle - té clásico con una pizca de leche fría.
5. Spaniards do not put pepper on the table to go with the salt, oil and vinegar.
6. Spaniards do say hello as they enter a bar, a bank, a post office or the like. They greet everyone.
7. Spaniards say goodbye as they leave a bar etc.
8. Spaniards tend to speak quite loudly!
9. Spaniards won't have a hissy fit if a stranger comments favourably on a baby, musses up the hair of a four year old or speaks to their child.
10. Spaniards never sing along with their National Anthem. That's a bit of a trick really because the current Spanish National Anthem doesn't have any words. I can't remember what it is but there is some accepted version of tum tey tum, or hmm hmm hmm if a football crowd feels it needs to make a statement.
11. Spaniards never eat paella in the evening; it's just for lunch.
12. Spaniards do not put carpets in bathrooms and they think it's a disgustingly unhygienic thing to do so.
13. Spaniards hardly ever drink anything alcoholic, until late at night, without eating a little of something alongside - nuts, crisps, olives etc.
14. Spanish washbasins, baths and sinks hardly ever have two taps.
15. Spanish queues don't usually involve a line of people. A person joining the virtual queue has to ask who is the last person there so they can take their turn accordingly.
16. Spaniards take a start time as a rough indication of when to be at an appointed place. Punctuality has improved incredibly in the last few years but if the theatre performance is billed to start at 8pm then 8.15/8.20pm would be good going.
17. Spaniards eat to quite a fixed timetable. 2pm to 3.30pm to start the main meal of the day and around 9pm to 10pm for the much less important evening meal.
18. Spaniards would not consider going to a (normal) restaurant before 9pm in the evening. 
19. Spaniards do not care for spicy food.
20. Spaniards do not consider tipping to be any sort of duty. The idea of a fixed percentage is very foreign to them. Spaniards do not tip when service is bad.
21. Spaniards don't wait to be noticed by bar staff at the bar. They make their presence known.
22. Spaniards, in this part of the world at least, do not heat their homes, offices or workplaces adequately. This is becoming less true.
23. Spaniards let their children stay up very late and Spanish parents and carers include their children in lots of late night activities.
24. Spaniards don't eat in the street - that is they don't eat a sandwich or other snack type food as they walk.
25. Spaniards don't (generally) binge drink.
26. Spaniards have power points in bathrooms.
27. Spaniards talk to their families, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents etc. very, very regularly.
28. Spaniards do not drink tepid beer or soft drinks.
29. Spaniards don't, readily, invite people into their homes.
30. Spaniards, when driving, do not, in my experience, acknowledge friendly gestures from other motorists. Let someone into a lane of near stationary traffic and there will be no upraised palm to say "thank you".
31. Spaniards, most Spaniards, don't particularly like flamenco

There are tens more but that will do for now

5,844 days

Sixteen years ago today, on 7 October 2004, I parked up in Santa Pola having travelled the 1,349 miles from Huntingdon behind the wheel of a 1977 MGB GT. My travelling companion was a black and white cat called Mary. Our destination was the flat where Maggie had been living for over a month whilst she worked as a teacher in nearby Elche. The journey took two days and cost 200€ in fuel, 120€ in tolls, 55€ for accommodation and just 25€ in food.

Now, if anyone had asked, I'd have sworn that on the first full day in Spain I went and signed on the equivalent of the Council Tax Register, the padrón. In fact my diary tells me otherwise. The only interesting thing I did that first day was to go, with Maggie, to a Spanish class that she'd booked us in to. It seems I didn't get around to signing on the padrón till the week after. Even then it wasn't my first bit of officialdom - apparently I'd managed to get a social security number a few hours before. Strange how memories become distorted with time.

