Life in Culebrón

I suppose, wherever you live, life is full of routine. Depending on your luck those routines might be simple and safe or be hard and even life threatening. Mine are the soft routines of a relatively well off Western European. It's stretching a point to say that these routines are conditioned by living in Spain but that's the premise I'm starting from. I'm sure I'd never have noticed if I hadn't been racking my brains for something to blog about. So, this is the first, with more to come, about the most mundane of some of my weekly tasks. Usually, when I make my weekly trip to the post office there is nothing in our PO box. When we first got here, things we knew had been posted to us used to go astray. The delivery to our rural address was haphazard at best and non existent in reality. That's why we rented a post office box, un apartado de correos. Renting the box for a year in 2005 cost less than 50€; the last time I renewed it the price was 85€. We get almos...

In the UK, in my youth, Post Offices were like Government outposts. They were a place to cash your dole giro, sort out your passport, renew your driving licence, buy road tax or get a postal order. You could even post a letter there. I suspect that, nowadays, lots of young people hardly ever enter a Post Office. In Spain the Post Offices have never had the same import as they once did in the UK but, for me at least, they are still one of the places to send and receive cards, letters and packets.  At the start of each year the stamp prices go up in Spain. Quite a steep rise this year. The price to send a letter or card depends on the size and shape of the envelope as well as the weight. In fact I only really use the post for birthday and Christmas cards and as cards almost always come in non standard sizes (C5 and DL are considered standard) with jolly red or green envelopes I get charged the "non normalised" rate even though the weight is under the 20g limit. The cost of ...

The queue outside the post office in Elche was pretty orderly, maybe 20 or 25 people. Not exactly military in its straightness but orderly enough with at least a long metre between individuals. The habitual Spanish queuing technique involves finding out who was the last person to arrive before you so you can follow that person when it's your turn. For months now the number of people permitted into shops and offices has been limited so that people have to wait outside. Although the "who's last" queuing system is still alive and well the atypical line type queue has now become commonplace. Lines are easier to join.  British Post Offices have always been little outposts of Government as well as a place to post a parcel or letter. That's not the same in Spain and, even before social media, email and the rest made a lot of surface mail redundant many Spaniards hardly ever used post offices or postal services. There is very little tradition of Spanish junk mail by post ...

If you need to go to a bank in Spain think about it taking a good part of your morning. You may be lucky. Correct desk. Person not at breakfast. No wait. No complications. I'm sure it will happen one day but even when it's been a relatively problem free run it has seldom taken me less than twenty to thirty minutes. It doesn't matter where it is, as soon as there's a physical or virtual queue it's going to take time. Obviously the Post Office falls into this category. Yesterday I had a package to post. I went to the Post Office. Because the number of people who can be inside the office is limited the queue was in the street. I stayed for a while but after 20 minutes nobody had gone in and nobody had come out. My mask was getting tacky; I gave up. I popped back twice more in the next two hours. The queue was going nowhere. The main man in our post office isn't the sort of person to get flustered. He doesn't hurry. I thought I may be able to sidestep the que...

I know there's a rearguard action. I know that people talk about the character of the surface noise on vinyl discs and the value of the smell of books. I know that paper book sales increased and e-book sales fell last year and that there's a new version of the Nokia 3310 but, in the long term, it just has to be digital that wins. One of the many losers to date has been traditional mail. When someone asked me to write a reference for them a couple of years ago I thought about a document in an envelope with a stamp. I could feel the smirk as they gave me the email address. Be that as it may the Post Office in Pinoso is a good place to meet fellow Britons. We seem to be heavy postal users in comparison to the locals. My guess is that there is a lot of toing and froing with grandparent/grandchild presents and Callard and Bowser butterscotch. Moreover because so many of us are of a certain age, there is still a lot of traffic in greetings cards. It's fine, we say, sending a ...

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 ...

I went to the Post Office to buy some stamps for my Christmas cards but there was a big queue. Now it can take fifteen minutes for Enrique, the guy on the Post Office counter, to shift two people so five or six people and I thought maybe I should carry food. Alternatively I could go to a tobacconist and buy the stamps there. I chose the second option. In Spain there is a price for normal mail and a different price for what must be classed as abnormal mail. I mentioned this to the woman selling me the stamps in the tobacconist. She thought it was so much nonsense and limited herself to selling me stamps at 42c for national delivery and 90c for stuff to the rest of Europe. The other side of the world cost just 10c more. I wrote my cards but before I stuck on the stamps I checked what constituted normal and abnormal mail. The price differential was substantial and most of my cards were definitely abnormal. Being an honest sort of bloke I thought the best bet was to explain myself to...