Life in La Unión

They really couldn't make it any easier. Name and address, delivery address, old passport number and not much else. That's done on-line, then you pay - just short of £103. Next you print out the form which tells you the documents you need to enclose, a couple of passport photos and away in the post. Spaniards carry ID cards so even the smallest town has a photographer to take the appropriate photos. There are photo booths too but I thought a photographer would know the rules. The photos of me were pink and silver haired but then that's me. I thought there was a lot of shoulder and chest though and not enough face. True enough when I tried them against the template on the passport application form my face was too small. Also the photographer had guillotined the photos with a serrated edge which gave them a nice 1960s feel something I suspected that HM Passport Office may not find quite so charming. So I drove to a photo booth in Cartagena. The blurb on the outside said...

Maggie tells me I'm a bit deaf. She says I have the telly and the radio on too loud and that I don't understand her. Me, I didn't think there was a problem. Maybe I have problems understanding Spanish and I hope a bit of extra volume will help. In fact I like to use headphones or earphones when I can. So today I went for a hearing test. I was a bit annoyed that they kept me waiting as the parking meter ticked away and when the woman beckoned me into her office with a "Come on" I wondered if we were going to have a conversation in broken English. But no, she let me speak in Spanish. Broken Spanish instead. The test was simply a range of beeps in each ear at different frequencies. "Perfect" she said. "For my age?" I asked. '"No, more or less perfect, a bit of loss of low frequency in the left ear but absolutely fine." It was a good answer. Hearing loss may have given me a good excuse for my problems with Spanish b...

I've just had a really enjoyable holiday in Sri Lanka. At times it seemed like hard graft as we trudged kilometres or puffed and panted up steps but it will give me stories to bore anyone who will listen for years to come. Teaching English has made me very aware of my native tongue. I am more and more amazed by the power of the English language. In Sri Lanka, in Qatar, people addressed me in English and I spoke to them in English. Sometimes there was some confusion but the truth is that I have more difficulty speaking Spanish in Spain than I did speaking English in Sri Lanka. You'd have to ask the people I spoke to if it were the same for them! I haven't done the research but my impression is that Sri Lanka isn't incredibly poor. We certainly weren't besieged by outstretched hands or made to squirm at our wealth amongst bodies disfigured with disease or hunger. On the other hand it was pretty obvious that we were from a different, richer, more caring and bette...

It may well have been the Fat Duck but anyway it was a posh restaurant. A friend had been invited there. He said that the food was good but that the service was better - the waiters were at his elbow a second after he realised that he needed one. Like most things in life Spanish waiters follow a normal distribution. Some are terrible, some are superb and the vast majority do a good enough job. Customers need the waiters in Spanish bars to be more attentive than their British counterparts because the culture of table service as opposed to bar service puts the onus on them to spot you. Generally they do, generally the service is quick enough and generally the relationship between customer and server is neutral. By neutral I mean that the service is neither toadying nor overly friendly. That can be a difficult relationship to maintain. Generally that's how I remember being served by people in the UK but the last time I was in England I noticed a couple of times that servers we...

More than once I have used the example of Spanish filling stations as one of the sure signs that Spanish business is badly organised. There are plenty of self service places, like the one in the photo, but usually as you pull up on the forecourt someone comes to serve you. I wonder why, with self service pumps, they pay someone to do a job that they could get me, the customer, to do for nothing? When I ask Spaniards about the reason I often get something about keeping people employed. Given that we seem happy enough to live in a capitalist system that answer just adds to my grave doubts about how Spaniards approach business. A couple of times, usually at night, we have pulled up at service stations where the lone employee is firmly locked inside the petrol station and a prepayment system is in operation. You have to hand over your money before they allow you to pump fuel into your vehicle. I went to a local petrol station today, late morning. Nobody came to serve me and the pumps...

I really like tea. Nothing special, just ordinary council house tea; milk, no sugar. We've never found it difficult to buy "British" tea since we first arrived here. In the early days it could be a bit of a fag going to the right supermarket or searching out a British food shop but nowadays Mercadona, probably the most widespread chain of supermarkets in Spain, stocks PG Tips and Tetley's so it's dead easy Long ago I stopped buying tea in Spanish bars. It usually comes luke warm and, unless you are very precise in your ordering instructions made half and half with hot milk. Anyway the coffee is excellent so why bother? Even for non tea drinking Britons tea is as much a concept as it is a drink. We are aware of the variations on tea from English Breakfast and Earl Grey through Darjeelings and Lapsang Souchong and we may even include decaff, fruit and herbal teas in the list but we all know that tea is tea and it has names like Ty-phoo, Yorkshire, Tetley...

The External Health building in Cartagena looks disused. I first went there a couple of weeks ago. I pressed the bell but I was so sure that the building was abandoned that I had started to walk away before someone answered the door. They took details and made me an appointment for today. Today in the same building a toothless chap wearing jeans and a faded polo shirt asked me what I wanted. He didn't look like medical staff - no white coat, the unmistakable badge of anyone doing any job in the health service. He must have been the caretaker because he knew what I had to do. First the registration on a lob sided, thousand time copied form and then a short wait for the doctor. Usual advice - avoid the water, drink whisky without ice, don't eat veg. Big change to my lifestyle there then. Covering myself in DEET and taking anti typhoid and malaria tabs will be novel though. To get the tablets I need to go to another doctor for a scrip. Usual Spanish system. Why do thing...