Having done a couple of courses of Spanish classes in the UK I spoke some Spanish when I got to Spain. My memory is that we struggled with the language but that, overall, we used to manage OK. Again my diary suggests that I may be misremembering. I obviously felt strongly enough about it at the time to record that I had problems buying dusters and kidney beans one day! I didn't know the Spanish for either and, though I found the dusters easily enough, there were two jars of potential candidates as kidney beans. My solution, at the time, was to go to the international section in the supermarket (we were in Santa Pola after all) where I went through the ingredients on the side of a can of chilli con carne to find the Spanish words I needed. I suspect that the entry is a sign of frustration at feeling lost and adrift with the language. It's a frustration I still often feel.

As well as misremembering there are other early entries in the diary that show just how wrong some first impressions were. We went to Villena that first weekend. In my diary I mention that the town seems nice enough but that it has no "old part". If you've ever been to Villena you'll know just how wrong that is. It also shows too just how lost we were. Nowadays, when we go to a new town we always head for the bit where the town hall and parish church are because that's where the heart of the town will be. Seemingly we didn't know to do that in Villena all those years ago.

The house hunting began nearly straight away. If we could we went out looking at places together. There were a lot of cowboy house sellers at the time and we saw all sorts of junk. We soon became very aware of some of the very dodgy sales techniques of the numerous get rich quick merchants in a market where house prices were rising week by week. On lots of occasions people were simply wasting our time so it became routine for me to talk to agents and sellers and have a look at the places alone so that I could filter out the no hopers. Later Maggie and I would go back to anything that I'd added to the "reasonable" pile. 

Eventually I went to an Estate Agent in Monóvar who showed me, amongst others, the house in Culebrón where we now live. I saw other houses, with a different agent, in the same area, around Pinoso, on the same day. I didn't care for the Culebrón house much and I discounted it but, the next day, on the Saturday, I'd arranged for some second viewings so that Maggie could see my selection. As we passed, what is now, our track I made the short detour to show the house to Maggie. It just happened that the owner had been so appalled by the state of the garden, when he'd shown me around, that he'd come back to do a bit of tidying up. By sheer fluke he was in the garden when we showed up and so he was available to show us around. I still didn't like the house much though the driveway was nice. Maggie hated the other houses I'd lined up but she reckoned the Culebrón house had potential. The truth is that our house hunting was not going well, we didn't have enough money and we seemed to be running out of options. With the help of the estate agent we got a builder to have a look. On a miserable November evening in the light of very low wattage bulbs Maggie invented a plan for the design of our house on the spur of the moment. It was drawn freehand in an old school notebook. A few days later we got the builder's quote back and on the 19th November we made an offer on the house which the owners rejected. We ended up paying the full asking price.

Back in the diary my summing up at the end of the year contained the following - "... and now living in Spain with absolutely no income, no job prospects to talk of and living off Maggie. I've just agreed to spend all the money I have in the world on a damp, shed like house in the middle of bugger all where. I am quite unable to speak the language". 

We didn't complete the purchase till after the Christmas holidays and we didn't move in till April of 2005. I have a photo of Maggie, the photo at the top of this post, unlocking the gate as we took possession and, every time I see that snap, I remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach that we had just made the most terrible mistake.

The oddest thing though is that, the other day, I was driving somewhere close by - it could have been the Yecla road or the one down to La Romaneta - and I found myself grinning all over my face for no apparent reason. I was thinking how stunning the countryside looked and congratulating myself on having made the right decision when we upped sticks and moved here.

Oh, and in't seat o'nowt, as we say where I was born or aprovechando que el Pisuerga pasa por Valladolid as we say in the place where I live, there's another entry in my diary about the first weekend after getting here in 2004 which notes that our first meal out was at a local Chinese restaurant and cost a massive 4.96€.

Apocritacide

There are a lot of flies in Culebrón. There are also plenty of wasps. The most common type in Culebrón don't seem to be quite like the one that stung me in Elland when I was at Junior School. I inadvertently squashed the poor beast as I rested my chin on a low wall to marvel at a Mercedes 220 SE "Fintail" passing by. Mr Kemp, the Headteacher, used an onion from the Harvest Festival display to lesson the considerable pain. I've been stung a couple of times here but, to be honest, I've hardly noticed. Obviously British wasps are tougher. National pride and all that.

