Life in Culebrón

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 ...

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 b...

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...

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 transitio...

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 di...

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 word...

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 ...

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 f...

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...

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...

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...

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 Die...

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 con...

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 w...

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...

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...

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 imp...

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. L...

   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...