Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

We were in a restaurant last week. The food was reasonable enough as was the price. At first the service was good but, despite repeated efforts to draw a waiter's attention, it took us around 25 minutes to get the after food coffee. This has happened a lot recently. Waiting table in Spain used to be a well respected profession. That seems to be less so nowadays and, in my opinion, service has worsened over the years. This made me wonder about other things that have changed since we moved here.

My guess is that some of the changes have nothing much to do with Spain, just to do with the world. After all in our first rented flat the Internet was dial up - the modem connected to the phone socket and there was a lot of squealing and singing as it connected. It didn't matter much because there were hardly any Spanish websites that functioned properly anyway. 

Ringing people in the UK used to be an expensive or relatively difficult process. I remember that nearly all of we immigrants had some sort of telephone card. You dialled this or that number and it re-routed your call somehow. I seem to recall a 6€ card being good for about 45 minutes to the UK. We used to use locutorios too, places with Internet connections and telephone booths where you could make the call, or use the Internet, and then pay at the counter as you finished.

One of the horrid things about moving to a new country, new to you but not new in the sense of newly created earth's crust or the result of some political or military upheaval, is that there is a mountain of paperwork to be done all at once. In your home country the paperwork comes in dribs and drabs or, when something new happens, like getting a flat or buying a car, you usually have a support network. When I bought my first car I didn't really know what to do but my dad did. Not so here, not at first. Buying or renting somewhere to live, getting utilities connected, getting a bank account, sorting insurance, registering with your local town hall, completing the documents you need to do things financial, sorting the documentation about your residence, maybe doing your tax return, buying a car and so on and so on comes in one, seemingly never ending, torrent. What's more you don't know your way around. By some sort of miraculous process in your homeland you know how to register with a dentist or get your mail forwarded but not so in a new country. There will be different systems, different things needed and, worse still nearly everyone here doesn't speak the same language as you. When I arrived I had enough Spanish to order a beer in a bar or a meal in a restaurant, holiday Spanish, but it's a long way from there to ringing up some bloke on a dodgy mobile phone connection to get your septic tank emptied or to arrange for the delivery of twenty tons of topsoil.

People who've been through the process recently won't agree with me but those sort of administrative things have got easier. After years of being personally paperwork stable Brexit came along and I've had to do battle with Spanish bureaucracy again. Also, because I have a smidgeon of Spanish I've helped pals with their NIEs, S1 forms, TIEs etc. and I can assure you that the process is easier than it was in 2004 when we first started. You might think getting a "cita previa" for ID documents is a bit of a pain but we used to have to get to the police station before the cock crew to get a ticket for one of the available appointments for that day. If you missed getting one of the 50 or so appointments or if it got to "closing time" then you had to go back the next day.

I well remember the rigmarole, if not the detail, when I re-registered a UK plated car. There was lots of stuff to do before getting into a queue with what I hoped was the correct documentation. I had to, for instance, get someone, from some official college of engineers, to measure and draw my car to get something similar to, what we old Brits still call, a log book. With that documentation in hand I had to go to an ITV (MOT) station to get the car checked against the paperwork. That was a separate process to the standard ITV test. I also wasted some money, and a trip to Alicante, getting some sort of tax exemption form from the British Consulate. The queue to pay import duty on my 1977 car was in Elche and the process was interesting because of the car's age. I had to get the obvious things too, like insurance. The whole process probably involved around a dozen meetings, queues or appointments till I finally got to the traffic office where there were three queues. I forget what exactly they were for but there were definitely three. Let's say that the first was to tell you that you were in the wrong queue and that you needed to joining queue two. Queue two gave you the bill that had to be paid at a cash office before you joined queue three where you hoped to hand over all the documentation and hopefully get back some sort of "you have finished" paperwork in exchange. I remember the day I was told to go back to get the final registration certificate with which I could then get my number plates made up. They told me to come back on Monday for the finished paperwork, so I did. The office was closed, it was a fiesta day, a local holiday. 

Nowadays an awful lot of the information about what you have to do is available online, there are forums where people who've done it before you will help with the details and sometimes nearly all of the process can be done from home with your phone or computer. People will tell me that it's still chaotic and difficult but most things are so much easier than they were. My last criminal record check, I needed one because I was teaching, I was able to do in the wee small hours from my computer. My last European Health Card took fewer than three minutes online. The very first time I got a criminal record check I had to get a form from a tobacconist and then take it to the Justice Ministry in Murcia. For my first health card I waited in a queue for over two hours to be told that, as I was on a temporary contract, my health card would be valid for only six months.

Sorry, this has become much more serious than I intended. Let's see if I can lighten it up. Here are some other things:

When we wanted to buy a house doing it honestly was really difficult. Finding someone who didn't want a good percentage of the purchase price in folding cash severely limited our choice of houses. The symbol of lots of illicit cash swilling around in dodgy deals was the 500€ note. It's a banknote that is no longer in circulation (at one time a huge percentage of all the 500€ notes ever printed were in Spain and used for money laundering  of one sort and another) and Maggie tells me that, nowadays, it's quite difficult to spend 200€ notes.

I'm pretty sure that broadcast terrestrial television was just four channels when we first arrived. The two from the national broadcaster RTVE, which then had adverts, Antena 3 and Tele5. Cuatro and la Sexta were introduced in the first year we lived here. There was subscription television, I think the big one was Canal+, but the big changes came with the change to digital telly. With Netflix and Prime Video, and HBO and Apple TV and Movistar+, and all the rest, so common now it's difficult to think that the choice was so limited. For us one of the big gains of digital telly was that the broadcast Spanish stuff suddenly came with a dual soundtrack. Currently the most popular soaps among Spanish viewers are Turkish. Those soaps are dubbed into Spanish but, with a couple of presses on the remote, you can get them in Turkish. One of the first series we watched when we were first here was Desperate Housewives. It was dubbed into Spanish. I will never forget how disappointed I was when I finally saw an episode in its original English because the posh one, Bree Van de Kamp, sounded American and I'd always supposed that, underneath the dubbed Spanish, she would sound like Joanna Lumley or Penelope Keith. If you wanted British TV the only real option was to buy a big satellite dish - businesses did rebroadcast British TV locally but they were apt to go bust or get closed down as illegal - and lots of the bar talk among Britons was of transponders and Astra satellites.

Living in the countryside, as we do, there have always been underpowered small white vans on the road in front of my car. The white vans remain, and they still never exceed 80 km/h, but the bright blue overalls and workwear that their drivers sported habitually now seems to be a thing of the past.

On the road there are far fewer Guardia bike patrols than there used to be. They were dead common. Nowadays you only really see Guardia motorbikes at events like cycle or motorcycle races. Also nobody flashes any more to warn you that there is a speed trap around the corner. A Spanish pal tells me because the fines for warning of a speed trap are big and people won't risk it.

Whilst we're on driving, seatbelts were considered something very mamby pamby. There was a time when you didn't need to wear them in towns, just on the open road. Guardia and other police never wore seat belts. They argued that they would slow them up if they needed to jump out of their cars in a hurry!

In Pinoso, the number of street parking spaces has been drastically reduced because of the terraces, the outside spaces, of the bars. When we were first here terraces were not that common. The foreign demand for outside drinking and dining gave some push to the terraces but the real change came with the anti smoking legislation of 2011 when people could no longer, legitimately, smoke inside most bars and restaurants. The decline in smoking in Spain has been marked over the years. In my time I've been served at a railway station and in the Traffic Office by someone smoking and I think, though it could be my imagination, that I've been with a Spanish doctor who was smoking.

