Pinoso Water and Rubbish charges

I was chatting to my neighbours the other day. We were talking about the plans for the solar farm which will run along the Southern side of the CV83 (that's on the right as you drive from Pinoso to Monóvar). In the way that these things do the conversation drifted and we ended up talking about our water bills. My Spanish neighbours, whose main home is in Petrer, were blissfully unaware of the system for billing in Pinoso and they didn't know about this years price increases either. I reckoned that if they didn't know then neither would other people. An easy blog beckoned.

I posted this same information in an entry on the Pinoso Community Facebook page back in September 2023. If you read that post you can save yourself effort and stop now.

Here in Culebrón, and I presume throughout Pinoso, households are charged for drinking water on metered use. The bills are raised by Pinoso Town Hall, because they maintain the water system, but the money is collected by an organisation called SUMA. The bills for the third and fourth quarters of the water year are sent out in April and the bills for the first and second quarters of the water year in September. The bill for the drainage charges are also sent in April.

For quite a few years, in the recent past, Pinoso was a very wealthy town because the Town Hall charged an extraction fee on the marble dug out of the Monte Coto quarry. The quarry is inside the Pinoso municipal boundary but it overlooks the nearby village of Algueña. According to Levantina Stone (The biggest producer in the quarry) it's the largest marble quarry in the world. I seem to remember that, at the height of production, the quarry was adding 9 million euros to the town coffers though I know that the Town Hall usually quotes the maximum income as 6 million. Either way for a town with a population just over 8,000 people the income was quite a bonus. It kept local taxes and fees low and provided funds for all sorts of projects. As the building bubble collapsed so did the income from the quarry. The pandemic didn't help business much either. Nonetheless the income from the quarry seems to have levelled off at about two million euros per year. In the meanwhile Pinoso has noticeably cut back on lots of things to save money and increased charges in a number of ways to boost income. At a town meeting we were told that Pinoso's current annual budget is around 10 million, which, they said, is pretty average for a town of the size of Pinoso, but, unlike most towns Pinoso still has this extra, bonus, income stream. I noticed that the actual income for 2023 was nearly twelve and a half million and the expenditure eleven and a half million.

The Town Hall argues that the couple of millions of marble money has largely been propping up the price of drinking water and the collection and processing of waste. There are a whole bunch of factors at work adding complications (and cost) to these two basic services: changes in legislation about waste management, the way that some people misuse the general (green) rubbish bins, the reluctance of people to use the recycling bins, the amount of water available because of climatic conditions, the amount of water allotted to Pinoso, the huge increase in the price of electricity (for pumping water), the age of the water distribution system etc. Between them the two services are costing about a million over the amount of money that the Town Hall collects from local charges. The Town Hall's argument is that if people paid something much more akin to the real cost of the water and waste processing then the marble money would be freed up to provide more and better services. 

As always with these things there are multiple interpretations of the current situation but the Town Hall went ahead and increased the charges. Not that anyone has said this, so this is purely speculation on my part, but I think some of the thinking behind the water increases is that the current distribution system (the pipework) is crumbling and the investment needed to fix the system is beyond the means of the Town Hall. If the system is made profitable that makes the privatisation of the supply a much more tempting offer to private concerns. At some time in the future they may be willing to take on infrastructure improvements in return for a long term contract.

The changes were published as being applicable form 2024 so I suppose that we are now under the new regime. ADDITION It turns out that this wasn't true. There was one appeal against the water rate increase which was dismissed by the Pinoso Town Council at its January 2024 meeting. The Council said at that meeting that the new rates would be published in the Boletín Official and, as soon as they'd been published they would become current.

The rubbish collection charge will double from the current 60€ to 120€ per household

Household water is charged on a sliding scale. In the table below you can see that the first 10 cubic metres will be charged at 48 cents per cubic metre, the next 10 cubic metres at 78 cents and so on. There are different rates for businesses. The agricultural water supplied through the SAT network is not a part of this system.

Block of 0 to 10 m³/quarter 0.4800 €/m³ (Old charge was 0.18 €/m3)
Block of 10.01 to 20 m³/quarter 0.7800 €/m³ (Old charge was 0,28 €/m3)
Block of 20.01 to 40 m³/quarter 1.1500 €/m³ (Old charge was 0,35 €/m3)
Block of 40.01 to 80 m³/quarter 1.9500 €/m³ (Old charge was 0.5625 €/m3)
Block of 80 m³/quarter and any further use at 3.2500 €/m³ (Old charge was 1.3750 €/m3)

There are all sorts of little add ons to the bill for water meter rental, water filtration charges etc. but, as an example, last quarter in our house we used 22 cubic metres of water and the bill was around 22€. My dodgy arithmetic suggests that with the new regime that will rise to about 50€ or maybe a bit more.

Blinded and dazzled

There are plans to build a solar farm just around the back of our house. Not eyesore close but close enough. We knew nothing about it. Well, actually that's not quite true. I probably knew but I didn't know that I knew. I remember seeing a piece on the Pinoso Town Hall website a couple of years back (8 September 2021 to be precise) with the snappy title (translated here) of Public information of authorization on undeveloped land for the photovoltaic power plant called "PSF IM2 Jumilla" in the municipality of Pinoso. The website entry mentioned several plots and plot numbers but it didn't give any real clue as to the location, no map, no village name. Obviously there was no purposeful intention to hide the location.

