Number two of two

Chinese buffets are an example. The first time you go to one it's all a bit confusing. The second time, less so, and by the third time you actually get what you want and in the order you want it. I've heard that crows learn quickly but I think we humans are faster.

I've been helping a friend in his meetings with the medical staff at the hospital. If you've read this blog before you will know that I mumble and groan about my Spanish speaking ability all the time. I do speak Spanish though. I gurgle and trip over words, my Yorkshire accent becomes more pronounced and I abandon any clever constructions I may think I know, especially during the first few words, but I usually muddle through.

Hospitals are much less easy to understand than Chinese buffets but, crow like, I suspect we'll soon pick it up. Spanish hospitals speak Spanish which adds a layer of difficulty for non Spanish speakers. Not only do you not know which door to wait outside or knock on but it's not so easy, Blanche DuBois like, to rely on the the kindness of strangers. That's why I've been involved. The first time my friend, his wife and I traipse, en masse, into a new to us doctor's office the doctor asks if I'm the translator. I usually say that I'm a pal who speaks a little Spanish. That generally suffices though it possibly undersells my abilities. Most of we old Britons don't handle Spanish particularly well. When we say "A little" to the question "Do you speak Spanish?" some Britons actually mean they have no more than hello, goodbye, I'd like a pint of lager please and my postillion has been struck by lightning. Their economy with the truth can make my truth sound like an untruth.

I suspect that uncertainty about my abilities may be why one doctor gave us a bit of a drubbing. Her argument was that she needed a translator who could convey the nuances of what she was saying, someone who knew the hospital procedures and, basically, someone more clued up than me. She didn't say that last thing but I understood it anyway. I tend to agree with her. If I can't say dexamethasone and it's a word I need to know then it's not so good. There is also something in my personality that makes me unhappy about talking to strangers and I suggested to my pals that I may be a bad choice as a go between. I told them how, before Google Maps, I would buy a street plan rather than ask someone for directions. My friends though have decided that they prefer dealing with someone they know over someone more technically competent.

They were in the hospital the other day without me. They were working on the assumption that they were there for a procedure. Patients are pretty passive during lots of procedures from a CAT scan to a blood pressure check. Nobody needs to say much as they are strapped into an x-ray machine, they just need to go where directed. But the friends got scolded again. "What happens if there is some problem and you can't tell us about it?

When I keeled over last year and woke up in an ambulance I was able to talk to the paramedics, the next few days in hospital there were no real communication problems. I forget that for other Britons that isn't necessarily the case. The other day, on a forum, I directed a bloke who is having trouble with marketing phone calls to one of the "Robinson List" sites. It wasn't much use to him as it was in Spanish. I don't think that had even registered with me. Crap as I think my Spanish is it's perfectly useable for most situations and it's difficult to remember that for some people even the small things, like knowing what's in a can on a supermarket shelf, is a constant and repetitive daily problem.

Number one of two

I think it would be true to say that the majority of Britons who settle in Spain intend to learn Spanish. The general view seems to be that, after a year or so, we should be getting by followed by a general and constant improvement until we are fluent after maybe four or five years. A longish term project but with immediate gains. That's a vast generalisation. Some people never have any intention of learning Spanish. Others, particularly those who maintain regular and constant relationships with Spaniards through living, working or studying together, may expect to, and actually do, learn the language much faster.

There are as many opinions on learning Spanish amongst Britons living here as there are Britons. I often think that a chap who runs a famous English language learning organisation here in Spain has it right. He was talking about English but the idea holds good for Spanish. He maintains that most people learning English get to whatever level they want or need and then falter or stop. That expertise may be sufficient to get a beer or it may be enough to maintain a detailed conversation about the functioning of the House of Lords. It's a level that suits the individual. Job done, now to rebuild the outbuildings.

Most Britons find it hard to learn Spanish. The sounds are different, there are thousands of words and phrases to memorise, there are structures and formulas to grasp, copy and use and English keeps getting in the way. It's just one huge memory task. People blame their teachers, they maintain that they are too old to learn, they say they get by alright with a few words. As I said, as many opinions as there are Britons living here.

It's easy to see that Spaniards find English just as odd as Britons find Spanish. I'm reading a book at a moment and the character goes for a walk from one Battery Park at the bottom of Manhattan up through Harlem and across to the Bronx. He follows Fordham Road. Now Fordham Road has a certain sound Britons but either the Spanish author, the Spanish proof readers or the Spanish editors don't share that sensibility. Fordham Road is also spelled as Frodham Rd. (possible but wrong) and Fhordam Rd. (impossible in my opinion). The point is not the misspelling but that it seems possible or even correct to Spaniards and my guess is that most Spanish readers won't even notice the error. I'm often Christopher Jhon on documents and there's something similar with the Pinoso Christmas programme. A local theatre group is doing Oliver Tweest, I presumed this was a spoof on Oliver Twist but no, it's a simple typo.