My Gran used to say that smoking stunted your growth. That, and not the poor nutrition during much of the Franco era, could be the reason that I used to tower above everyone in a crowd when we first got here. Nowadays Spanish young people are much taller, much better fed, and they are much better at blocking my view.

Drinking and driving was incredibly common in Spain. Police officers getting a brandy before they got back in their patrol cars or lorry and coach drivers mixing booze with their coffee are not just apocryphal; they were real and common. Spaniards still tend to not really consider beer to be alcohol but my impression is that drink driving has fallen off. The limits have always been stricter here than in the UK but I think that the sanctions are less severe. I could be wrong and I'm too lazy to Google the truth. Oh, and lots of drivers here are stoned too. The numbers are always difficult to compare because drugs tests are normally given to people who the police suspect of being drugged up whilst alcohol tests are given randomly. Nonetheless headlines like "Más conductores drogados que bebidos en las carreteras de Sevilla" are pretty common (More drivers in Seville drugged up than boozed up)

Gender violence, men being violent to women, is taken seriously in Spain. When women are killed by their partner or ex partner it's always a TV news story. In Francoist times, long long ago, women were controlled by men in ways that would now be attributed to Islamist groups. It took a long time for that legacy to change and that the change is obvious in the street is nothing but good. The same with same sex couples and all the rights and equality stuff where Spain has been right out at the front - for instance gay marriage has been with us in Spain since 2005. It took the UK, well most of it, till 2014 to catch up.

And for now, last but not least, timekeeping. In the early 21st century if someone arrived within an hour of the appointed time for a proper appointment that was considered punctual. I have to say that, at the same sort of time, in the UK, British Gas would give appointment slots "in the morning",  that being between 07:30 and 15:00, and still not come but there is no doubt that time keeping was worse in Spain. Nowadays most people turn up when they say they will, give or take a bit. Another proof is that it is no longer safe to turn up 20 minutes late for the theatre because performances often get under way within five to ten minutes of the given time. On that, just remember that if a Spanish plumber, septic tank emptier, fuel oil supplier or builder says that they will be with you in the morning that means till 2pm and "por la tarde" means as late as 8 or 9pm. That hasn't changed!

Brexit paperwork

There are lots of English language Facebook pages dedicated to living in Spain and aimed at Britons. There are Citizens Advice pages, Civil Guard authored pages, one from the British Consulate and subject specific pages like After Brexit and more. They are all alive with Brexit problems. Twitter is also aglow with similar stuff. Originally it was pros and cons but now it's practicalities. Apparently, since January 1st, British people who live in Spain, but are in the UK, have been bumping into problems getting home. Some of it seems to be the teething problems of new requirements at the border - the officials don't recognise the documentation and stuff written in Spanish makes no sense to them - but it has left people stranded.

One of the things that sometimes makes me snigger and sometimes exasperates me is the lack of understanding and failure to grasp the basics of the paperwork that most of us have here in Spain. I can't guarantee the accuracy of the rest of this post but, so far as I know, it's correct.

The Spaniards lived under two dictatorships in the 20th Century. The better known one had Franco as its Head of State. He introduced an identity card system and as a part of that Spaniards were issued with a unique identification number similar to the VIN on my car but shorter. The Spanish ID is called the DNI, Documento Nacional de Identidad and it has 8 digits and one verification letter which is generated by a mathematical formula. Spaniards older than 14 have to have an individual DNI, it's an offence not to have one. So the format is 12345678Z

Spaniards are identified by their DNI, it was originally a sort of tax identifier but now it's linked to everything from buying a mobile phone to passports. Because not everyone who wants to buy a property or a boat in Spain is Spanish there had to be something similar for foreigners. The similar document for foreigners is the NIE - the Foreigner's Identification Number, Número de identidad de extranjero. The NIE is really a tax identification number but, just like the DNI, it is now linked to so much more. The number is made up of an initial letter followed by seven digits and then a verification letter. The start letter is either an X or a Y. So the format is X1234567L or Y1234567X

Foreigners who want to live in Spain have to comply with a variety of conditions. Provided things are as they should be they are issued with an Identity Card or Residence Card and that card will carry their NIE. That's what happened to Maggie when she got a job here in the 1990s. She got the Residence Card because she had a job. The process included being fingerprinted and photographed. When we came house hunting in Spain, before we lived here, we went to a police station to get an NIE. I was issued with one but Maggie didn't need one because the number issued to her in the 1990s was still good. The NIE was just a piece of white A4 paper. 

Once we'd moved here we applied for Residence Cards. On the very day that I went to get my fingerprints done to get that card it was abolished for European Citizens.  I was literally in a queue to get the card and turned away. The reason the cards were abolished was because I was not a foreigner, I was a European citizen and we European citizens had rights in the member countries. Some European agreement, possibly Maastricht, said that the Spaniards couldn't demand that we Britons carry a Spanish ID card. The reasoning being that whatever our National Identity Document was (passport in our case) it was sufficient to move anywhere in Europe. The same would be true for French, Dutch, Belgians, Luxembourgians, Italians and so on. The new system would be  a register of European Citizens living in Spain. 

Maggie and I registered as soon as the new process came into being, probably around 2007. We were given a piece of A4 paper which had lots of green on it. This green certificate which was actually officially the Certificado de Registro de Ciudadano de la Unión or Registration Certificate for a Citizen of the Union was proof that we'd registered with the National Police as being resident in Spain. In time that certificate changed shape and size to be a sort of paper card but its purpose was very much the same. Everybody I know calls that certificate/card the Residencia.

Then came Brexit. When it was complete we would be foreigners again. Not European Citizens. Foreigners, such as Canadians, Mauritians and Chinese, living in Spain have a card which is called a Tarjeta de Identidad de Extranjero or a Foreigners Identity Card. I'm not sure whether it was by negotiation or because the Spaniards baulked at the idea of re-registering the approximately 300,000 Britons resident in Spain that it was decided that the green bits of paper and the green cards would continue to be valid for Britons to show that they had registered correctly before the end of the transition year and were legal to continue living in Spain from the start of 2021. There was also the offer to swap the green certificate for an ID card much like the ones carried by Spaniards and foreigners, a TIE card, but without most of the usual bureaucratic palaver. That system started in summer 2020 and Maggie and I went and got ours as soon as we could.

To recap then the NIE is simply an ID number and has nothing specifically to do with residence. The green residence certificate or card and the special Brexit TIE card all show that someone who was living here before 31 December 2020 has continuing resident status and is legally living here. There are also, apparently, letters of intent which show that Britons were living here with their rights as Europeans but that the authorities didn't have time to process the paperwork before Big Ben chimed the last EU hour. Provided they complete the process they too will be legal.

There is another piece of paper which we Brits usually call the padrón. Each municipality keeps a register of the people who live there. This register is used for statistical purposes, as the census for funding for municipalities and as the basis of the electoral roll. Under some circumstances the "padrón" gives you some rights but for most Britons it simply registers us to an address. Often, if you want to carry out something financial, like entering into a loan agreement, you'll need a "padrón" that's no more than 3 months old but the "padrón" has nothing to do with residency status.

Obviously there are Britons who have recently moved to Spain and all this new paperwork must have been horrible for them. I sympathize because Covid has slowed everything down and getting an appointment has been hampered by unscrupulous characters who have found a way to profit out of selling on the appointments. 

On the other hand I have been amazed by the number of people who have lived here for years and years and have also been involved in the last minute scrabble. People who have always renewed their UK driving licences by using a family member's UK address, people who have never got around to getting one of the green certificates and maybe aren't even on the padrón. Some of those people seem to be blissfully unaware of anything that is going on around them. Back at Twitter and Facebook I have seen people who have no idea which document is which and what it's good for. And can you imagine the Customs Official at Stansted presented with a letter of intent to apply for this or that in flowery Spanish when their briefing says to only allow residents to travel?