Now the way that things are made public in Spain is that they are published in a sort of official gazette, the Boletín Oficial del Estado or the Official State Bulletin. I suppose it's just published to the Internet nowadays; no paper version. The Boletín, the BOE, is the national version and there are regional versions. We live in the municipality of Pinoso in the province of Alicante. The three provinces that make up the Valencian Community are Alicante, Valencia and Castellón. Anything of municipal, provincial or regional concern is published in a regional version of the boletín called the Diario Oficial de la Generalitat Valenciana. I remember writing an article for the old TIM magazine about how things were officially published in Spain and, in drawing a comparison with the UK. Researching that article at the time I found things out about both systems that I had not known before.

One of our neighbours found out about the plans, I think because he saw some blokes measuring up. It just so happens that, because of his work, he knows how people should be informed about new projects. He's pretty certain that we weren't told what was going to happen as we should have been, that the plans for landscaping the site are inadequate and that, in general, the whole process has been flawed.

Again, to be honest, despite knowing about the BOE and its equivalents I have no idea what the process is for publishing planning permissions. I suppose if a biggish scheme is controversial most of us rely on some sort of interest group kicking up a fuss. If you've passed close to Salinas recently you'll know that's the case there. When that happens we can chain ourselves to trees and face down the bulldozers. I had a quick look at the process is in the UK for planning permissions. Obviously enough there, in the UK, the applicant must be told of the decision as must everyone else who has made a representation to the planning authority or who is an owner of the land or a tenant of an agricultural holding on the land or an adjoining owner or occupier. The UK version adds a caveat which says that the local planning authority should take a flexible approach and make a judgement about whether additional publication of the decision is needed on a case by case basis, weighing up factors such as the level of public interest in the application and the cost of additional notification. 

If Pinoso Town Hall were to follow the same general principles then none of the houses that will have a nice view of the panels owns or rents adjacent land, none of us made any representation to the Town Hall about the project and I don't think that there is much public unrest about the scheme. 

Nonetheless it all just seems a little underhand somehow.

Ugly Spain

I'm reading a book called España fea, or ugly Spain. Actually the full, and translated title is Ugly Spain: Urban chaos, democracy's greatest failure. Now this book is 506 pages long and I'm on page 98 so I'm being a bit previous here but it did set me thinking. One of the central themes in the book, so far, is that Spain followed the US model of delegating planning to local administrations which have been open to corruption and cronyism. The end result is a mish mash of badly designed, poorly built and inappropriately placed buildings.

Lots of Spain is chocker with palaces and churches and big, big stone buildings. Around here in Alicante and Murcia those sorts of "monumental" town centres are far less common than in other part of Spain. Orihuela leans a bit that way and there must be others but, in general, this area is, architecturally, less impressive than many others. Pinoso is a perfect example. It's a great place to live, it's safe and tidy and with lots of services and lots going on but architecturally it's a bit limited. The Torre del Reloj isn't really that jaw droppingly beautiful and the newer buildings (with the exception of the tanatorio) were unlikely to win any architectural prizes.

Unlike some other towns Pinoso didn't go too bonkers during the "brick explosion" in the first few years of the 21st century. The expansion of the town was low key and a couple of the vanity projects actually turned out rather well. Compare it with Fortuna with the Lamparillas development or Monóvar with its plans for the Ecociudad and Pinoso was the soul of discretion. Nonetheless, if you look around Pinoso there are any number of half completed houses and blocks of flats. Glance towards the town centre as you drive along Calederón de la Barca (the road the lorries use to bypass the town; the one that comes out at the junction near the Repsol garage) and you will see tens of unfinished private houses. And whilst we're by the garage there are those big blocks of flats, some lived in, some abandoned, alongside the Jumilla road. I wonder if they will just be left there forever to rot? Lots of the older houses in Pinoso town are still owned by members of a families that haven't set foot in Pinoso for years. Their houses get no maintenance and every now and again bits fall off them or, in extreme cases, they simply fall down. 

Look around the central parts of Pinoso and you will see that, among the older houses, there are lots of single, two and three storey buildings. The single storey houses generally have a central door and a matched single window to left and right. The two and three storey houses have vertically elongated windows and doors with the casements and door surrounds picked out by moulding. Often there is a symmetry to the front of the building and some sort of horizontal lines to demarcate the various floors. Many have little balconies and lots and lots have the fancy grill work on the balconies and windows. There isn't a model but there is a repeated style. So, even if Pinoso isn't particularly architecturally interesting it does have a certain uniformity of character.

You do not see that uniformity as you move away from the old town centre. Santa Catalina is a district with a particular and different character but, again, it looks like it belongs here, it looks Valenciano. I'm not so sure you can say that about the Franco regime houses, the group of buildings to the west of Paseo de la Constitución, or in those the streets named for nearby towns. The residential home for older people, the pensioner's club, the theatre, health centre, nursery school etc. would probably look just as at home in Barnsley or Bilbao as they do in Pinoso. And would you say that the Sports Centre blends nicely and looks local?

