Avoiding carbon monoxide poisoning

Ingrid told me a story. She holds with the majority view that telephone sales people should be made to run around dripping wet wearing only a towel to see how they like it. One day though a chap phoned trying to sell a combined electric and gas supply package and Ingrid positively welcomed the call. She was enthusiastic. She would be delighted to take advantage of the offer. By Ingrid's account the man handled the unexpected situation well. He remembered his training and kept on extolling the virtues as he completed the draft contract. It all fell apart at the address stage though. Ingrid lived in an old half timbered cottage with green wellies in the porch and a big red Aga in the kitchen. "Aah, I'm afraid we can't offer piped gas to your location," said the salesman, "your  house is too rural." "I know," said Ingrid, "why didn't you?" Then she put the phone down.

There's no piped gas in Culebrón either. Piped gas in Spain is generally only available in relatively large towns. We make do with gas bottles. We buy the lighter, Cepsa branded aluminium bottles from the shop at the bodega in Pinoso though we also have a couple of the heavier steel Repsol bottles. We could have the bottles delivered but we're not that organised.

Gas kills lots of people in Spain. Often people cobble together ingenious but lethal heaters that explode and demolish the building around them. Sometimes death comes more quietly in the form of carbon monoxide poisoning.

The legislation says that you should have your gas system and appliances checked at installation and every five years after that. Sensible legislation in my opinion. We had it done five years ago. We had it done again today. So now, if the grim reaper comes to call we can be pretty sure that it won't be in the form of flesh tearing shards of sharpened metal or the lack of oxygenated blood.

Las Lamparillas

The best route home from Cartagena to Culebrón passes close by the town of Fortuna. Alongside the ring road the gaunt skeletons of hundreds of unfinished houses bear witness to the folly of the Spanish building boom. The planned development, built in the bone dry scrubland that surrounds Fortuna, was to be called Fortuna Hill Nature and Residential Golf Resort.

 A key part of the new resort was the Las Lamparillas development. It was aimed at golf playing Britons who weren't quite rich enough to buy a similar place on the coast and was planned to have 3,737 houses when complete. There were other agreements for other developments in Fortuna. If everything had gone as planned Fortuna's population would have increased from 10,000 to 100,000.

A research project carried out by a local university in 2004 gives some idea as to the scale of the building work planned. Across Murcia, a region with just one and a half million inhabitants, there were agreements to build 800,000 houses. The figures never made sense but nobody seemed to notice before everything went pear shaped.

Work on Las Lamaprillas, which was just part of the whole resort, started in 2007. By 2010 the principal developer of the site went bust with debts of some 120,000,000€. The banks that had loaned the money took the valueless site and the part completed houses as payment. Nobody, not the banks, not the courts and certainly not the developers considered doing the decent thing by the people who had paid deposits for the houses or to the merchants who supplied the building materials. Local businesses and house buyers are still owed around 30 million by the developers.

The town mayor says that it's easy to criticise now but that, at the time, everyone was doing well out of the building boom and nobody was complaining then.

Local councils can re-classify former rural land as urban land. On reclassification citrus groves and farm fields become much more valuable as buildiing plots. In the boom years Fortuna town council found itself with nearly 10 million euros extra from the sale of reclassified land and the councillors set about spending the money with gusto. They expected more money to follow and they borrowed against future income. The result now, in the lean years, is that the council has had to jack up taxes and either cut services or charge more for them. Many projects were never completed but the bank loans on them still have to be paid off.

In small towns in Spain everyone knows everyone else. Little networks of friends and relations do favours for other little networks. The money coming in from the developers apparently flowed into lots of those networks. At the time of the local elections in 2003 with so much money swilling around the locals became much more interested in who was in charge whilst the politicians saw the potential in controlling all that lovely money. The ruling PP party set about buying votes. It wasn't until 2011 that the courts found party workers guilty of vote rigging. The mayor, the same man is still the mayor now as then, chose not to resign.