Getting the new Brexit version TIE

Maggie and I went for our new TIE cards, Tarjeta de Identidad de Extranjero, Foreigner's Identity Card, today. The idea of this entry is to explain the bare bones of the process for someone who has to do it and who already has one of the green residence forms or cards.

Now that we are no longer European Union Citizens we Britons can get this ID card, we have been able to since Monday. We don't have to, at least for a while, but we can. The advantage is, in a country that uses and demands ID all the time, we will have a credit sized card that will save us the bother of carrying around our passport and other floppy bits of paper. I think, though I'm not sure, that it also allows us to sign in for certain online transactions.

The process was pretty straightforward. I saw, online, that there were some appointments available and didn't hesitate to book them up straight away. Getting appointments for lots of the official procedures has been difficult for months, no doubt partly due to we Britons finally sorting out our missing paperwork as the getting Brexit done dates came and went and came and went. I was happy to get an appointment at all and amazed when I managed to get appointments for both Maggie and me within half an hour of each other on the same day. If you have a go and you find there are no appointments available try again later. They seem to come and go quite often.

The paperwork we needed was pretty simple. There's a form for the process available online, we also had to pay the 12€ fee beforehand, which we did at a local bank. As well as the two forms the Foreigner's Office wanted a copy of the form that shows your official address, the padrón, a copy of the green document that all we British immigrants call the residencia (mine was one of the A4 sized sheets), a photo and, of course, sight of the British passport. Hardly anything. There was a trick to come though but I was ready for it.

We found the Foreigner's Office in Alicante easily, parking was easy too and it was on "our" side of town. A bit before the appointed time I queued up outside. It was a short queue of maybe seven or eight people, I showed my appointment card to the security guard and he let me in. It was amazing the number of people he turned away because they didn't have appointments. Once inside I went through the security scanner and then tapped my appointment code into a machine. The machine spat out a sort of delicatessen counter ticket and the number on that ticket flashed up on a TV screen in the waiting area telling me where to go. I went to my appointed desk in the appointed room and handed over my paperwork. In the official list of required paperwork there was mention of passport and residencia - there was no mention of copies but I've been to a lot of government offices in my 15 years here and I've learned to carry more paper than they ask for. So, when they wanted a copy of the passport and a copy of the residencia I pulled them out of my bag, rabbit like. The biggest problem was my fingerprints. I had to give my fingerprints for the biometric data chip and it appears I don't have one or any. As I said to the bloke I must remember to use that finger on the trigger if the time ever comes. I tried lots of time, maybe forty times before they got the prints they needed. That done, paperwork stapled together, the man gave me a paper slip which told me where to collect my new card in "about" three weeks. I was out within about 20 minutes.

Maggie had a similar experience though the security guard wasn't around for twenty minutes or so, probably breakfast time, I kid you not, so she was a bit late getting in. And Maggie's top hat didn't work so well - she pulled out the residencia but not a copy of her passport so she had to go to the nearby bar to get a copy. Even then she only took about 40 minutes to complete the process.

Now, if the document turns up, as promised in three weeks, just one more trip to Alicante and we're in business.

This part was written on 30 July. I rang, yesterday, to see if the card was ready and they said it was. I was told there was no appointment system and just to turn up at Calle Campo de Mirra, 6 between 9am and 2pm. That's what I did. There was a bit of queuing but basically it was hand over the bit of paper I'd been given at the end of the first session, show my passport, hand in the green residence form, give a couple of fingerprints and leave with my new TIE card.

Trying to get an ID card

In Spain you have to carry ID at all times. For Spanish nationals they have an identity card, the DNI and for foreigners there is a TIE, the Foreigner's Identity Card. EU citizens, within an EU country like Spain, are neither Nationals nor foreigners. This means that EU citizens have to carry the form of ID in use in their country. Now we Brits are a little odd in that we don't have an ID card so Brits are supposed to carry their passport with them at all times in case the "Competent Authority" needs to see it.

As well as the need to carry identification EU citizens, living in Spain, have to register. When the scheme was first introduced the registration certificate was a bit of green A4 paper but later it became smaller and more card like, something like the old UK paper driving licence.

A couple of weeks ago the UK left the European Union. Consequently the registration document became a bit of an anachronism for UK citizens. Nonetheless with the transition period, the limbo time, we're neither fish nor fowl. Quite what's going to happen is a bit moot. As everyone else in Spain carries ID then Britons are obviously going to have to do the same in time. There are a lot of us though, nearly 366,000, so if we all popped out to get our new ID between now and the end of the transition period it may all get a bit congested. Currently the idea is that the process for exchanging the green certificate for something more like the Spanish or Foreigners card, will be quick, cheap and easy.

Getting an appointment to go to one of the offices where ID cards and the like are handed out has become a bit of a problem. Most of the time it doesn't matter much to we (relatively) wealthy Brits, it's usually no more than a minor inconvenience. Not always though. It can sometimes make life very difficult even for we haves. For the have nots who need to rent a flat or find a job it can be disastrous.

The few weeks I spent in the Cub Scouts taught me to be prepared. I applied for an appointment back in November to get myself a new identity card appointment after the Brexit date. Clearly stating that I was British and I wanted the Foreigner's Identity Card, the TIE, I got an appointment. I'm not isolated though; I read the press, I have been keeping up to date with the Brexit information from the British and Spanish Governments as well as checking the Citizens Advice Bureau Spain stuff. I knew that the process wasn't going to be generally available on the date of my interview.

I came very close to cancelling the appointment. In the end I asked the Citizen's Advice people what they thought, expecting the answer to be that there wasn't a chance. What they actually said was along the lines of - you've got nothing to lose by having a bash, have a go and tell us how you get on.

I went, yesterday. The appointment was in Benidorm. The policeman on the front of house information desk was acting as gatekeeper asking all sorts of questions before allowing anyone to stay. I thought that was quite positive. He was turning away well over 75% of the people for being in the wrong office, not having an appointment or not having the basic documentation.

I got seen half an hour after my appointment time. I told another police officer what I was there for. He looked at the paperwork and said no. He reckoned it would be September before they started to process we Britons. It took him about 2 minutes to turn me away. I wasn't surprised, I wasn't shocked or angry. It was just a bit of a waste of time.

Hang on, let's say he's right and they get cracking on September 1. The end of the transition period is 31 December 2020. That's 121 days (we'll pretend there are no holidays or Sundays) so if there are 365,967 Britons resident in Spain my arithmetic says they will need to process 3,024 people a day.

He loved Big Brother

I didn't sleep particularly well last night. I kept waking up with some half formed Spanish phrase rolling around the empty quarters of my mind before lapsing back into semi unconsciousness. It wasn't the thought of what the Catalans might do after the sentencing of their pro independence politicians today, it was because I was off to the Social Security office.

When I was last in that office, just before Christmas, I was told that my old age pension would include a little from Spain and a lot more from Britain. I started to get money from the UK, on time, in May. I expected a top up from Spain last month.  But it didn't come. Worse than that, trying to find out why not, I found, online, that my health care had been downgraded from a constitutional right as a worker to a bit of a dispensation for foreigners. Given that the UK has been a hotbed of political idiocy for a few years the less I have to depend on anything coming from there and the more I can rely on things directly from here the better.

I was worried about my appointment on two scores. The first, the perennial, is simply being able to present my case in Spanish. The second is that if my Spanish work history, dodgy and short as it is, was going to be disregarded then all those times I had stood out for a legal contract were going to be wasted. I also know that challenging a wrong, unfair or unreasonable bureaucratic decision is a hard and thankless slog.