Now it's obvious that if we stopped all modern development we'd all be living in caves or half timbered houses or maybe, if we were all rich, in those "Modernista" houses which were so typical of wealthy Spaniards as the 19th became the 20th Century. It's because, over the years, that we have built new in among the old, that we get the variety that makes towns and cities so interesting. Tate Modern to the Millennium Bridge to St Paul's. But when something new is built surely there should be an attempt to make it fit with what's already there, with the weather, with the environment with where it is?

Walk along Calle Monóvar and Perfecto Miro or Calle Azorín and although the houses are from all sorts of times there is a sort of oneness. The newer blocks shoehorned into a vacant plot stick out like a sore thumb. Look at the Town Hall. Now I understand that the old building was a right mess and a new one was needed. But seriously could anyone, ever, have thought that fitted in or was even nice? And what do you think of the municipal market in Plaza Colón? Is that building in keeping with the style of the square? Where are its credentials as a Pinosero, Alicantino or Valenciano building?

Over in el Faldar this weekend they burned their hoguera - the bonfire to celebrate San Juan. The villagers had built a replica of the water tower, called el Pouet (which I think means well in Valenciano) which is just off Calle Valencia on the western edge of Santa Catalina. All the blurb from the local Medios de Comunicación, the Town Hall's communication arm, was about how emblemático, symbolic, el Pouet is of Pinoso. If you know it you will know that for some reason, a few years ago, permission was given to build a block of flats next to it which were in a completely different style and which completely overshadow the little water tower. That block of flats was never finished. Presumably some property speculator went bust with the 2008 crisis and just walked away from the car wreck result. 

It happens in the countryside too. Look at the old houses and the way they sort of blend in to the land, maybe in a stand of trees, just in the hollow there, same sort of colouration. They do that estate agent thing of nestling. Then look at the newer houses. It's true that they haver better shaped rooms, insulation (maybe) and that their pools and barbecue areas make them nicer to live in than the more traditional houses. The trouble is that so many of them look completely out of place; almost as though they just landed there from some far away place. I'm sure it's perfectly possible to build something with modern features that would blend in just a tad better and maybe that idea should be intrinsic to the local planning regulations. 

Anyway, I have another 408 pages to go so maybe I'll have a more detailed, less simplistic, analysis to offer soon.

Breakdown of the 2021 Pinoso population figures by country of origin

A little while ago I published a blog about the population of Pinoso. A lot of people showed some interest in that entry. As a result I asked the Pinoso Town Hall if they'd publish a breakdown of the figures as several people had asked about their home countries. The Town Hall published the figures. I'd like to think it's because I asked but it's probably sheer chance!
Nationalities	MEN	WOMEN	TOTAL
EUROPE
Austria	1	0	1
Belgium	35	34	69
Bulgaria	12	13	25
Czech Republic	0	2	2
Denmark	2	0	2
Finland	0	1	1
France	9	4	13
Germany	16	17	33
Iceland	2	1	3
Ireland	12	6	18
Italy	9	10	19
Latvia	0	1	1
Lithuania	1	1	2
Macedonia	1	0	1
Netherlands	34	37	71
Norway	3	3	6
Poland	8	11	19
Portugal	1	2	3
Rumania	30	37	67
Russia	1	2	3
Slovakia	0	1	1
Spain	3437	3337	6774
Sweden	3	2	5
Switzerland	0	1	1
Ukraine	23	28	51
United Kingdom	429	406	835
AFRICA
Algeria	15	9	24
Mali	2	0	2
Morocco	102	97	199
Mauritania	1	1	2
Senegal	3	0	3
Zambia	0	1	1
Zimbabwe	1	0	1
AMERICA
Argentina	4	2	6
Bolivia	5	6	11
Brazil	2	2	4
Canada	2	0	2
Colombia	10	12	22
Cuba	2	3	5
Dominican Republic	6	6	12
Ecuador	23	18	41
Guatemala	2	2	4
Honduras	0	4	4
Mexico	0	2	2
Nicaragua	9	5	14
Paraguay	0	4	4
Peru	4	3	7
USA	2	3	5
Uruguay	3	6	9
Venezuela	4	4	8
ASIA
China	10	8	18
India	5	0	5
Japan	0	1	1
Pakistan	16	12	28
Thailand	1	2	3
OTHER
Stateless	0	1	1
Former Spanish Territories	2	2	4
Total	4305	4173	8478
.

Watery stuff

Artemio is a heavy set bloke who works for Pinoso Town Hall. Usually he has a big cigar clamped between his teeth. I'd prefer not to commit to giving him an age. He drives a Jeep which, he says, is much better than the Land Rover he used to have but, as you can see from the snap alongside, the Land Rover is still with the team. Artemio's  voice is raspy and, until the second or third sentence, when I tune in, I find him really difficult to understand. Artemio is the bloke you call if there is a water leak out in the street, or in our case, on the track. It's a 24 hour a day service. Should you ever need it the number is 656978410. If the leak is on the domestic side of the water meter then you need a plumber but if the leak is on the other side of the meter you call Artemio. Or rather you call his number. He's in charge of the team and he's not always the person who turns up.

Most people expect that when they click the switch on the wall the electric light will come on and when they open the tap water will come out. In rural Spain that's not always the case. I suppose in rural Scotland it could well be the same. If you live a long way from power lines or water pipes then you're on your own. We have mains water and mains electric but not everyone in the countryside has. People have water storage tanks which have to be filled up from time to time by tanker lorry and lots of houses run off solar power either for environmental reasons or because they have no economic option.