The people of Fortuna will be paying for las Lamparillas for years to come. Spain is paying for lots of similar projects the length and breadth of the country.

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Since writing this article a higher court has confirmed the charges of vote rigging in Fortuna and the Mayor, Matias Carrillo, has resigned. 

Dashed hopes

My dad never passed a driving test. When he began to drive it was enough to stay alive on the road with provisional licences long enough to claim the full driving licence. He was very angry when, in one of the periodic updates of the licencing system, his right to ride motorbikes and drive steam rollers was taken away from him. He sent a letter to, what was then, the Ministry of Transport. His argument was simple.  He wrote: I never passed a test to drive anything so, if I'm allowed to drive anything I should be allowed to drive everything. The Ministry took no notice of his flawless logic.

Eight months ago I began the process of swapping my UK driving licence for a Spanish one. I used a local driving school as the intermediary. Three weeks ago the school phoned to say they needed my UK driving licence in a hurry. Yesterday they telephoned me again. "Is my licence ready?" I asked. "Pop by the office to pick it up" was the answer.

As I drove to their office today I became wistful. I've had a UK driving licence since I was 16*, well over 40 years. From red covered booklets to the current plastic cards. Not having a UK licence would be odd. I also knew the Spanish would have taken away my right to drive minibuses. We old Brits got to drive minibuses as a Brussels concession. It's not that I'm keen to drive minibuses but losing rights is never a good thing.

In the end I was mightily disappointed. All I got was a piece of card. A temporary substitute for my UK licence. The real one, the new Spanish one, should be available by mid April.

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*When I was 16 it was possible to get a licence to drive a three wheeler. My father was keen that I didn't die on a motorbike so I became the proud owner of a Reliant Regal similar to the one in the photo.

Multiservicios Rurales

Peach and Horne were a couple of geologists who made geological maps of the Scottish North West Highlands around the end of the 19th and turn of the 20th Centuries. In the area they worked I was impressed that some bright spark from the Royal Mail had thought to use minibuses to deliver the mail to local Post Offices and so provide a regular and reliable rural bus service at a stroke. As a holidaymaking teenager in the English Lake District I was amused when I realised that the drivers of the Borrowdale Buses provided a grocery delivery service for many people along their route. At Comberton Village College in Cambridgeshire I thought it was clever of the school to offer space for a Building Society branch and even in the Archers, in Ambridge, there is a volunteer run community shop.

Ever since agriculture stopped being the key employer in Western Europe and rural areas began to depopulate people have been coming up with clever ideas to maintain rural communities and lifestyles.

We were in Teruel province in Aragon the last couple of days to visit our pal Pepa who has opened a sort of country cottage for rent, a Casa Rural. Teruel has a problem of rural depopulation. Beautiful villages set amidst impressive scenery but with ageing populations, no jobs and very few services.

Pepa mentioned "Multiservicios" to us and described the one in her adopted village of Fuentes de Rubielos. It doesn't take much translation - Multiservices - and the idea is dead simple too. The key element is a shop to sell the staples but most offer a bar and some sort of community space as well. In Olba we had a meal in the Multiservicio restaurant and the sign outside said that they offered banking services, Internet, post office, lodging and tourist info.

I tried to find out from Pepa just how these worked. Who subsidised what, how did anyone ensure that the level of service offered was appropriate? How did the people who ran them avoid going bankrupt, how were they guaranteed a wage? Basically she didn't know. She just saw the positive results of them in the villages and she knew that it was the Town Halls and the equivalent of the English Chambers of Trade and the County Council that put the funding in.

Checking through the official website it seems that the main contribution of the Town Hall is usually the building. The building is done up, presumably with grants, and then offered at a peppercorn rent to the Multiservicio operator. There wasn't a lot of the nitty gritty detail about how they actually worked though. After all the reason that there aren't shops in villages is that there aren't enough customers to make them profitable.