My appointment was on the dot, no waiting at all. I told the bloke behind the desk that all I wanted to know was where I stood with Social Security - did I have Spanish rights or just foreign ones? We talked for a while, he looked at paperwork and then he said the magic words "If you've paid in to the system here then you have the right to health care". That was all I needed to hear. I was as happy as Larry; anything else was largely irrelevant. By the way apparently the phrase comes from the state of mind of an undefeated Australian 19th century boxer, Larry Foley, on retirement. But then  he made me happier. I was asked why I hadn't claimed the Spanish part of my pension. It seems that going in December hadn't been enough. I should have gone back when I finished working in April. We filled in the paperwork. All I have to do now is wait.

The handshake, as I left , was as warm as a manly, cisgender, handshake can be.

Hair tearing and garment rending

I was grumbling about being chased by the tax office here who say I didn't pay enough tax in 2014. I was particularly galled that I had paid an accountant to do the original tax return and now I'm having to pay a second accountant to sort out the job that the first one did. Sometimes the label professional doesn't seem the most adequate for the people we buy services from, like architects and lawyers, or for the civil servants/local government officers who process the documentation supplied by those so called experts.

Anyway the accountant bloke who's trying to sort this out for me went to the tax office. The tax office were unwilling to accept my P60s in English. They had to be translated by an officially qualified translator. Figures vary but of the, roughly, 300,000 Britons resident in Spain about one third live in Alicante province. So what chance do you think there is that the P60 is an unknown document in an Alicante tax office? And a P60, it's not a wordy document. Basically it's two figures. Amount paid and tax deducted. So, the fact that the tax official wants an official translation is the stupid posturing of an idiotic bureaucrat. I didn't have a lot of option though. I paid the 65€.

The crux of this mess is that Government Pensions – army pensions, police pensions, civil servant pensions etc. - are included in some double taxation rules between Spain and the UK. They are taxed in the UK. They have to be recorded on the Spanish tax declaration in a specific way. The documentation to support my claim that I have paid my taxes had to be sent to the tax office by today to avoid a penalty and the accountant needed my signature. He told me that he'd spoken to the boss of the tax office and she had said that it was unlikely that the P60 would be enough proof. The suggestion was that I should get a certificate to say that a Teachers Pension is a Government Pension. I phoned the UK to ask for such a certificate. They don't exist said the woman in the tax office in Manchester. There's a manual, a manual which we share with Spain, about double taxation and which lists the UK Government Pensions. Anyone in a tax office in Spain dealing with double taxation can look in the Spanish version of that manual. She gave me the link to the UK manual and, true enough, there's a list. Again I might have to question the professionalism of the Spanish tax people. Of course it could be that I'm the only person with a Teachers Pension amongst those 100,000 immigrant Britons.

So, as it stands. I've paid the first accountant. I've paid the second accountant. I've paid the translator. The chances are that the Spanish tax people won't accept the evidence. The British tax people say there is no further evidence.

That's why rending of garments comes to mind.

To facilitate proof of conformity

I've got a bit of a tax problem. It started just before the Easter break. The Spanish tax people seem to think that I lied in my 2014 tax return. I didn't. Well, so far as I know I didn't. The whole process is going to be one huge pain in the backside. Part of the ritual of bureaucratic torture that the Spanish state inflicts on its citizens with a monotonous regularity. In the years that we've been here we've bumped into it time after time. We immigrant Brits complain about Spanish bureaucracy and so do Spaniards. Britons complain about British bureaucracy too and I suppose that Ghanaians complain about Ghanaian bureaucracy. I think the difference with the Spanish system is that it is unassailable, unflinching, unmoving and unrepentant whereas the British one is just long winded. The British version is, was, much more open to question in the case of dissent.

The Spanish process starts in one of two ways. Either there is hardly any information. A bill or a fine or a notice that requires Holmeslike deduction to work out what it's about. Much more common though, and this is the case with the tax letter, is that the notification is written in pompous and overblown language using words that nobody uses, a language designed to highlight the difference between the erudite state apparatus and the lowly and colloquial citizen.

Over the years, and without giving it much thought, I can cite examples. I appealed the charge for mains drainage because we don't have mains drains. Appeal denied was the response. No explanation. They did say though that it was a firm ruling that could not be contested.

When I asked our Town Council about changes to the junction by our house they simply didn't reply. I can give you a list of other processes that have been thwarted with the same tactic.

A long, long wait is another common ploy. It took just over two years for the reply to our appeal against being overcharged for our local land tax. To get a building inspector to visit to rubber stamp the paperwork after some major building work took just over eighteen months. There is a four year "statute of limitations" on tax matters, which is why I've got the tax letter now, only two months left or they'd have to forget it. Honestly, 2014? Does it really take five years to get around to checking my piddling tax return? And I have ten working days to reply - or else. I suppose I can expect the same process next year for 2015.

Even if my tax declaration is as honest as I think it is I predict that there will be some administrative wrong that has to be righted. The whole rigmarole will be distressing and will cost me time and money. I will probably need official translations of my P60 and however it turns out I will have no redress. They will never say "Whoops, sorry about that".

It does all become quite wearing.

Mr Pugh and Charlie Drake

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.

A cashless society

Going into a bank in Spain is often the proverbial pain in whatchamacallit. I don't have to do it often. Cash comes from holes in the wall and most things get dealt with on cards or online. If I do have to go into a bank I always think it looks as though the clerks have never dealt with this particular procedure before. It's all a bit slow, a bit ponderous and there are always multiple documents to be signed.

We have a few banks in Pinoso but there isn't a branch of my bank, the Santander. There is an office with a big sign outside that says Santander and I once foolishly supposed that I could go there to pay in money. I can't. A bit like the wrong type of snow, on the railway, I have the wrong sort of account. It was originally opened with a bank that was later absorbed by the Santander. The name of the account has changed at least four times since then but, apparently, it still bears some Mark of Cain which makes it inferior to a proper Santander account. Whatever reason the man in the office in Pinoso cannot put folding money into my account. I have had trouble with the other banks too. They simply don't offer services to other bank's customers. Some will take my money off me and pay it into my account but they charge several euros to do it.

I had a period of being paid in cash and, to avoid charges, I would drive to the nearest branch of my bank in Monóvar, about 15 kilometres away. The process was simple enough but the wait could be mind bendingly long. At least I learned not to be coy about using the Spanish queuing technique of asking who was the last person in the bank so that I knew when it would be my turn. Spaniards do not, generally, care for the one in front of the other British queue.

At work, for reasons, I was paid with a cheque. I last saw a cheque in Spain about ten years ago so I wasn't sure what to do with it. I took it to the issuing bank and asked. Well, first I waited for about twenty five minutes before I got to speak to anyone. The two cashiers dealt with a total of three people, in front of me, in that time. I showed the teller the cheque;

"Can I pay this in to my account?"
"Of course you can."

So, I asked her to do it. She explained that she meant that if I drove to my bank and queued there then I could pay it in myself. She did say that her colleague could give me cash for it though. So I went back to waiting. I handed over the cheque and asked for cash. I was asked for ID and the man made some huffing and puffing noise when I handed over the A4 piece of paper that is my official ID document. It's been in my wallet for a long time and it looks a lot like those remnants of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Then he asked me for photo ID. This is all pretty normal. Everybody in the world seems entitled to ask me to prove that I'm who I say I am so I wasn't phased. I handed over my passport and asked if he'd prefer something Spanish, like my driving licence. He said he would. He asked me if I were resident and I suggested that a Spanish driving licence and a residence certificate may be a clue. He gawped at the computer screen for a while, made a copy of my passport, got me to sign two bits of paper and then, the part I really liked, bearing in mind that we are now closing in on 45 minutes.