Piped water around here comes as two variants. The stuff we have is drinking tap water. It comes filtered and treated. There is another network of water supply organised locally by S.A.T. Aguas de Pinoso, la Sociedad Agraria de Transformación. That network is designed for crop irrigation but, because it runs in places where the drinking water network doesn't some people use it as their primary water source. I think that it is basically filtered but I don't think it's suitable for drinking. That said I've made tea with it presuming that the boiled water would be safe. I wrote that section without checking the detail. I think it's correct but if it isn't I apologise now.

So, the last time I called Artemio was because I'd cut through a thinnish water pipe when I was hacking out weeds alongside our track. It turned out that it was a pipe our neighbour had laid himself to water his almond trees so I had to ring Artemio back and cancel. The time before that it was the public water supply and the water bubbling up through the soil was in the same place that it has bubbled up time and time again. "It's 30 year old pipe," said Artemio, "what do you expect? It goes time after time and we patch it up time after time too".

Interesting that about the pipe. We had a leak on our side of the water meter the other day. We got the original leak fixed and then the pipe, which is sort of semi rigid rubber, not quite the Durapipe type but not as flexible as hosepipe, sprang a pinhole leak. When I tried a temporary repair with some potty putty type epoxy resin the pipe sprang another leak. When the plumber finally got around to visiting he said that the pipe lasts for so long and then starts to fail; as if it had a sell by date. He also said that the piping which had failed, the stuff he was replacing, was thin walled agricultural pipe rather than the thicker walled domestic supply pipe. From the outside they would look identical if it were not for the blue pinstripe on the domestic stuff. He thought that we may have the thinner walled pipe from the meter to the stopcock in the house. He cheerily suggested that if it were beginning to go it may have reached the end of it's useful life. "Keep an eye on your meter." he said. 

I do check the water meter every week. I've heard far too many stories about unrecognised leaks leading to huge bills. I also pondered the pleasures of house ownership.

I've heard that about 10% of the Earth's surface is on fire at any one time

Spain has lots of wildfires. The number of times they are started by people, both inadvertently and on purpose, is alarming. The farmers who burn stubble, the people who flick fag ends from cars and the people who light barbecues in the countryside are oddly surprised when it all gets out of hand. There are also arsonists who start fires for reasons best known to themselves and their doctors. Fires can also start naturally, a lightning strike being the most common cause. Just like those potholes on British roads, fire breaks all over Spain are suffering from lack of spending. What should be a difficult barrier for the flames to leap, a defensible line for fire fighters to hold, is so full of weeds and shrubs that it offers no real barrier and the fires grow and spread.

There have been several fires in the local area over the past week or so. On the national scale they have not been big and they have not spread widely but seeing smoke on the horizon and watching fire fighting helicopters fly overhead is a bit anxiety making.

Just three days ago there was a fire within a couple of kilometres of where we live. It was put out quickly but the local police chief reminded people that if land is not maintained adequately then the costs of putting out the fire will have to be borne by the landowner. The news of the fires got picked up by our village WhatsApp group and there was an exhortation from the Town Hall representative in the village, the local "mayoress", for people to put their house in order. The little land we have, the garden, is weed free but just outside our boundary there is a lot of long dry grass. We have tracks bordering our property on two sides which are, so far as I know, and our Spanish neighbours agree, the responsibility of the Town Hall. Both Maggie and I commented in the WhatsApp group in a way which clearly showed that we were far from happy about how our part of the village is routinely forgotten. That neglect includes not cutting the verges back. One way and another the exchanges became a bit tense.

Concerned by the recent spate of fires, and by the local inaction, Maggie decided that she would have a go at hacking those weeds down herself. Now, to be honest, the tools we have are not much use against deep rooted two metre high grass. We tried though and the next door neighbour joined in and brought out the small tractor that he uses to plough his orchard. In the end we took about 20 garden refuse sack size bag loads off the verge alongside our house. It's better but it's still not perfect.

Still dripping with sweat I contacted the people who have the refuse collection contract for the outlying villages of Pinoso. I told them that we had left the 20 sack loads of cuttings by the side of the communal bin. They came back to say that whilst they collect old furniture and other household stuff they don't deal with garden waste and that I'd have to sort that myself. I'm sure you can imagine what I thought about that. Fortunately though, this morning, our mayoress was on the case and she turned up with the appropriate bloke from the Town Hall. He said he would arrange for the weeds to be cut back and that he'd get the cuttings taken away.

So that's where it rests at the moment.

Ambulance chasers

We were following an ambulance. It wasn't in a hurry and neither were we. On the back door was the symbol of the Generalitat, the Regional Government, and the name of a private firm. Along the side, in big letters, SAMU, obligingly decoded for us even in Valenciano (Servei d'Ajuda Mèdica Urgent), the English would be something like Emergency Medical Care Service. I think, though I'm not absolutely sure, that just as people in care homes wear name tags in their cardigans, writing SAMU on an ambulance says who they are and where they belong. Use SAMU or SAMUR (which is the service for the emergency ambulances in Madrid) and you mean ambulance: the sort of ambulance that comes for heart attacks and road traffic accidents and not the sort of ambulance that comes to take you for your appointment with the urologist.