Nonetheless we did go in a couple of the Multiservicios and there was no doubt that, in summer at least, with tourists and summer residents in the villages, they were doing their job. In Fuentes, as we leaned on the bar long enough to have a drink, a steady stream of kids came in to buy crisps and sweets, the bar had at least five customers for take-away drinks and, over in the corner, the game of snakes and ladders was pretty lively. The Multiservicio restaurant in Olba had about five tables occupied as we sat down to eat.

I was just talking to Maggie about writing this post and she asked if I fancied getting involved in one of them. It gets a bit parky in Teruel in winter but who knows? - romantic sort of idea - at least from a distance.

Plucking defeat from the jaws of victory

Since we've been back in Culebrón I've been pestering the planning department at the Town Hall for the licence - the final bit of paper - related to our roof collapsing all those years ago.

I called again this morning, still no licence but the chap promised to ring when the paperwork was finally signed off.

He did. I was surprised, nobody ever rings back. Fifteen minutes later, I was in his office to collect it.

"Excellent," I said, "What about all the other paperwork?" "What paperwork?" said he. "I've no idea but we left a bundle of the stuff when we started this process all those years ago. I have no idea what papers we left with you and what I should get back but there was a file full of the stuff stamped and sealed and I suppose we should have at least some of it."

He had no idea what I wanted, I had no idea what I was asking for and none of the other town hall people who have been involved in this tortuous process were anywhere to be seen. My Spanish was also in a state of collapse.

I'd intended to go and buy a coffee to celebrate but, instead, I drove home feeling dejected.

I suppose it's all over though. The house hasn't really changed from the original deeds so there shouldn't be any problem if we want to sell the house and the Town Hall won't be hounding us for anything because they have files with a big closed sticker on them and we do have a "Habitation Certificate" that we didn't have before. Maybe I should get the coffee after all, perhaps, with a drop of something harder to go with it!

I was going to link some of the phrases above to the history of the roof but there are so many that I'm going to put a list here. If you're interested you can see the whole story. Every date is an update on the tale. 08 May 2008 29 June 2009  01 July 2008 25 July 2008 04 August 2008 04 August 2008 07 August 2008 21 August 2008 19 September 2008 04 November 2008 24 December 2008 09 March 2009 06 July 2009 10 July 2009 (paragraphs 3 and 4) 20 July 2009 03 April 2010 21 May 2010 08 July 2011 20 July 2011

Not fit for habitation

The chap from the council came, as arranged, to check that our house is fit to live in as a result of the roof repair. We have been waiting for someone to "sign off" on the repairs for quite a while now. He looked around and then told us "no."

We have a gas hob in the kitchen and there is no air vent in the room apart from the rather large gap under the door and the cooker hood. "Drill some holes through your door, pop a plate over it and come and see me again," he said.

I went to borrow a drill from our neighbour but, like a true pal, he came and did the job for us. Back to the planning office tomorrow morning then.

I'm shocked

I think it was in 2008 when the roof of our house collapsed. It was an expensive faff getting it fixed but, eventually, it was all done. The architect signed off the work and the planning office stamped it. But there was one last step to go.

We asked a pal to keep pestering the planning office to do that last final inspection but around 15 months later still no result. Being back in Culebrón for the summer and able to go to the office when it's open I popped in yesterday and talked to them.

I'll be down at 10.30 said the man. It's closing in on noon now. I am surprised.

Desestimado

I quite approve of taxes. We all pay in, we all get more out. I know it's not a popular view.

Our local taxes in Spain are based on services, at least some of them are, so much for water, so much for rubbish collection etc. So the system isn't for the general good it's a specific charge. Back in December we got a bill for drainage but we don't have drainage so I appealed the charge. I didn't get a reply so, being away from work and having time we drove the 25kms to the tax collection office to ask what was happening about the appeal. Whilst we were there I also wanted to get a digital certificate to allow me to access the Virtual Offices of several quasi governmental organisations.