"You shouldn't use cheques, you know, they involve a lot of bureaucracy."
"And is that my fault?," I snapped back, in Spanish.

He'd been condescendingly talking to me in English despite the fact that I addressed him in Spanish. He responded in Spanish that time. He assured me that I was not responsible for whatever process the Caixa Bank had agreed with who knows what supranational banking system and handed over the few euros that the cheque was worth.

Sometimes there are still reminders of the years that Spain stagnated while the rest of Europe moved forwards.

Saying nothing

Two or three people have expressed surprise that I haven't written anything about Catalonia. There are a couple of reasons. One is that, in general, this blog is about what happens to us, the things we experience, and, apart from a couple of conversations and listening to the radio or watching the telly, I have no direct experience of what's happening in Catalonia. I also have to admit to having had a couple of disagreeable experiences in Catalonia, because I was a foreigner, and I am probably a touch anti Catalan. That's not a good starting point for a post.

To some tiny degree there is a bit of a reflection of Catalonia in the region in which I live, in Valencia. Valenciano, the local language, and Catalan are similar enough that if I use the Catalan version of Google translate on any items written in Valenciano the translation is at least as good as it is from Spanish to English. Lots of the sources of information I use are turning more and more to Valenciano. I've tried, and I continue to try, to learn Spanish to fit in to my adopted home and I sometimes feel that someone is trying to take that possibility away from me. Going into a restaurant in Barcelona the only menu they were willing offer was in Catalan. The restaurant was saying quite clearly that non Catalans were unwelcome. We took the hint and left. My local town hall producing a magazine or an event programme in Valenciano transmits the same message.

Catalonia was a stronghold for the Republic in the Spanish Civil war and Franco made sure that the Catalans paid for that for the rest of his life. Grandparents who were involved, parents who remembered and today's younger generations of Catalans were shaped by that repression. The feeling in Barcelona that Madrid has it in for them was, and is, a constant in daily life.

Politics in Catalonia for the last several years has been a shifting ground of political parties with the same faces but changing party names. There was an earlier referendum in 2014. That process ran into legal problems, a stand off between the central and local government. As a result of that failed referendum regional elections were held with the clear intention of showing that there was popular support for independence. The politicians who had fomented the referendum lost ground. The only way they were able to form a regional government was to form a coalition. One of the demands of a political group, usually described as anti system, to enter into that coalition was that the old president, Artur Mas should go. His successor was Carles Puigedemont. The main election pledge of the coalition was to hold a referendum and that's what they just did.

There was plenty of opposition to holding the referendum within the various political parties in Catalonia. Several normal procedures were set aside or ignored completely to get to the point where the regional parliament approved the legislation to hold the referendum. Basically the coalition bludgeoned the legislation through. Democracy gave way to expediency. However it was going to be done there was going to be a referendum and that was obvious to anybody.

Spain is basically a federal country. Local regions have lots of devolved powers in things like education, health, transport and lots, lots more. The central government has a hand in everything but it's only in areas like defence and foreign policy where the regions don't have a say. Some regions have more devolved powers than others and Catalonia is one of the regions where nearly everything is under local control. That's why, for instance, there is a separate police force in Catalonia - the Mossos d'Esquadra. The boss of the Mossos has been accused of sedition by the National Court.

So, the Catalan government has said that it's going to hold a referendum. The response of the central government is to say "You can't do that." There were some very half hearted attempts at doing what politicians do, which is to talk, but the Catalan elite said they were only willing to talk about the when and how of the referendum. Instead of finding a way to talk all that President Rajoy and his pals did was to sulk in the corner and repeat over and over again that it was illegal, unconstitutional etc., etc. For years as the process dragged along the central government stuck to that line. Basically they did what we in the trade call bugger all. The other major political parties weren't much help either - one day this, the next day that. As the referendum started to take shape the Government response was to ask the courts to decide. The courts said the referendum was illegal because it was unconstitutional. The courts used their powers, to thwart the illegal referendum. Judges don't go out to sort out the problems on the street. They send the police. Anyone with half a brain could see what was going to happen as boat loads of police from all over Spain were shipped in to stop the referendum. Exactly the same as when police are deployed to protect a G8 conference or a World Trade Organisation summit. The protestors push and shove and shout and throw stones or burn cars or whatever and eventually some police officer or some police commander loses it and answers stones with rubber bullets. Policemen are given big sticks and body armour for a reason and wire meshes aren't put onto police vans to make them easier to drive.

Up to a point then we have a conflict between two groups of politicians. But, as the referendum got closer it all became much more personal. Lots of Catalan towns have local administrations that do not support the ruling coalition. The mayors said they would not open up their buildings for the vote. Supporters of the vote harassed the mayors and their families. There was a telephone campaign to persuade people to vote and people who said they were not in favour of the vote were verbally harangued on the phone. It became the usual round of graffiti, slashed tyres, children told about their traitorous parents. All you have to do is to think about the things that people who identify themselves with one tribe or another, from football fans to terrorist organisations, do to other tribes to know what happened, and is happening, in Catalonia. Well except for deaths, I'm not aware of any deaths yet.

The vote itself of course was a complete democratic fiasco. Almost none of the usual controls to ensure that a vote is fair were in place. Votes were not secret and it was unsafe to attempt to vote no. Anyway the "no" voters simply stayed away. For anyone to suggest that over 90% of Catalans support independence is sheer nonsense. Surveys and polls suggest about 45% of Catalans are in favour of independence but something over 70% want a binding referendum. Eventually, of course, the police waded in and afterwards the Catalan government said that hundreds had been injured. We all saw the violence on telly but how many people were injured is moot. If some Guardia Civil whacks you over the head with a big stick that's one thing but if you become exhausted or hurt in the pushing and shoving, the advances and retreats of an angry crowd that's something different. I have read that just four people were hospitalised after the violence. Either way facts and emotions are different things. Police hitting people with sticks is bad. It's bad press too. It suggests a repressed group kept down by bully boys.

But here's the personal bit. In one of the earlier blogs about corruption I suggested that one of the reasons for so much political corruption in Spain is because of the everyday small scale corruption of Spanish society. The bills without VAT, the wages paid cash in hand etc. There is a parallel in the way that you can appeal or complain to the authorities. For instance, we have been overcharged by several hundred euros in our rates bill. I sent in my appeal about seven months ago and nothing has happened. I can't get an answer. I made a suggestion to the local town hall about the junction near our house using the official process. The response? - none whatsoever. Some pals were charged a tax on the profit on the sale of their house despite actually losing money. The tax is illegal but they were told by a solicitor that it was a waste of time taking it to court. Other friends were mis-sold dodgy shares by a bank and had a hell of a job getting anything back. A couple of years after we first arrived here there was a scandal about a pyramid selling scheme based on stamps and that case is, only now, going through the courts. There is a freedom of information act here but when I tried to ask a public radio station for its policy they simply didn't reply and the ombudsman said it was nothing to do with her. When I tried to ask the interior ministry why Guardia Civil don't wear seat belts in their cars I was told that the will of the people was delegated to central government and that it was not my place to ask such a question.

Britons living in Spain often complain about the bureaucracy. One reason is that when you move from one country to another there is an avalanche of things to be done from identity documents to bank accounts. My personal view is that Spanish bureaucracy isn't that different from bureaucracy anywhere. The problem in Spain comes when something doesn't go to plan because there seems to be naff all you can do about it. Not answering is a remarkably effective technique for making a problem go away.