Health Services in Spain are devolved to the seventeen Regional Governments. Ours, in Valencia, is called the Generalitat Valenciana. Hence the logo on the ambulance. But I wondered about that name of the private firm. Obviously there are private ambulances to move people to and from private clinics and to deal with patients who are paying through their insurance companies or health plans. Mutual societies, which work with the Social Security Department to cover work place health, might also use private ambulances. But that wouldn't be the case for an ambulance with the Generalitat logo. Google of course knew. It seems that, in the modern world, the Health Authorities usually outsource their ambulance services. So there's a tendering and contracting process for outsourced fleets of ambulances. Staff can also be outsourced though it seems that the doctors and nurses aboard the ambulances are, usually, Health Authority Staff whilst the drivers and paramedics come with the ambulance.

I know there are Red Cross, Civil Protection and yellow DYA ambulances. I'd also read a story recently, in the local press, about our Town Hall buying a new ambulance. So how did this all fit together?

I think the Red Cross ambulances are, much like the Red Cross or St John in the UK. I saw a Red Cross ambulance crew in action only a few weeks ago in Aspe. They were covering a fiesta and somebody was taken badly ill. I presume that event organisers have to cover emergency first aid and one of the potential options is the Red Cross. The DYA is another example of a charitable organisation that raises money in any number of ways, including selling its services. The DYA was originally set up to cover the shortage of ambulances to deal with road traffic accidents in Spain but, I think, it now generally operates through arrangements with Regional Health Authorities. Obviously when push comes to shove, in a train crash or terrorist attack, all the ambulances from everywhere become available. So then, what about our Town Hall ambulance? Checking back in the local press the ambulance was described as a TNA. Google said TNA is Ambulancia de Transporte no Asistido. The penny dropped.

There are two basic types of ambulances. Emergency Response Ambulances and Transfer Ambulances. Emergency Response Ambulances come in two types and with three crewing levels. Transfer ambulances come in two variations with two crewing levels. There are plenty of other sorts too, like rapid response vehicles, but I'll just stick to the principal types.

Generally, when someone calls 112 (there are other numbers too but 112 is foolproof), the ambulance that turns up will be an SVB - Basic Life Support ambulance. It will be crewed by two TES, técnicos en emergencias sanitarias, or emergency health specialists which are probably equivalent to UK paramedics. They will have spent a couple of years at college getting their qualification and they will probably have done lots of short ancillary courses. The SVB vehicles are kitted out with defibrillators, all those immobilising braces, oxygen, drips and a long etcétera.

The next step up is an SVA - Advanced Life Support ambulance. These SVA vehicles carry more medication on board than the SVBs and more sophisticated kit. The real difference though is not in the vehicles, it's that SVAs come with more qualified staff. The SVA Sanitarizada (the lowest level of SVA) comes with an Emergency Health Specialists (TES) and an Emergency Nurse. The course to become a nurse in Spain is a four year university degree course. Most SVA nurses also do a further two years masters in nursing.

The most sophisticated vehicles and crew is also an SVA but, this time, it's called Medicalizada. These ambulances are sometimes referred to as Mobile Intensive Care Units. The on board equipment doesn't usually vary much from the Sanitizada but this time the TES and the Nurse have a Doctor with them. A Spanish SVA Doctor will have done six years at university, a couple of years on a Masters in Emergency Medicine and another four years or so on a specialism like cardiology or intensive care medicine.

Away from the full blown, nobody dies on my watch, vehicles there are the two types of transport or transfer ambulance. The first of these is what my dad and his mum would have recognised as ambulances. The patient will probably be on a wheeled stretcher. Their lives are probably not in danger but they are not well. It's possible, though not likely, that the transfer could become an emergency so the vehicles are equipped with horns and lights. The patient will be accompanied by one TES paramedic and a driver. The driver may just have first aid type knowledge from a couple of months course or they might be a TES as well.

The last and simplest type, the TNA, the sort of ambulance that our Town Hall just leased, may have a first aider or a TES type driver but there is no expectation that the run will become an emergency. Often these vehicles are minibuses.

In re-reading various articles about transfer ambulances it looks as though there are often arrangements between local Town Halls to share access to the SVB ambulances. I was talking to one of my students about this and she said that before Pinoso sorted out its own local arrangements people could die whilst they waited for an ambulance to arrive from Elda, which is where our hospital is, some 28 kilometres away.

There is all sorts of legislation about how a vehicle qualifies to be an ambulance, from simple things like having the word ambulance painted back to front so that any driver looking in their rear view mirror will be able to read that they have an ambulance on their tail through to what it needs to carry, how it can operate and how long it can take to get such and such a distance.

Just one last thing. Spanish ambulances have traditionally had amber flashing lights, they've only just started to use blues and twos. Ambulances could have blue lights from August 2018 and all of them will have to carry blue lights by August 2020.

Vote early, vote often

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 leaving Europe. I was on the losing side. Here in Spain, as a resident and a European Citizen, I have been able to vote in two lots of local municipal elections. Neither Spain nor the UK allows me to vote at a regional level but the UK system allowed me a vote in the last couple of General Elections and in Europe. I'm about to lose that vote for having been absent from Britain for fifteen years. My country is about to leave the European Union anyway so it looked like I was going to lose my Spanish vote too. Disenfranchised everywhere.