How people choose to learn is as diverse as the methods. Some take classes to try to learn - some want native speakers, others look for people from their own country with a good grasp of the language. Some sign up for miracle courses while others use applications on their mobile phone, watch films, listen to songs and podcasts, there are those who make vocabulary lists and there are even some unreformed types who buy books with CDs in the back cover. Methods and tips are a regular topic of conversation amongst the immigrant British population here. Some of those things come at no extra cost, some, like classes, cost money. Obviously enough most of the same things could be said about Spaniards who want to learn English except that the ones here are not living in a foreign milieu. They're home.

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.

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.

Catetos and country bumpkins

There's nothing going on. A pretty typical Saturday but, lost for anything to write, I hatched a cunning plan. I'd talk about nothing.

This plan came to me just after I'd collected the mail and as I washed the car, Maggie's car to be precise. We have a post box on the house but deliveries in the countryside are a bit haphazard. Safer a PO box in the town Post Office. We also have water and space to wash a car at our house in Culebrón. Today I was just being lazy. For many Spaniards though the Sunday morning car wash ritual, beloved of so much of suburban Britain, is unrealisable. Most people here, after all, live in flats, not everybody, but the majority. So getting a bucket of water to your car isn't easy. Anyway several towns have local bye-laws prohibiting street car washing. Pinnoso being a typical example. This means that there are lots of car washing bays in petrol stations all over Spain. In contrast to the UK where I remember that the tunnel wash with rotating brushes was the most common here those lance type power washers that lift off paint are the usual offer.

The car freshly washed I went  to buy some gas - in a bottle. We country folk don't have piped gas. Butane in 12.5kg cylinders is the norm. I bought the gas from the shop at the local co-operative bodega which has a decidedly agricultural theme. Safety footwear and parts for irrigation systems rub shoulders with tinned sardines and chocolate bars. I asked if they had any liquid for killing the picudo rojo, the beetle that wants to eat our palm tree. They did and I bought some. I got some cashew nuts too and a bottle of brandy.

I shouldn't have needed the insecticide. I know a man who has some, a man that I've hired twice already to douse the tree in some nasty chemicals that apparently mash up the neural pathway of the beetle beasties. Approximately six weeks ago he and I made a vague arrangement that I would contact him before the weekend for the "every 45 days" treatment. Do it via a message he said. It's easier for me. I loved him. Messages in Spanish are so much easier than phone calls. I sent him a message. I sent him a second. He didn't reply. I phoned. No answer. I phoned again and this time he answered. He was specific but vague - Saturday morning, I'll confirm the time on Saturday. He didn't phone to confirm. He didn't turn up. 

I know that plumbers, carpenters, gas fitters and insect slaughterers all over the world fail to turn up to the majority of their appointments. There is, though, something fatalistically Spanish about the process. The non answered messages and the vague phone call are a routine stratagem. 

On a separate tack I have been trying to find out how long in advance I need to book a trip for the oversubscribed visits to the Cota Doñana National Park. The company that runs one of the trips has a website with a "contact us" online form. I've used the form, I've had the confirmation of receipt of the message but I've had no reply. I resent the message, just in case. The third time I asked them why they bothered with a contact form if they never responded. I asked if they were public employees and consequently out for breakfast (this is a Spanish joke.) The truth is I wasn't in the least surprised. It was just a first sally. I knew that I would have to phone just as I know that there will be a vagueness about the eventual booking. We will have to trust to luck as we set out for a destination 700kms from home. 

So, back to today, I climbed up the ladder, which wasn't quite long enough, weighed down by a back pack type spray gun that weighed in at around 20kg and requires both hands to operate. I wobbled and sprayed the tree. I had to do that with 45 litres of the stuff. It took over two hours and it nearly killed me. The chemicals were running down my arms, soaking my back, dribbling into my hair. I was wearing a mask, gloves and overalls but I felt the need for a change of clothes and a shower afterwards. Ah!, country pleasures.

Anyway, as it is a typical Saturday now for the telly. I usually end up watching a programme on La Sexta in which pundits and journalists shout at each other and especially at an economist with a strange accent. It's compulsive viewing particularly with a packet of cashew nuts and half a bottle of brandy to hand. We country folk are easily amused.

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.

Another little glitch

This is another in my series of moans about Spanish websites.

We booked a couple of days away with the Castilla la Mancha tourist website. I booked and paid online without any difficulty. I got a confirmation of the purchase by email. The next working day a courier turned up with the voucher and a really well presented booklet. I was well impressed; the website had worked, the organisation seemed efficient.

The package contained a voucher which can be exchanged for a series "weekend" breaks. I could either ring or send a request by email. So, for the usual reason of avoiding a phone conversation, I sent an email. The next evening I got one of those "This is an automatically generated message, delivery of your message has been delayed, you do not need to do anything, we will try to resend the messsage." I checked the email address and I even replied to the email that they had sent me as a foolproof way of getting the address right. I've just had another "undeliverable" message again on both emails.

Ah well, on the phone tomorrow then.

P.S: I did phone and they were dead efficient. They confirmed the details of our telephone conversation by email within moments, phoned through the confirmation in a couple of hours and sent the voucher for the trip at the same time by email.