The Catalans want some changes and they didn't get any answers either. In my opinion it's not surprising that they chose a radical approach. When the King spoke on telly the other night he said that there were democratic means open to the Catalans to express their views. I think he's wrong. He seems like a nice enough bloke, for a king, but my guess is that he normally gets answers if he asks a question. Getting redress, getting answers in Spain for ordinary people is often a tortuous process.

As I said at the start of this I'm a little anti Catalan but if I'd been there on Sunday, and the streets had been flooded with booted and suited police, I may well have been angry enough to go out and vote too.

Confused

The Post Office sends me a text message when there is something that needs signing for waiting in our post box. This is often good. If we have an order on the way from Amazon or Decathlon it means it's parcel opening time. But it can be bad too. It's the way that the local police make sure that you have the notification of the parking fine and it's the way the tax office tells you that you've been fiddling your tax and you're in trouble.

The one today was a Model 990 form from the Catastro, the Land Registry. My reading of Spanish isn't too bad. For instance I just knocked off a novel by Carmen Martín Gaite of about 260 pages in under a week with the usual few pages a day workday reading. But official Spanish is something else. The tax man and the local government woman don't see why they should use a common word when there is a long and unknown one available in the thicker versions of the dictionary.

I got the gist though. The Registry said that our house deeds were not up to date and they wanted 60€ for sorting out the paperwork. If we chose to fight them with lawyers we could but, otherwise, cough up in the next fifteen days. I didn't hesitate. I went to a bank in Pinoso and paid.

I've just had a more detailed re-read of the letter. There is a lengthy explanation of each section of the form. It made me snigger and snort as the terminology varies between the explanatory notes and the real form. So on the explanatory notes it may say multiplier - the figure by which we multiply the rateable value of your property to arrive at nominal value but, on the actual form, it says co-efficient of multiplication.

The upshot is plain. The rateable value of the house has increased. The local taxes we pay are based on that nominal value of the house. If the supposed value of the house increases then our tax burden increases with it. I presume that the next stage will be an arrears demand for the difference between the taxes we have paid and the taxes we should have paid.

You are supposed to get permission from the local town hall to do almost any work on your house. Generally people do this when it's somethng obvious - changing windows - or something that changes the footprint of the house - building an extension for instance. Technically though you are supposed to do it for nearly everything. When I heard someone explaining this on the radio she used the example of replacing the bathroom tiles. Apparently, every time we get any work done on the house, as well as getting permission to do it from the town hall, we are supposed to tell the Land Registry. Whilst people do usually or at least sometimes get the town hall licences I suspect that nobody does the Registry bit and I further suspect that the Government knows this. So they came up with a wheeze of a plan. Rather than actually try to fine everyone they simply regularise the records for a nominal 60€. Almost nobody is going to fight a 60€ charge as it would cost nearly as much to ask a lawyer whether it was worth fighting. So, by getting someone to check town hall licences against catastral records the Government has a nice little earner.

Ho, ho! Sigh.

My draft tax declaration became available online the other day. Because I was self employed for a while in the 2015 tax year I'm going to need an accountant to sort it out but I'm putting off ringing him till my UK tax documentation turns up. Curiosity got the better of me though and I thought I would have a look at the online version to see what the tax office's initial assessment was. Rebate or more to pay?

On the first page, more or less in the first line, I noticed that my name was wrong. Although the effect on the printed form looks fine, which is presumably why I've missed it for the past ten years as have various tax offices and accountants, in fact the surnames and first names are mixed up. So they have my name as Jo and my surname as Christopher Thompson. The Jo is because, when I first registered at the Social Security, their database only had room for a forename fourteen characters long so the Christopher John had to be pruned. Heaven knows what Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz Picasso - that's Pablo Picasso to you and me - would have done. I quietly closed down the webpage. I'll let the accountant sort that out too.

The firm I work for sent me an email yesterday afternoon telling me that new legislation is coming into force which means that I will need to do something like the very first police record checks that we did in the UK. There is a pretty obvious question as to why anyone is allowed to work with children without being checked but we'll pass that by. The police, or in this case the Justice Ministry, will produce a form to say whether I have a criminal record or not. I asked my employer when this legislation would come into force. The end of the month was the reply. Good to get plenty of notice. Good that my employer is helping me with the process too.

I had a look online. Amazingly the process can be completed via the Internet. Even more amazingly I have an electronic signature which the Ministry site recognised. The form couldn't have been simpler: name and address type information, place of birth and bank payment details. I filled in the form and pushed send. Please fill in the phone number in the approved format it said. It took me four attempts to get that right. There was no suggested format but the international dialling code, with a plus, not two zeros, did the trick. This time it said that the information on my Foreigners Identification Number (NIE) form didn't match what I'd typed in. That's true because, as it turns out, the NIE, which I have used since 2005, is riddled with errors. It has me living in a street in Pinoso, instead of Culebrón, and the postcode is for Sax, a town about 30kms away. I won't bore you with the detail of the reason behind the particular errors but the underlying fault is quite bizarre.

To use a British example. Let's say I lived at 8 Oak Fold, the fold being an alternative to street or drive or avenue. The person who designed the database had never heard of fold as a street name so they left it out of their drop down lists. They didn't think to include a box for free text entry either. They did, however, make it essential that one of the street type names from the drop down list was included in the address. So, the person who is trying to register me on their database, let's say it's Council Tax, does the best that they can and uses Drove as a near equivalent. The form gets processed. The next time, at Vehicle Registration, the fold option is missing again. This time the form filler in chooses Street because that's the most frequent option. No problem to me. I get registered for Council Tax and Vehicle Registration. The problem arises ten years later when I think I live at 8 Oak Fold but Vehicles think I live at Oak Street and Council Tax think I live at Oak Drove and neither can find me.

I was just having a root around the Justice Ministry website. Google told me that its security certificate couldn 't be trusted but I ploughed ahead anyway. Apparently I can download the form, fill it in with a biro and post it to someone. This is quite an unusual Spanish option but it's a good one from my point of view. Actually, as I typed that I wondered if it were true. Lots of times the forms that require payment are triplicate forms which mean that they have to be picked up in person, filled in, paid for over a bank counter and then taken back to the office. Bit of a problem though. The website tells me that there is an intervención técnica - i.e. the site is being fiddled with - and that I have to wait till midnight which was 51 minutes ago as I type.

Ho, ho! Sigh.

Dogs, bulletins and cats homes

I was reading the news from the local town hall. There was information about the new hunting season. I read, for instance, that from 19 July until 25 December rabbits can be hunted with dogs. No more than eight hunting dogs though and, even if you bring a gang of pals with you to hunt, you can't have more than fifteen dogs all together. Certain breeds of dogs are prohibited and greyhounds can only be used between July and October. Oh, and hunting is only possible from Thursday to Sunday and on Public Holidays. This is pretty detailed stuff. Falconry, firearms and bows come in from the 12th October. There were lots more details about exactly what can be hunted, when and how. The piece ended though with a web address for the Diari Oficial of the Comunitat Valenciana - the official bulletin of the Valencian Community.

All of the regional governments have something similar; a publication where local ordinances, byelaws and official reports are recorded. It's the place where contracts can be put out to tender, where details of bankruptcy are recorded and where all sorts of announcements can be officially made. There is a national equivalent - the Official State Bulletin - where  "parliamentary bills", royal decrees and lots more is published. Once upon a time they were printed on paper now they are published on the Internet. I've read parts of the bulletins from time to time when I've being trying to find something out but, as you may imagine, they make dull and heavy reading.

I occasionally go onto expat forums often looking for a more human, and English language, version of the same sort of information. The information on the forums is unrelaible in the sense that people pass on what they have heard and what they have surmised as well as what they know. It's done with the best of intentions but it can cause confusion.