No chance with the certificate said the woman, no Internet today. Go to the Town Hall to get one. And the drains, we still haven't got a reply? She dug around in her computer, ah, yes, appeal denied. I was a bit cross not because of the charge so much but because of the woman's blasé attitude in an office where the customer service is usually good. I think I was caustic, the Spanish certainly seemed to flow, if not my body language made the message clear anyway.

We went to the Town Hall. The digital certificate woman was friendly, informative and efficient, ten minutes from start to finish. Now I wonder if it will work?

16 pence a pack

I really approved of the radio doctor on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire. Full of good advice. He wasn't the sort to recommend a trip to the GP if you had a bit of a sniffle. He did suggest that men of a certain age should take low dose aspirin though and I'm still taking his advice.

As I remember in the UK, in 2004, a packet of aspirin in a supermarket or one of those shampoo and  sun cream shops was going for around 16p. A hundred dispersible 75mg aspirin were about a quid so it was a bit of a shock when I got to Spain and a pack of 30 tablets was around 4€.

Then I found out that Aspirin is a Bayer trade mark in Spain so, by asking for Aspirina, I was asking for the equivalent of Anadin  rather than the generic. Acido acetilsalicilico may be a bit of a mouthful but salicylic acid is the generic name and the tabs come in at about a quarter of the price.

As older men we were talking about illnesses. My pal Geoff said that he didn't take all the aspirin that he was prescribed and would I like them? When he dropped them off I wondered why he was being prescribed the Bayer brand rather than the cheap generic equivalent. I could have sworn that the Spanish health care system had pledged to save millions by prescribing generic. Maybe I misunderstood or maybe it's the doctor who misunderstood.

Bars again

Back at the end of 2009 the Government introduced some legislation which said that bars shouldn't be cooled below 26ºC in summer or heated above 21ºC in winter. Obviously the measure was designed to save power and to help reduce the country's carbon dioxide emissions.

I remember thinking at the time that 21ºC wasn't very warm. Spanish bars can be cold and unwelcoming spots in winter with their tiled floors, tiled walls, hard, unpadded chairs and open doors.

Fortunately the bar owners have taken no notice. Only the other morning I was warming my frozen hands around a hot cup of coffee in a nice warm bar and later mentioned to Maggie how much more comfortable bars are than they were only a couple of years ago. But now some consumer group has been going around stirring things up and publicising the fact that the bars are failing to stick to the law.

Killjoys.

No taxes without drains

As a follow up to the last post (not the haunting melody but my last entry on this blog) I wrote out my appeal against the new drainage charge using the official form downloaded from the SUMA website.

On Tuesdays I meet with a Spanish bloke called Carlos to do a language exchange. I fail to speak Spanish and he talks some English. I asked him to check the grammar and what not of my appeal. "No problems," he said, "all the right boxes filled in and the explanation is simple but clear and accurate." The last item asked me to list any supporting documentation I was sending and as I had none that's what I'd written.

"You should send a copy of your DNI," said Carlos.

The DNI is the Identity Card that all Spaniards carry. I have an equivalent but it would never have struck me to send a copy. Thinking about it though I knew that Carlos was right. Everyone, but everyone wants to check your identity here and it has become so routine for Spaniards to show their ID that it never crosses their mind that it's an intrusive and overly bureaucratic measure.

Lots of faff to post the letter too. "Better not to fold the documents, get a big envelope," was what Carlos had advised. So I bought an envelope. I'd filled in the Certificated letter form at the Post Office and handed it across the counter with the unsealed envelope. "Just one small detail and you'll be there," said the friendly chappie at the Post Office, "You need to complete a Registered mail certificate as well as a sort of receipt."

It's away now. Just a simple form and an item to post but it feels like a small scale triumph whether SUMA finally accept the appeal or not.

Excuse me, what am I paying for?