Hope springs eternal though. We have elections here in May and, when I heard an advert on the radio, advising EU citizens to get themselves on the voting register, I went to the local Town Hall and checked I was still registered. The people behind the desk thought I was barmy but they rang the central register and confirmed I was on the electoral roll. Whether that would do me any good after March 29 was a moot point. Then, the other day, a rather ambiguous letter from Pinoso Town Hall said that EU citizens should signal their wish to be on the voting list by filling in a form. It had to be done before 30 January. We're still EU citizens at the moment so Maggie and I went to the Town Hall and signed the form yesterday. The same day I read that the UK had signed a bilateral agreement with Spain to maintain the voting rights of Spaniards in the UK and Brits in Spain.

So I'd like to thank Robin Walker and Marco Aguiriano for signing on the dotted line on behalf of their respective governments and so keeping me in the game.

Bàsquet: els equips cadet i infantil inicien la competició

I am often quite concerned by my Facebook feed. Apparently I have friends, acquaintances and friends of acquaintances who believe that wearing particular clothes is dangerous, that seeking a better future is intrinsically wrong and that arguing that people should be treated equally is woolly minded thinking. I listen to Trump and Matteo Salvini and Viktor Orbán knowing that Jair Bolsonaro is about to join their ranks and I wince. I think of my home country and its isolationist anti cultural bigotry and I wonder where it all went wrong.

My dad used to talk about how, in his youth, there was hope for a world order of sorts. People working together to solve common problems. Obviously we're now on exactly the opposite track. United Nations, World Trade Association, European Union. Forget it. We'll do better on our own.

On the most parochial of levels, with something very tiny, I don't like what's happening in Pinoso. I have some mobile phone application that collects news articles. Amongst others it takes the news from the local Town Hall. It's news that isn't news really but it helps me to keep up with what's going on locally. Since we got back from our holidays though I wonder if there has been a change of policy, if the news has been Marine Le Pen-ised; Pinoso for the Pinoseros? This was the crop of news headlines yesterday:

Música, jocs i màgia per celebrar el dia de la Comunitat Valenciana

Handbol: inici de lliga amb derrota

Bàsquet: inici de la competició

Futbol sala: resultats del cap de setmana

“Meldo” visita la escuela infantil municipal

Futbol: resultats del cap de setmana

You may notice that they are all in Valencian, the local language rather than in the worldwide version of Spanish or in both. I'm not that interested in the games and magic to celebrate Valencia day, the handball, what happened with the basketball or five a side teams or even about Meldo visiting the nursery but what if the news were about local taxes or changes in administrative procedures that had a direct effect on me? 

The last time I saw a full list of the nationalities living in Pinoso it read like this, ranked in number of people from each country: Spaniards, Britons, Ecuadorians, Ukrainians, Moroccans, Colombians, Bulgarians, Argentinians, Uruguayans, French, Paraguayans, Cubans, Brazilians, Romanians, Germans, Bolivians, Swedes, Algerians, Pakistanis, Italians, Norwegians, Dominicans, Georgians, Lithuanians, Belgians, Portuguese, Czechs, Russians, Venezuelans, Thais, Belarusians, Slovakians and someone from the United States.

It's likely that only a percentage of one of those groups speaks Valenciano. So am I to presume that the rest of us can go take a running jump?

All the news that's fit to print

We have a splendid little town in Pinoso. I mean splendid. The other day we had David Bisbal here, one of the biggest pop stars in Spain. A bit like getting Ed Sheeran to play Marlborough in Wiltshire. There was a float in the carnival procession complaining about the concert. About 5,000 people paid the ticket price of a bit less than 30€ per head and the event made a profit. The complaint was that the prices were too high, that the audience was outsiders and that the profit went to the Town Hall. I presume if the prices had been lower and the Town Hall had made a loss there would have been complaints about that too.

Sometimes though I do wonder about the way that the Town Hall spends money. The current administration has done a lot to prettify the town. There are arguments both ways. The first is - what a waste of money when we need more (fill in the space s appropriate). The second is - lovely, how nice our town looks. I've tended to the second camp. Pinoso is not endowed with many, any, buildings of note. There is lots on a small scale but you have to know what you are looking for. So, keeping the town neat and tidy and the lights and drains working seems reasonable enough.

The Town Hall runs a radio station, produces a periodic magazine, maintains a Facebook page and has a website. The Town Hall website was tarted up recently. It's now slower than it was, more difficult to navigate and altogether much clumsier than before. Nonetheless at least it gives us a way of dealing with some of those minor admin procedures and it gives us access to information. But not really. Take the news sort of information - events and happenings. There have been a couple of pieces put out by the media team which haven't rung true with me. For instance in Culebrón we have a bit of a fun run and the headline was something like "Even more runners this year" but I remembered differently, I checked and there were, in fact, fewer runners in 2018 than in 2017.  There are little reports too from the local police but there seems to be very little about the break ins that we hear about on the grapevine - I suspect a hint of subtle disinformation - report that a flower pot was vandalised but forget that someone was robbed at gunpoint, because that's not a local police issue, is disingenuous to say the least because of the picture it paints. There was a piece too about how sad it was that the local football team wouldn't be playing next year despite the best efforts of the newly formed committee and the councillors to get the team onto an even keel. The comments on a local forum type Facebook page suggest that the reason for the crisis in the football teams is that the Town Hall has pulled the funding. Winston Smith would be proud of them - rewriting history subtly or not. I could be completely wrong of course. We Britons tend to pick up dodgy information because of our dodgy Spanish or because we choose not to get too involved with our adopted new home. The thing I really don't like though is that when I do try to check I find it more or less impossible.

