They say that moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do. To be honest I don't think it compares to, for instance, living in Aleppo in 2015/16 but I appreciate the general idea. So moving countries must be extra hard. You still have to deal with estate agents and solicitors and utility suppliers but, on top, you have to learn a whole new bunch of procedures. As a new migrant everything comes in one big, strange, deluge and it needs doing now. Whether that's getting your identity documents, buying and taxing the car or working out which of those cleaning products in the supermarket is bleach it has to be sorted out straight away.
It's ages since we had to cope with the hundreds of things to be done on first moving here. The pain of it all is long forgotten. I might still have to renew our PO box or get the car checked for road worthiness every now and then but it's nearly fifteen years now since we were juggling piles of paperwork every day. In fact, to be honest, I've been feeling a little smug about it all recently. Brexit is reminding lots of the British migrants here that the sort of half British half Spanish thing might fall apart on them. You can argue all you like about the finer points of whether your British driving licence is still good but, if Britain crashes out of the EU, the jig is up unless you have that Spanish licence you should have applied for long ago. International Driving Permit time it is. So there has been a bit of a scramble amongst the Britons living in Spain to get their paperwork sorted. I think our paperwork is pretty much in order as it stands, hence the smugness. Mind you hubris and all that; pride before the fall. We shall see.
I've been repaying a favour to a non Spanish speaking pal who helped me out last year. He needed to sort a few bits of paperwork. There have been little hiccoughs along the way, forms left at home, the wrong certificate here and the wrong fee there but, basically, we've managed to sort everything out without any huge trauma.
What's struck me as we've been dealing with things is how patient the staff in the various government offices have been. We were standing in a queue, the man in front was Lithuanian and his partner was from Dominica. They were having language difficulties. The policeman dealing with them repeated his information, drew diagrams, sorted their documents into piles, wrote out internet addresses. The policeman must spend his days dealing with annoyingly confused people yet he didn't snort or tut or send them away. It would be human nature to get cross, to get fed up of it all but he didn't. It was the same with us. For the problems we had the officials dealing with us smoothed our path to get back in the queue when it would have been much easier, for them, to send us away. It mustn't always be like that because someone who helps people with official paperwork all the time warned me about someone working in Elda Police Station. The truth is though that I've never been treated as off offhandedly as I was in Elland, Halifax, Peterborough, Bradford or Manchester when dealing with Job centres and Social Security offices. True the difference is 30 or 40 years so I'm sure that if I were claiming Universal Credit in the UK nowadays I wouldn't still find the chairs bolted to the floor or dismissive staff.