The majority of the local taxes in Alicante are collected by an agency called SUMA. So the water bills, the rubbish collection, car road tax and the equivalent of the council tax all come from SUMA despite actually being set by the local Town Hall in Pinoso.

SUMA, in my experience, is an efficient organisation. I pay most of my bills by "direct debit" and SUMA's notifications always come a couple of weeks before the due date reminding me to check that I have sufficient funds in the bank etc. So unlike the banks, phone company and electric people who just take the money on random dates often without notification (though to be fair the phone and electric people have improved recently) SUMA do it the correct way.

So the other week a notification arrives that says that there has been a bit of a cock up on their part and that for some tax period they have either made an error in or forgotten a charge relating to sewerage and sewage charges. The language is the archaic stuff of official documentation and there is no date set on which they intend to take the payment (only 42€) though there is a section which tells me my rights should I wish to challenge this ruling. My guess is that this is notification that there will be a charge and that shortly they will send an actual bill.

Now we got new drains in Culebrón a while ago but ours was one of the six houses that was left out of the scheme. I could see a link, new service, new charge. So I wrote an email to them asking what the charge was and whether it applied to us as we don't have any drains. Their reply came back in a couple of days (another good sign, most Spanish organisations don't respond to email) though it offered no explanation except to tell me the official routes for lodging a complaint. Those routes include going into an office, using their virtual office (which requires an electronic signature) or sending the official form which has to be validated in a post office before the envelope is sealed.

I have two forms of electronic signature on my computer but neither of them will get me past their gate-keeping. Going to an office is a bit tricky as their working day and mine don't mesh and sending an official complaint by post seems a bit drastic. All I really want to know is what I'm paying for and whether it's a one off charge or an annual increase.

I've just spent an hour or so writing the few lines in Spanish (checking and rechecking grammar and phraseology takes me ages) to try to explain what I'm after, saying that I'm not after any sort of privileged information so we don't need the secure measures that they are asking for etc.

This could be the real test as to whether SUMA really is more human and one notch easier to deal with than the majority of Spanish bureaucracies. It would be so nice if they just did the decent thing and replied with a nice simple explanation in everyday language. Somehow though I doubt that will be the case.

Monday update: Not only have they replied (well done boys!)) but they've also said it's probably a mistake and I should appeal the decision as it's a recurring payment.

A sort of Foxtrot

The Post Office sent me a text message to say that there was something I needed to sign for waiting in our PO Box. Usually this is good news, often something ordered from Amazon. But we weren't expecting anything and a letter or packet that needs to be signed for can be bad too - a traffic fine, a tax demand.

Over the counter it looked official, bad, but then I realised that it was for a friend who had used our PO box number as a temporary measure when he was between homes. I was relieved.

As far as I know when non residents, and our friend still maintains his UK residence, sell a house a percentage of the selling fee is held back to cover the tax payable on the sale by the notary who handles the transaction. The Land Registry people eventually arrive at the official figure and then either ask for more cash or pay back the difference. We guessed that was what the paperwork was about as well as formalising the land registry entry in the new names. It may have been something completely different though because without a dictionary to deal with the technical and archaic language used in official documents we couldn't be sure.

What I thought was interesting and so Spanish was that the couple involved "completed" on the house nearly four years ago. All that time to process the sale. Even more Spanish was that the couple had 10 days to appeal the ruling.

Slow, slow, quick quick, slow.

I should like to suggest

Have you ever followed a police patrol car on a UK motorway? They'll be driving at 68mph in a 70mph zone so you can creep past whilst still obeying the law. I have a lot of respect for patrol car drivers - in my estimation they know their stuff and they give a good example in their driving habits.

Here in Spain we have to wear seat belts - a good thing. Amazingly police officers at local and national level and the Guardia Civil (who deal specifically with traffic) must have an exemption - they go around beltless. How odd is that?

