Life in Culebrón

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

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

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