And may God have mercy upon your soul

The last time I was in France I was holidaying in Cataluña. It was the sign that said 20 kilometres to France or something that drew us there. Ah, the gay abandon of it all, the sweet adventure of crossing an international frontier just because we could. Free spirits and all that.

So last Friday I got a speeding ticket from France written in Spanish. Some French traffic camera seems to think I was there on Christmas Eve 2016. Actually I was in Villena and so was the Mini. I bought a bottle of Laphroaig for me and a bottle of wine for Maggie as a Christmas treat. I paid with a credit card. The credit card bill is now one of my few bits of evidence that I was in Spain.

At first I thought the ticket was a scam but a bit of asking around and a bit of checking some websites and it seemed real enough. A 68€ fine or 45€ with a discount for quick payment. I have 45 days from the issue of the ticket to appeal.

The paperwork was pretty good; details of what and how and why, methods to get a copy of the photo and various "modes" of appeal. The website was in several languages and both the paperwork and the website suggested that nearly everything could be done online. Paying the fine went from cash and credit cards to paying via a mobile phone app and a Google Pay account.

When I got into the detail of the paperwork the website and documentation began to look less good. Basically unless I had certain pieces of paper I would have to make a deposit of 68€ to contest the ticket. I rang the service centre in France and spoke to someone in English. She said it was easy. Go to the police, report that my number plates had been usurped (A bit like Richard III and Henry VII) and then send them the scanned report via the website and Robert est ton oncle. I went to the Guardia Civil. "We can't give you any paperwork because how do we know the plates have been usurped?" "You need to get a copy of the photo - it'll either be a mistake or if it is real then we can give you paperwork". "Anyway, it's easy without us," said the Guardia officer, "just fill in the form bim, bam, tell them you weren't there and Robert será tu tio". I rang the French service centre again. "If I just pay the fine do I get points on my licence?" The man, it was a man this time, said he would advise against paying up because if someone had copied my plates I could expect fine after fine after fine. I see the logic but I don't know how that will work practically - how will paying stop the speed cameras generating tickets? He did tell me though that my defence was Mode 1 on the form. He said I didn't need to send money to make the appeal. He was wrong. For a Mode 1 appeal I needed the paperwork from the Guardia. Without paperwork it's a Mode 3 appeal. Actually it didn't matter anyway. After hours of preparing documents, scanning other documents and reducing them in size so they would fit onto the French website I finally pressed the send button. "Erreur" said the site. It was one of those websites where after each failed attempt you need to go back to the very first step. I tried with different browsers, different document sizes, different labels on the documents. I gave up.

I asked my insurance company - insurance companies in Spain often "deal with" speeding tickets - if they could help and I sent them all the scanned paperwork. They, rang me back. They only deal with stuff in Spain so they couldn't help but the legal department pointed out that my paperwork probably proved that I was in Spain but it didn't prove the car was. They thought the chances were that the speeding ticket would hold up in court and I would be found guilty.

I turned my attention to getting a copy of the photo. If it wasn't my registration number, if it wasn't the car or it wasn't me I might not have to prove the nearly impossible that neither the car nor I were in France. That had to be done by ordinary post. It needed lots of copied documentation of course. I went to the post office to post it before work but, after waiting in the queue for thirty minutes, I gave up, stuck all the stamps I had on the envelope and hurled it into the post box. 

I've spent this weekend occasionally trying to get the documentation to load to the website but, eventually, I gave up and collected it all together in an envelope. I paid the 68€ to lodge an appeal online. I notice that there are three possible decisions on appeal: I may end up paying the original fine because I didn't prove my case, I may end up with the fine increased by 10% for wasting the court's time or they may exonerate me. In the last case I have to write to ask for my deposit to be refunded - the refund is not automatic. And the cost of posting the bundle of documents by registered post was another 13.25€.

My guess? They decide I was in France and it costs me 68€.

The photo by the way is of the last time I was in France.

White Lines (Don't Don't Do It)

When driving in Spain crossing solid white lines, in their many manifestations, is a bit of a no-no. I did it innocently in Cartagena in front of a passing police car once and got that crooked finger "come hither" symbol along with a sound telling off. On the telly the traffic cameras in the helicopters metaphorically click their tongues as lorries, cars and motorbikes, on completely deserted roads, take the direct line through the curves.