The thing is you see that although we live in Spain we all, well all of us older people, continue to be Norwegian or Moroccan or, in our case, British. And it's the Norwegian or Morrocan or British experience that we use as the yardstick (yes, it's a pun). Take something like a driving licence or a will (both of which I have had conversations about today). Spanish inheritance legislation is quite different to the British version. We might not know the ins and outs of the British system but we know the broad detail. You can leave what you want to whom you want. In Spain, though, inheritance law generally gives precedence to the children of the deceased. This system seems so, well, foreign, to us and obviously, wrong. I've never asked a Spaniard about it but I suspect that they would think a British will that disinherited sons and daughters was equally bizarre.

Now Maggie needs to change her British driving licence for a Spanish one. Bar room conversations about driving licences are commonplace. It doesn't seem odd to we Britons that, despite living 2000 kms from the UK, we should continue to hold a British driving licence. Anyway Maggie was trying to find out what she needs to do to exchange her licence. She asked Google but Google just pointed her indiscriminately to out of date and wrong web pages as well as to accurate and up to date stuff. She was confused by the contradictory information.

The information on the  DGT or "Ministry of Transport" website was perfectly clear and seemed straightforward but it would also involve at least one trip to Alicante. She decided, for ease, to let an intermediary, the local driving school, handle the process. The chap there told her what paperwork she would need. His list differed from the one on the DGT website but I rather suspect that the intermediary is taking the belt and braces approach. He's working on the assumption that if he has every conceivable piece of paper when he goes to the traffic office then he can't be caught out

One document he asked Maggie to get hold of is something that nearly everyone calls a residencia; residence permit. Of course Europeans don't need a residence permit because we have right of abode, well provided we have sufficient medical cover and money to ensure that we are not going to be a burden on the state, we have right of abode. The document is more accurately something that records or register the fact that an EU citizen is living in Spain. We registered years ago and, anyway, once an EU citizen has lived here continuosly for five years we apparently gain the right to permanent residence (something I learned in my search). But this chap told Maggie she needed a newer version of this certificate in order to exchange her licence.

This didn't sound right to me and I thought I'd check it out. What I think I found was that we British expats are talking about three different systems that have existed in the last ten years and all of which are called residencia by their British holders. The document format has varied from plastic cards to bits of paper and back to plastic cards with a different purpose and design. The renewal period for this documentation has varied from every five years to never. The changes to these "residencia" rules have also affected another document called the NIE - the Foreigners' Identification Number.

Someone recently told me that their NIE had a three month sell by date. I was sure they were wrong. My NIE certificate certainly has no expiry date. They were right though, at least about their documentation. The short lifespan is to ensure that, at the end of the three months, the EU citizen who is going to live in Spain has to tell the authorities. Unless the person swaps their NIE for a "residencia" when the three months are up they will find it difficult to transact lots of everyday business from getting a phone line to picking up a parcel from the post office. It's at that point too that the authorities can check that the person wanting to live here has the financial wherewithall to do so. Consequently whereas I have a white A4 bit of paper for my NIE and a green bit of paper for my registration newer arrivals start with a white bit of A4 paper which they soon have to trade in for a green plastic card.

So my experience, my information, about a key process for we foreigners is now wrong. What we immigrants need is some sort of definitive version of all the rules and regs easily accessible on the Internet. Oh, hang on a minute,. Now if only it were written in English but then we are, as I said, 2000 kms from the UK.

Wrinkled skin

On the second day I lived here, that is the day after the MGB, Mary the cat and I arrived in Spain to join Maggie, I went to the Town Hall in Santa Pola to register on the padrón. The padrón is a local register of inhabitants. Town Hall's like to have people on their padrón because it increases their funding from national and regional sources. Without being on the padrón it's difficult to access some services.

There were some problems with the paperwork; some tiny little defects. The Town Hall needed the landlord's signature. She was in Switzerland. They needed Maggie's signature. She was at work. I went to the Estate Agent, who had rented us the flat, and asked for advice. She forged the absent landlady's signature. Back at the Town Hall I forged Maggie's signature. As I wrote it with a pen borrowed from the clerk it wasn't much of a forgery. "Ah, the landlady and your wife came back unexpectedly." said the clerk as he stamped our padrón and we became official residents.

Today I had to set off for work within the hour. Maggie had just finished her job for the day and was due to get her nails done. We decided a quick snack lunch in a bar would be just the job. It all went dreadfully wrong, The service was slow and Maggie left after a salad and some indifferent mushrooms. I waited for the double portions we'd ordered to eat together to come. There were some Britons sitting very close to our table. Abandoned by Maggie I started talking to them. They were pretty new to the area. In the few moments we talked I heard that the electricity supply wasn't in their name, that they did not have the deeds for the house, that their water pipes seemed to be leaking and that they weren't registered with anyone for anything.

I began to dole out my ten year old wisdom, most of which is certainly out of date. I mentioned local people to contact to sort this and that problem. More importantly I helped them with their pudding order. They wanted ice cream as well as the fruit salad.

As I drove away there were two thoughts uppermost in my mind. The first was just how confusing I had probably been. For someone who was having trouble with the translation of the word for hake, the fish, talk of various Spanish processes must have been first rate gobbledygook. Padrón this, escritura that  with Iberdrola and gestores up the ying yang. It had probably been confusing for me too all those years ago in Santa Pola. The second, much more rewarding, thought was that I'd had no trouble at all getting them ice cream and fruit salad.

Extrapolate as John D.W. Bottomley, my one time chemistry teacher, used to say.

Of no fixed address

The British Embassy has a Facebook page called Brits Living in Spain. Lots of their posts are pretty good. Today there was one about applying for a European health card online and true enough there was a simple online form on the Ministry of Employment and Social Security's website for workers and pensioners. I filled it in and sent it off. An email came back to say my address didn't match anything on their database.

My address is easy. House number, Culebrón and postcode.

Postcodes in Spain identify a town or village. Culebrón is 03658 but the post office told us never to use that as mail would be wrongly sent to the sorting office in Salinas. Better to use 03650 they said. Some organisations have address checking software that matches the village name to the correct postcode and make arbitrary changes. Maybe the Ministry of Employment and Social Security is one of those organisations. So the mistake could be in the postcode.

Lots of Spanish internet databases require a descriptive word which is the equivalent of things like street, avenue, drive or crescent in the address and most of them will not accept a blank field. On the deeds to the house the descriptive term is Partida - a word that has lots of meanings but roughly translates as place or zone. On the equivalent of the Council Tax Register the Town Hall gave our address the prefix Caserío which loosely translates to hamlet. If a database offers either of these terms I use them. Sometimes the firm or agency I'm dealing with simply adds its own prefix and, quite often, additional information too. Our electricity provider for instance uses Calle (street) Culebrón and then adds bajo which is normally used for ground floor flats. True enough we only have a ground floor. The phone company has made up a different address which includes the word Aldea (village.) So the mistake could be the first word of the address.

Actually my name is nearly as fickle as my address. Barclaycard changed the spelling of my name to Christofer and on my health card and social security card my name is Christopher Joh as they ran out of characters. Online the phone company has given me a second surname. None of this matters very much as I get hardly any snail mail and most identification just happens through my ID number. I don't suppose my name is the problem.

All this makes it difficult to correct my address so it matches their database though. I looked at my tax return thinking there may be a link between Government databases but they have a different variation - Calle Rio Culebrón (Culebron river street) which I suspect is somebody correcting what they assumed to be a Brit misspelling of the address. From Caserío to Calle Rio.

I was told I'd got my first application wrong by an automated system so I thought I may as well have another go. I banged off another form. Maybe I can keep going till we get a match.