Anyway, as I said there are lots of wasps. One of the common questions on Facebook, amongst the Britons living here, is how to deal with the hordes of them swooping and hovering over swimming pools. Being poor and poolless our wasps have to make do with drinking from the water bowls that we leave for the cats. Recently the wasps have also been feasting on something growing on the leaves of the fig tree. Wasps are not my favourite beasts but they have as much right to the planet as I have so, generally, I try to leave them be. Not always though.

They sometimes start to build very small nests, usually underneath the roof overhangs though not always. The one in the post box was a bit of a shock! The nests we've had have been very small, two or three centimetres in any direction, and usually with an obvious population of only three, four or five wasps. Sharing living space with wasp nests is just a step too far. Fly spray has proved to be drastically lethal to the wasps on the nests. One quick burst and the whole population drops dead to the ground. 

I've slaughtered one such population just minutes ago. I'm sure I will be judged.

Beginners guide to table manners

Very occasionally I write a piece for the blog which forms a part of the Country Fincas website. Country Fincas is the estate agent that Maggie works for in Pinoso.

Having written it specifically for them I thought why not use it myself? So here it is.

The English are ironic. The French don't like to wash. Germans are humourless and efficient. Well so they say. But the chances are that it's not actually true. There are some generalisations of course that are generally true. For instance punctuality is important, culturally important, in some countries and completely irrelevant in others. Punctuality doesn't really matter much if someone lives in a place without timepieces or where there are no trains to catch. My guess is that a Nigerian farmer in the middle of the countryside doesn't really care what time they start work so long as the work gets done.

Anyway, Spain is very similar, in most ways, to the rest of Europe. There is law and order, traffic is organised, water comes from taps, children go to school, supermarkets have lots and lots of food, cows are not sacred, head covering is optional, men can cut their hair as they wish, people only use chopsticks to eat under certain circumstances. In nearly all of the big things Spain is very much like the UK. There are hundreds or thousands of detail differences though and some don't seem so small when you are faced with what seems to be interminable bureaucracy or animal cruelty to give a couple of examples.

We've lived here for a while now and lots of those detail differences now seem so normal to us that we don't really notice them. When friends come to see us from the UK though it's different. They do notice. So here is my guide to eating and drinking. I'm sure that I will miss things out or overgeneralise but it's a good starting point for the tyro.

In a bar or café the server will come to you. It can be a little difficult deciding sometimes whether a place is a restaurant or whether it's a place where you can get a drinks and a snack. Table cloths usually indicate that you are expected to eat. Obviously you can choose to sit at the bar but you do not, usually, need to approach the bar to get served. Sit at your table, either inside or outside (on the terraza), and someone will come to you. If the terraza is deserted or if the bar staff do not have a clear view of the terrace it can be quicker to go to the bar, ask for your drinks, or whatever, and then sit down and wait for them to be brought. You do not need to pay until you are about to go though, if you are only going to make one order, it can be quicker to pay when the things are brought to you. If you pay the bar staff will presume that you do not need more service. In some seaside places or when a bar is crowded because of an event you may be asked to pay at once to avoid people slipping away without paying or to make life easier for the servers.

At events, music festivals, town fiestas etc. where there is a bar a bit like the beer tent at some British event, you may have to queue to get tickets which you then exchange at the bar to get the food or drink. The idea is to avoid the temporary bar staff stealing money by centralising the money taking.

Food is usually served from around 2pm through till 3.30pm for lunch and dinner from around 9pm till maybe 11pm. In tourist areas or where there are a lot of non Spaniards opening times are often earlier. Cold snacks, the famous tapas, are available at any time but anything that requires cooking may only be available when the kitchen is staffed for lunch or dinner. In the big cities food is available around the clock in many establishments. In lots of places there will be a display counter on the bar where you can browse some of the tapas on offer and order by pointing. Spaniards often order a lot of tapas to share rather than ordering a more formal meal.