Culebrón, our village, is split in half by the CV83 road - or more accurately split into something like a big bit and a little bit - and it's our part, the little bit, that is the cast aside orphan of the village. Our access road is made from dirt and it is criss crossed with rivulets carved by the occasional storms. Some of the gullies are suspension torturing deep. Our street lighting is vestigial and intermittent and about half the houses are just beyond the reach of the mains drainage.

But, more than that, we are marooned behind solid white lines. Getting in and out of our part of the village requires either long detours to stay legal or nerves of steel as you make that not strictly legal, well definitely 300€ worth of illegal, turn across those stubbornly solid white lines. If anyone were to make that illegal turn - which, of course none of us do - they would also worry about the outright safety of it all as the traffic on the main road whizzes past at a lot more than the 60 km/h speed limit.

We really need a roundabout but my guess is that roundabouts don't come cheap. As I took the legal route the other day I wondered if a bit of extra signing and some re-organisation of the white lines might do the trick.

On the Town Hall website there's a form - it's a form that smacks of quill pens and  "I remain your humble servant" despite its downloadability - that seems to be a catch all for any general petition to the local council. So I filled it in and popped it into the Council offices on the way to work. I got a bar code and everything. The Town Hall doesn't have jurisdiction over the main road but I asked if they might make an application to the regional Government for we badly done to Culebroneros.

I know what will happen. Absolutely nothing. I mean nothing. Nobody will turn me down or reply but the form will simply cease to exist. Nonetheless, as I walked away, checking the Spanish of my copy for the umpteenth time, I felt that, at least, I'd tried.

Road signs

There are a lot of road signs in Spain. Most of them are pretty standard and give orders, warnings or advice in the way that road signs do all across the world. Some of them though, particularly speed restriction signs can be really difficult to work out.

In general there are fixed speed limits on roads which do not need to be signed. They are the default. They vary for different types of vehicles so I'll limit myself to cars. On motorways the speed limit is 120k/h, on roads with a wide hard shoulder it's 100, on standard two lane roads it's 90 and in towns it's 50k/h. All of these speed limits can be amended by the usual round sign with a red border and the black number on a white background. I didn't realise till I was checking details for this post that there is also a general minimum speed limit which is half the maximum. So you could be fined for going faster than 120k/h or slower than 60k/h on a motorway.

There is also an interesting exception to the 90k/h rule. Where there are no signs on a normal two way road you can exceed the speed limit by 20k/h during an overtaking manoeuvre.

Speed limit signs and no overtaking signs are everywhere on Spanish roads. I often wonder if someone powerful has a brother in law who makes road signs because, at times, the proliferation of them seems so excessive. It's very normal for instance to count down from the open road as you approach a town or a hazard such as a roundabout. 80k/h, twenty metres, 70k/h, twenty metres, 40k/h.

One of the key places where there are no overtaking signs and speed restrictions on what would normally be considered "the open road" is around a junction. These signs are usually backed up by changing the central road markings to single continuous white lines. These signs can be odd. Often there will, for instance, be a 60k/h sign a couple of hundred metres before a junction but, after the junction there will be nothing to say that the restriction has been lifted. Sometimes there are signs to mark the end of the no overtaking rule which I always take as showing that you can speed up again but, often, you seem to have to presume that once the hazard has been passed you are back to the general speed limit. In the case of a T junction this can mean that there are different speed limits on the opposite sides of the road because the hazard is only important on the side of the road where the junction is.

Another interseting one is where the sign is more descriptive. For instance there is an 80k/h limit on the way through a wide spot in the road outside Pinoso called Casas Ibañez. A few metres inside the 80 zone is a second sign which says 50k/h in the crossing. A few hundred metres later there is a second 80k/h sign. So I know where the 50k/h restrction ends but I have no idea where it starts.

And then, there are the completely contradictory signs. In the photo at the top of this entry the 20k/h sign is obvious but, on the road, the markings say 30k/h. Actually I understand that the cycle way marked in red is actually at variance with the rules for bikes which says that they should keep as close to the edge of the road as possible and means that cyclists using the track could actually be fined.

Hey, ho!