Suffering suffrage Batman

I don't think that I have ever missed an opportunity to vote in local, regional or national elections since I turned 18. They've already taken away my right to vote in regional elections either in the UK or Spain (though we're still having correspondence about that) and I'll lose the right to vote in the UK National elections in another few years (though not if Harry Shindler gets his way) but, at the moment, I get to vote locally in Spain, nationally in the UK and supranationally in Spain. It seems only reasonable that if people were willing to endure long and bitter campaigns to win my right to representation then I should make the effort to toddle along to a polling station. The Spanish system of voting for a party, rather than a person, is pretty duff anyway but it seems to be about the one opportunity there is to influence politicians short of gathering a few thousand like minded souls together in the streets and taking on the riot police.

On the radio I heard an advert telling us European types that we should make sure we were registered. Vote alongside us it said.

The basic method is to ensure that you are on the town padrón, a list of local inhabitants. I make a habit of renewing my padrón each summer even though there is no real necessity to do so. Always better safe than sorry.

So, being in Culebrón today I popped into the local town hall and asked if I were on the list. The man said that he hadn't got the electoral lists yet. Bit stupid mounting a big radio and TV campaign to get us to check if we can't actually do it I said. Well, you're on the padrón so you've got a vote he countered. And that's where we left it.

Not quite time to dig out my riot balaclava yet then.

Mr Angry

Recently I have had a bit of a spate of sending Mr Angry letters - well emails - to various organisations in Spain. Generally they have been specific complaints. Problems with the operation of a bank website or some problem with bill payments for instance

I think Barclays, for their Spanish Barclaycard, have an almost foolproof system. I sent an email to ask a general question about the functioning of their redesigned website. They sent me a guffy response telling me that they were unable to respond to an open email for reasons of security and that I should phone customer services. By return I composed a long and snotty email telling them what I thought about their customer service via email. I got exactly the same response as to my initial message. Hmm, I thought. I sent another email wishing them a pleasant day. They told me that they were unable to respond to an open email for reasons of security and that I should phone customer services.

That's a great trick. Give the impression that they can be contacted by email when they can't. That's why there's the rhyming slang for bankers I suppose.

The European Union continues to update me periodically on my bid to be able to vote at regional elections either in my country of residence or in the country where I was born. I think that's jolly nice of them. They do seem to have had a lot of meetings all over Europe to talk about it though.

I collected my mail today and in my PO box there was a letter from the Subsecretary General of the Subsecretariat of the Interior Ministry Department of Human Resources and Inspection Isabel Borrel Roncales. I think it has a real signature. It is a response to an email that I sent to complain about a proposal for a draconian piece of anti democratic legislation. Isabel tells me that it's nothing to do with me and that the equivalent of the Commons in the UK, las Cortes Generales "in which National Sovereignty resides" will make the decision with or without my help thank you very much.

Now this is not a good response. Much better that she had said "Crikey Chris, I showed your email to the President; he clasped his head as he realised what a big mistake he was making and he decided then and there to scrap the legislation. He wants to thank you personally for pointing out the error of his ways."

But it is a response. Well done the Interior Ministry I say. More responsive than Barclays that's for sure.

Preparing to die

We had a will written in the UK years and years ago. A really tall, avuncular chap did it for us. His office was like something from Dickens with big ticking clocks, overstuffed chairs, a leather trimmed desk and legal documents tied with ribbons. Leeds Day in St Ives.

Spanish inheritance law is quite keen on blood. Distant relatives outrank unmarried partners by miles. For years, several years, we have been going to get a Spanish will.

Last week we finally got to a solicitor, un abogado. The chap who talked to us wore jeans and a T shirt and looked significantly younger than some of the clothes I was wearing. There were no ticking clocks. "We're more your juvenle delinquent and petty thief office," said the boy lawyer. "One of our colleagues down in Alicante can come up and help you write a will but why don't you try the noatary? If your will isn't tricky they can do the job faster and cheaper than us."

Notary sounds really old fashioned to me. Like scriveners. Something to do with Guilds and quill pens. Notaries are busy people in Spain though. Their services are used all the time. The notary's office in Pinoso never seems to have sufficient waiting space and people lean against the walls clutching sheaves of paper.

We waded through the waiting throng and spoke above the insistent telephone to get ourselves an appointment. We didn't need the notary apparently. It was the notary's secretary for us. She started by asking for various ID documents. The rest was very strange. I think she described to us, though we may have given her some clues, more or less exactly what we had written down in our notes. We apparently want just about the most basic and straightforward will imaginable.

Our notarial representative said that she'd give us a bell when she had a first draft ready. I have high hopes that all we'll have to do is correct some of the spellings of the names and we will finally be rid of at least one of those recurring summer jobs.

Return to sender, address unknown

   Santiago Alcanda a radio 3 presenter      

I have quite a long Christmas break. I fancied getting away from work and the usual alternatives of doing very little and drinking a lot of brandy. I spent hours on the Internet looking at websites in Teruel, Granada and Albacete provinces. I sent a few emails - "Are you running your horse riding/cookery courses/star gazing courses in the period between 26th and 31st December?" I got not a single reply. I'm not surprised. From my experience lots of businesses never look at their email. And whilst there are lots of honourable exceptions the disorganisation in Spanish businesses makes me laugh and cry by turns.

Anyway, back in November I got a little annoyed at not being able to find anything but the most banal contemporary music on Spanish radio and I wrote to Radio 3, the state broadcaster which says it champions contemporary music, to ask what their music policy was. They have an Internet form for the purpose. I anticipated at the time that I wouldn't get any sort of reply and of course I haven't.

But this isn't reasonable. Who do theses people think they are that they can just ignore my question? It's a public enterprise, paid for by us, the taxpayers. The question wasn't rude, I kept the bad language to a minimum and there was no doubt what the question was. So I sent the question again, and again, and again and then I sent a snotty email in English asking if they were guarding state secrets. I gave them the template for a simple reply too "We don't have a music policy we just get a few old blokes to drone on for a while on air"

Tonight as Maggie made the living room a no go zone with Strictly Come Dancing I used the time to step up the campaign. I sent the question again. I also sent the same question to another part of the same broadcaster (a bit like sending a question about BBC Radio 1 to Feedback on BBC Radio 4.) What's more I sent the original question and a complaint about not receiving an answer to the "Viewers and Listeners Defender" a sort of radio ombudsman.

Good grief, all I wanted was to hear a few non top 40 modern Spanish bands on the radio but now what I want is an answer. It doesn't have to be an answer I like but I want an answer.

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At the risk of opening myself up to public ridicule I have reproduced the question here just to prove it wasn't rude. Well it proves that if you can understand my version of Spanish.

¿Cuál es la política musical de Radio 3?

Querría disfrutar de Radio 3. Creía haber descubierto una alternativa a la programación repetitiva, limitada y lenta de emisoras como Cadena Dial y los 40 Principales.

Pensaba que R3 era una emisora musical. Desafortunadamente cada vez que pongo R3 hay alguien hablando. Me parece que la mayoría de los locutores preferiría oír sus propias voces que la música

Pensaba que R3 era una emisora contemporánea. Desafortunadamente cada vez que pongo R3 suena música de los años 50,60 o 70

Pensaba que era una emisora tanto generalista como especialista. Desafortunadamente muchas veces cuando pongo R3 oigo Country y Western, Jazz o Flamenco. Esas músicas tienen su valor y su audiencia pero, en mi opinión, no son estilos musicales aptos para las horas de máxima audiencia.

Por eso tengo interés por conocer cual es la política musical de Radio 3 pues no logro encontrarla en la página web.