Whether there will be a list of the things available or not is a bit hit and miss. Again lists and menus are more likely where there are more non Spanish customers. It's very usual for the server to list the things available and, when you ask for the bill, to simply tell you how much you owe without anything being written down.

The main meal of the day for many Spaniards is lunch rather than dinner. One way to eat cheaply and well is to have the menú diario or menú del día - the set meal - where you will usually be offered a range of first courses, second courses and desserts with a drink and bread. We Brits tend to think of the first course as being a starter but that's not usually the case and the first course is often as substantial as the second. The word menú suggests a set meal, the Spanish word for what we think of as a menu is actually carta. If you don't want to take one of the fixed options you can usually choose from the carta. The set meals are usually much, much cheaper. If you are wandering from restaurant to restaurant checking the set meal prices look to see whether the price includes bread (pan), bebida (drink), postre (pudding) and coffee (café). One of the little tricks in tourist areas is to miss those items off the list so that one 10€ menú includes everything whilst the 9€ menú next door charges extra for one or more of the items. It is very common for the menú to list postre o café, pudding or coffee so, if you have both, expect to pay a tad more.

Another little trick for tourists is that you see a blackboard outside a restaurant offering the set meal. Once you sit down you are given the carta and in it there is no mention of the fixed meal. Confused by the situation you then order from the carta and end up paying more than you intended. If there is a board offering a set meal then there is a set meal. Ask for it and you will get it.

Some places do a fixed evening meal too but it is much rarer than the daytime equivalent. Normally you will choose from the carta in the evening. One of those little differences is that if you choose something from the entrantes, starters, the serving staff will presume that it is to share with your fellow diners so the starters will be put in the middle of the table for everyone to have a go at.

I could go on but that's probably enough to digest for now.

Hands against the wall and drop your trousers

In the 70s, when much of South and Central America were in political turmoil, I read an impressive book about the violation of human rights there. The book was full of torture stories. I was most impressed by the way that ordinary people didn't buckle under but I also pondered where the torturers came from. One Sunday you have a nice civilised country but by Monday morning there are people connecting electric wires to mens' testicles and stubbing out their fag ends on the soles of peoples' feet. What's the selection process, what skills and qualities are on the job description?

At the time when the IRA and UFF and everyone else in Northern Ireland was going at it I heard some bloke, who'd served in the British Army, describing a common technique for obtaining information from prisoners. They put a plastic bucket over their victim's head and then beat the bucket with a mop handle. It made me realise just how easy torture can be and I still, sometimes, think of that as I shop amongst the Addis stuff in the supermarket.

About a month ago a judge, talking in some conference here in Spain, said that he thought ETA (The Basque terrorist organisation) members had been routinely tortured by Spanish Security Forces. Now I have no idea whether he's right but in all probability he is. If I were a Guardia Civil member, who had just seen some mates blown to pieces by a bomb,  I might well become a little over zealous too. The Association of the Victims of Terrorism thought the judge should be sacked. They thought that it was outrageous that he should suggest that the Security Forces were other than on the side of the angels.

A couple of days ago a branch of Local Government in Madrid decided to ban a flag from a big football match final due to take part in the capital on Sunday. The flag is a version of the official Catalan flag with some adaptations. It has a nationlist significance and is a symbol often used by people who want an independent Catlonia. I was apalled, incensed and troubled by the decision in equal measure. The idea of trying to stop an opinion being expressed, in a democracy, by waving a flag seems akin to totalitarianism to me. I know that some Spaniards were of the same opinion but I got the feeling that for many Spaniards the equation was flag waving equals Catalan Separatists, Catalan Separatists bad, Stop them. Four legs good, two legs bad!