So I just emailed the Interior Minister and asked him why. I expect a reply. As Willie Whitelaw once said to me when I, amazingly, got through to him on the phone "Why do you think I have a phone on my desk?" - Señor Rubalcaba has an email address at least.

I declare

I've just done my tax return. It didn't take me long. The tax people, usually referred to as Hacienda, send me a document through the post that says what they think I owe them or what they think they owe me. If I agree all I have to do is go to their webpage and confirm the details and that's it done for another year.

If I hadn't agreed then I could have changed the details online and confirmed those. I presume that, after a change, some tax clerk or maybe a computer programme, checks the changes and, if they seem reasonable, the confirmed but altered details are given the OK and processed.

The first year I had to do this I went to a local accountant who charged me a few euros, 30€ as I remember, to complete the original form and get me into the tax system. Once I existed on the Hacienda database they began to log any salary and tax payments made by my employers or by the state unemployment people so that they could calculate whether I had over or under paid at the end of the tax year. The tax year is the calendar year.

It doesn't have to be done online. Accountants can deal with the paperwork as can the local tax offices and I think that banks can too. It's obviously more difficult for someone with a business or with multiple income streams but for someone with finances as simple as mine it's dead easy.

Maggie got notification that her draft was available online via a text message to her mobile phone which included the reference number to give her access to the online draft.

Best of all they reckoned they owed me a few euros.

On the road

The rights and wrongs of running cars in Spain, originally registered on foreign plates, is one of the staples of the many expat Internet bulletin boards. Whatever the legal technicalities the idea is pretty simple. If you live in Spain your car should have Spanish plates, Spanish insurance and the rest whilst if, for instance, you live in the UK your motor should have UK plates, tax, insurance and safety checks. Living here means you spend more than 183 days of the year in Spain.

A Swedish chum who lives in Pinoso was pulled over at a police checkpoint a couple of weeks ago. Her car, which was running on Swedish plates, was briefly impounded until she was able to register the vehicle on temporary "tourist" plates. Now she is going through the process of re-registering on Spanish plates. The police told her they were having a bit of a blitz on foreign cars and that there would be no fine (I can't remember whether she said that could have been two or three thousand euros) if she got on with the re-registration.

Obviously, as EU passports are no longer stamped with entry and exit dates, keeping track of where a car lives has become much more difficult. I presume too that a year means a calendar year so it wouldn't be enormously difficult to organise a perfectly legal stay of nearly 12 months with a short six months on each side of the new year.

My guess is that all the police look for is a full and current set of paperwork whether that be Spanish or from another EU country.

Ranting

I have complained before about the banks in Spain. I'm going to do it again.

When I was in Ciudad Rodrigo I opened an account with a bank called Banesto. It didn't go smoothly. Despite several visits they never managed to transfer my direct debits successfully and they lied to me about commission charges. I asked about charges before opening the account and I was given a list. The list did not mention that every Internet transfer would cost 2€. "Ah, that's not a commission, that's a service charge."

As much as anything I chose Banesto because there is a branch in Pinoso. At least there was. It was closed down the week before we got back. There is, however, an agency with the Banesto sign and there is a note on the old bank office to say that business can be transacted in the agency. "Can I get money out of my account here?" I asked, "Of course:" But it wasn't true. If my account had been in Pinoso I could have got to my money but as it was in Ciudad Rodrigo my options were to go to the bank machine of another bank - where there is a charge - or to drive to Monóvar some 14kms away.

I got very cross and in shameful, grammatically inept, Spanish I complained loudly. "The sign says Banesto, my bank book says Banesto but I can't get my money. It's always the same, every time a little trick to siphon off a euro here and a euro there. You're a bunch of liars and thieves!

I could see the looks of complete disbelief between the two women on the other side of the desk. What was wrong with this Brit, who couldn't speak properly, making such a fuss over a commission charge of 1.43€? So far, this year, two accounts, both continuosly in credit have had attracted charges of 180€.