Now the other day I had a conversation with a Canadian who has lived here for a long time. I was being relatively supportive of our administration and he was less so. The conversation ranged across everything from Education Policy and the use of the local Valencian language to general funding in the town. We had different ideas about where the money was coming from. We both knew that there was local, provincial and regional funding but we had different ideas about how it was being used in Pinoso and how much there was of it. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned to one of my students how nice something new was in the town and she agreed but went on to say that the Town Hall only likes to spend money on sexy, vote winning, projects. She lives at the top of a pot holed and tree root damaged tarmac road and that sorting the road out was neither sexy or vote winning. Here in Culebrón I watched the hypocritical annual clean up of the village before our local fiesta. It reminded me of that little story that says that the Royals think that a new paint smell is normal. I marvelled at the piece haranguing local citizens for dumping things beside the rubbish bins which serve the rural areas outside the town. I think they said it had cost the Town Hall 7,000€. I could hardly believe that a Town Hall with a budget of well over 10,000,000€, that happily spends thousands on new flowerpots and railings, was worried about 7,000€ but, even more, I wondered if they'd considered why people had dumped rubbish. Was it perhaps that the communal bins are full to overflowing because they do not have sufficient capacity for the frequency with which they are emptied? Or maybe it's because the town's tip doesn't open at the right times?

One of the selling points of the new webpage was how it allowed people to feedback to the Town Hall and to find "transparency" information. It is possible to make comments on the website but nobody ever answers them. Saying nothing, refusing to engage in a conversation is a remarkably effective way of blocking complaints or questions - it worked in the days of paper forms and it still works in the electronic age. Nonetheless, following on from my conversation with the Canadian I clicked on Transparencia on the Town Hall website. There are redirects to things like budget proposals, income and expenditure predictions, declarations from councillors about their personal wealth and lots more good things. I clicked on a number of links and the message that came back was usually "It seems that we can't find the page you're looking for. Maybe you should try a general search." Other headings led to broken links. In other words either the website isn't functioning or the transparency is a sham. I did try searching and I did find some very basic budgetary stuff there published to the Provincial Bulletin. Stuff like 5,000,000€ in from the quarry and 5,000,000€ out on personnel. That's a lot of personnel for a town of 7,500 people. I'm probably just misreading it all because if those employees were getting the national average pay of 23,000€ that would be 217 staff and there can't possibly be 217 Town Hall staff for a town of around 7,500 souls can there? Oh, and, 23,000€ sounds like a good wage to me. For instance, if I were paid according to the agreements between teaching unions and employers, my annual pay for a 34 hour week would be around 15,000€. Who knows, the information may be there but the website is so turgid, so slow, so laborious, with so many dead ends that I always give up.

And that worries me. The truth is that the Town Hall has tight rein over the flow of information. When we used to have a weekly newspaper, when we used to have a website run by an ex-school teacher it was relatively easy to find alternative and optional points of views; non sanitised information. That's a healthy sort of town, a town that knows how to take and respond to criticism as well as to organise a splendid fiesta and build a new library.

Of no known address

Some fathead at the HSBC bank seems to think that I may have been lying about my address for the past thirteen years and about my identity for the past forty five years. They want me to prove who I am and where I live. So they sent me some sort of half baked questionnaire. Good job I wasn't lying about my address or I'd never have received it!!

Nowadays we rich folk live in an interconnected world. Instead of completing the form IN BLACK INK AND IN CAPITALS I can use a webcam application which begins with the letter J and is amusingly named to stop it from being too daunting. So I can use the software called Jumbo, Jumio or Juliet (I forget which) to prove that I'm me and that I live where I say I live. The explanatory leaflet tells me that I can supply the information they need in just six minutes. In reality It took me longer than that to read the instructions never mind the time I wasted in finding and scanning paperwork. One possible form of documentation, to prove where I live, is to send a utility bill. Given the unreasonableness of their basic request that seemed reasonable. The application Jumanji or Jamiroquai told me though that the bill needed to be in English. Ah, of course. Spanish utility companies produce all their bills in English in deference to the domination of English as THE World language. Actually though, with the wonders of the Internet, I can get the bill in a version of English. That may have saved me the translation fee which appears to be the alternative if the bill happens to be in some funny foreign language. Though tell me - what exactly is the translation of an address? What is the English for Alicante. Do they really want Culebrón translated as big snake?

There is, though, another stumbling block. My home address isn't exactly the same on the electricity bill as it is on, well almost any other proof of address, that I can muster. I've explained this before. Basically the problem boils down to terrible Spanish database design. Instead of using a free field for the box on the form where you would be expected to put street, avenue or close, some idiot, who presumably worked for the HSBC before moving to Spain, made a long list of all of the street synonyms they could think of. So if I live in Pedanía Culebrón or Partida Culebrón or Caserío Culebrón and pedania, partida and caserío are not on the database someone has to choose whatever they consider to be the nearest equivalent - drove might become drive and gate might become close or street or avenue.