During the last twelve months a law has been enacted in Spain that fines or imprisons people for doing things that the Government thinks endangers citizens. It's not as though Spain is short of laws to deal with wrongdoers. You can get into trouble if you go burning and looting. Attacking people is also considered to be a bit beyond the pale. In fact if you can think of some bad thing I 'm pretty sure there is a Spanish law against doing it. There wasn't, though, a law to stop people posting videos to YouTube of police officers beating people with sticks for no obvious reason. The fines for scaling the fence at a nuclear power plant and hanging up a banner were related to trespass and damage to property. Organising a demonstration without a licence wasn't that big a deal either in the punishment afterwards sense. But the new law toughened that up. I forget, and I can't be bothered to look because it makes me seethe, but that banner might now cost 300,000 or 600,000€. Suck on that you Greenpeace types! The result? Someone was arrested in a town close to us when they posted a picture on Facebook of a police car parked in a disabled parking slot. It was considered a slur on the local police. Now I may just have an alternative view about that incident but it's perhaps better that I don't write it down or they may be knocking on my door.

So, suggesting that police officers may have been involved in torture or lazy parking, waving a flag or taking a video could, under certain circumstances, lead to people being sacked, fined or jailed. These things don't go unchallenged of course, the courts overturned the flag waving ban yesterday, but the concensus view  makes me wonder if Spaniards have quite got the hang of this democracy thing.

What seems blatantly obvious to me, that having a different opinion should not, generally, lead to legal action seems to slip by a lot of Spaniards. The judge's opinion that torture happened is confused with siding with the evil that was or is ETA. Supporting the right of anyone to wave a Nationalist flag is confused with supporting that Nationalism and exposing police officers for abusing their role is only a step away from robbing a bank.

Maybe it's just a case of old habits dying hard.

What that Franklin chappie said

I don't really mind taxes. That doesn't mean that I like handing over my hard earned but I approve of the idea. I'm much keener on the model where we pay the taxes and, with them, our governments attempt to provide healthcare, education, infraestructure and all the rest than I am on the model where everyone looks out for themselves and to hell with the rest.

Anyway. For the past six years or so I've been getting a pension from a final salary pension scheme that I paid into for most of my UK working life. Because that money comes from a quasi government source the agreement between Spain and the UK was that it was exempt of Spanish taxes but taxed, at source, in the UK. Normally Spanish residents have to pay tax on their worldwide income here. In reality my pension is so small that it has never exceeded the personal UK allowance so, although Customs and Revenue send me coding notices and I get P60s and what not, I don't actually pay any tax on it. I also have a pension top up from some secondary UK scheme that I paid in to. That produces about £360 a year. That money is declared and taxed in Spain.

This being taxed in the UK had an advantage. It gave me two lots of personal allowances - one for the UK and one in Spain. Of course the tax people realised this and for the 2015 tax year - the tax year in Spain is a normal calendar year - they closed this "loophole". We are now sorting out the 2015 tax bills. The amount of my UK pension now has to be added to my Spanish earnings. The principal of no double taxation is maintained because any tax paid in the UK would be deducted from my Spanish tax bill.

I had a slightly complicated tax year in 2015 because I was technically self employed for a while. I'm having to use an accountant to sort it out rather than just accepting or amending the online draft tax declaration that the Spanish revenue people sent me back in April.

The accountant I use sent me a WhatsApp the other day to say it looked like I owed a bit less than 400€. This is not good but it's not heartbreaking either. It did make me wonder about the people who have decent pensions from the UK though: the ex police, ex military, time served civil servants etc. I've just had a quick look and it seems that the UK personal allowance is around £11,000 so if that suddenly becomes taxable at a mixture of the starting Spanish rate of 19% plus the portion that goes into a higher bracket charged at 24% (and my arithmetic is correct) then they are going to be facing an extra tax bill of just short of 3,000€.

I suspect that could be a bit of a hammer blow for lots of the pensioners here.