Add in a bit of post code confusion. Postcodes in Spain cover areas, a whole town will share a postcode. Technically our postcode is 03658 but the town we belong to has the post code 03650 so, like everyone else who lives near Pinoso, and acting on the advice of people in the Post Office, we use 03650. But Mr Database designer (it could only be a man) never spoke to the people in our Post Office and his database links the village to the wrong postcode. So I may think my address is Culebrón Hamlet, 03650 Pinoso Alicante but the closest we can get on database A is Culebrón Street, 03650 Pinoso, Alicante whilst on database B we might find Culebrón Village, 03658 Culebrón, Alicante. The number of variations on the same basic information is really remarkable.

Now who can say. Application Jiminy Cricket may be backed up by a person who sees the photo of me holding up my passport, who sees the uploaded copies of my driving licence or electricity bill and realises that they are all basically similar and in the same name (It won't help that my name is actually misspelled on at least one of the documents) and nods the information through as true. Somehow though I suspect that won't happen. What will actually happen is that some piece of visual recognition software will check my  passport photo against the webcam picture and there will be a cursory check of my driving licence number against some European database. I'll get bounced by both and we'll be back to square one.

White Lines (Don't Don't Do It)

When driving in Spain crossing solid white lines, in their many manifestations, is a bit of a no-no. I did it innocently in Cartagena in front of a passing police car once and got that crooked finger "come hither" symbol along with a sound telling off. On the telly the traffic cameras in the helicopters metaphorically click their tongues as lorries, cars and motorbikes, on completely deserted roads, take the direct line through the curves.

Culebrón, our village, is split in half by the CV83 road - or more accurately split into something like a big bit and a little bit - and it's our part, the little bit, that is the cast aside orphan of the village. Our access road is made from dirt and it is criss crossed with rivulets carved by the occasional storms. Some of the gullies are suspension torturing deep. Our street lighting is vestigial and intermittent and about half the houses are just beyond the reach of the mains drainage.

But, more than that, we are marooned behind solid white lines. Getting in and out of our part of the village requires either long detours to stay legal or nerves of steel as you make that not strictly legal, well definitely 300€ worth of illegal, turn across those stubbornly solid white lines. If anyone were to make that illegal turn - which, of course none of us do - they would also worry about the outright safety of it all as the traffic on the main road whizzes past at a lot more than the 60 km/h speed limit.

We really need a roundabout but my guess is that roundabouts don't come cheap. As I took the legal route the other day I wondered if a bit of extra signing and some re-organisation of the white lines might do the trick.

On the Town Hall website there's a form - it's a form that smacks of quill pens and  "I remain your humble servant" despite its downloadability - that seems to be a catch all for any general petition to the local council. So I filled it in and popped it into the Council offices on the way to work. I got a bar code and everything. The Town Hall doesn't have jurisdiction over the main road but I asked if they might make an application to the regional Government for we badly done to Culebroneros.

I know what will happen. Absolutely nothing. I mean nothing. Nobody will turn me down or reply but the form will simply cease to exist. Nonetheless, as I walked away, checking the Spanish of my copy for the umpteenth time, I felt that, at least, I'd tried.

Very, very grave

Today is All Saints' day in Spain. Well I suppose it's All Saint's all over the Catholic World, maybe farther afield, anywhere in the Christian World. How would I know without asking Google? Anyway, where was I? Oh Yes, so it's the day or at least the period when Spanish families go and clean up the family niches, mausoleums and pantheons.

Yesterday, on Saturday afternoon, the local Town Hall here in Pinoso offered a guided tour of the local cemetery to tie in with the general theme. I thought it was a great idea and I signed up straight away but nearly everyone else I spoke to about it seemed to think it was a bit strange. Indeed Maggie, who I'd signed up for the visit, decided to give it a miss so I went by myself. Amazingly, I was the only Brit in the group. There aren't many things where we aren't represented.

The Mayor and a couple of councillors were there but it was someone called Clara who did the tour. I don't know who she is but I have to say that she did a superb job. Strangely, she started her introductory remarks by saying that some people thought that the idea of a graveyard tour was a bit rocambolesco (bizarre) but she hoped that after we'd done it we wouldn't agree. Maybe she'd talked to some of the same people as me.

Clara started from the entrance way explaining why cypress trees outside (it's yews, tejos, in the UK isn't it?) went on to the reason that the graveyard had been moved from alongside the church and near the town centre as a result of a decree by the provisional government sheltering in Cadiz at the start of the 19th Century and then went on to explain the history of the cemetery in general and some of the specific tombs in particular.

We saw the disused room where autopsies were once performed, we went underground to see the grave of the first person buried there in 1912 - someone who gets free rental of their plot. We saw political rivals buried side by side, we saw Modernist and Gothic style pantheons and someone with the group had a book, a family heirloom passed from eldest son to eldest son, that explained the history and management of her own eighty space family mausoleum. The Mayor did the bit about the ossuary (the place where remains removed from old and abandoned graves and plots are buried together) in Valencià but I got the drift and I knew why Eli, another councillor, laid a floral tribute by the little sculpture there.

The whole thing lasted about an hour. One of the best small scale visits I've done for ages. Whoever thought of that idea deserves a slap on the back.