I often despair of the Spanish ship spoiled for the ha'p'orth of tar. Nothing serious but enough to make us non competitive in a competive world and, incidentally, to drive me to distraction I bumped into it twice today. I went to find an exhibition. We've just had a new Primark open in the local shopping centre. As part of the opening hoo-hah the shop got ten local atrists to take a Primark garment and turn it into a work of art. Ignoring Bangladeshi slave workers I decided to go and have a look. The blurb on the centre's website didn't give an exact location but it's not a huge centre. When I got there I couldn't find the exhibition, There were no obvious notices. I looked in the shop but there were just people scrabbling through piles of clothes as far as I could see. Anyway I was pretty sure that Primark wouldn't give up expensive sales space to art. I wandered the centre but couldn't find anything. Eventually, overcoming my terror of talki...

My finances are a little stretched at the moment. Two months without pay over the summer and then a month with very few paid hours in September has left a delicate balance between outgoings and income. Provided my October pay gets to the bank before the 6th there won't be any problem but there's the rub. Transfer money from an account in Spain to another and your money disappears for a few days. It goes from the sending bank immediately but it can take four or five days to show up in the other account. I don't often go to a bank but, when I do it's always a pain. The queues are interminable. Every transaction seems to take an age. There are notices on the desk to say that they will only accept recibos, which so far as I know means receipts or bills, between 8.30 and 10.30 and that always makes me worry that they will send me away. I can't complain about the charges from my current bank. Basically there aren't any but, in order to maintain free banking, I h...

Mucha gente me ha preguntado sobre mi estado de animo ya que estoy de Rodriguez. ¿Estás bien viviendo solo? dicen. Sí, estoy bien e, inesperadamente, ¡estoy consiguiendo alimentarme sin ninguna ayuda! Por supuesto la vida de un soltero tiene sus desventajas pero tiene ventajas también; más espacio en la cama, dominio total del mando y sin la necesidad de desplazarme de habitación en habitación apagando las luces. Llenar el tiempo es fácil -  de hecho no me queda suficiente tiempo para hacer lo que quiero hacer. Siempre he sido un escritor de listas – las cosas por hacer -  y esta lista está tan llena como siempre. Los quehaceres de la casa, un libro para leer, tele para ver y la batalla continua de dominar el español - una batalla que a Maggie le encantó recordarme, en una de nuestras conversaciones por Skype - que nunca ganaré. El curro es una rutina obvia. Día tras día tengo que repetir los mismos consejos repetidas veces. A cada uno; pues la mayoría de mis alumnos, come...

Lots of people have asked me if I'm OK living alone. I'm fine and surprisingly I'm having no problem feeding myself. Being alone has lots of disadvantages but there are advantages too. More space in the bed, complete control of the telly remote and no need to go around the house turning off uselessly burning lights. I'm having no problem at all filling my time, in fact I am short of time. I've always been a list writer and my current lists are full; household things to do, books to read, work to prepare alongside the ongoing and time consuming task of trying to crack Spanish even though, as Maggie unkindly reminded me in one of our Skype conversations, I never will. Work is an obvious routine. As well as trying to correct the same errors in all of my students over and over again - "Can you please repeat that?" rather than "Can you repeat?" or the constant battle with some sounds; shhhhe not sea, shhhhow not sew - there is the simple time rout...

I'd just been to the flicks. Gravity, good film I thought. The cinema is in a shopping centre and the car park was mayhem - people and cars everywhere. The centre was ablaze with light. The Seventh Circle of hell but with writhing vehicles rather than contorted bodies. A Spanish chum riding in my car a while ago told me that it is a mortal sin, or at least 300€ worth of fine, not to signal whilst moving between lanes on motorways. I sniggered. Spaniards are not big on turn indicators. I picked my way through cars going in each and every direction. Going against the direction arrows in a car park is normal behaviour, moving without lights too, not signalling is as common as acne on teenage faces. I was about to move through a gap when I noticed that a supposedly parked car was rolling slowly forward. I waited and watched as the car bumped gently into a wall. The driver had been too absorbed in his wasap (that's WhatsApp to you and me) to notice till he felt the jolt. I lau...

One of my regular readers got in touch and said I should be blogging more. "There must be lots to talk about in your new neighbourhood!" she said. There isn't. I'm not doing anything so I'm not bumping into things that are noteworthy. Nonetheless, given that I have so few readers I had to try and think of something. Bananas. That was something that I thought this morning over breakfast as I tried to eat a particularly tasteless but yucky one. Bananas here are different. The Spanish word banana usually refers to a small fruit that looks like the typical "British" banana except that it's smaller. They are quite different though, a completely different texture and taste and typically they come from the Canary Islands. Plátanos are more like the typical banana that we can buy in any greengrocer or supermarket in the UK. The quality here though is very variable. Often they are very green, tough to eat and very woody in texture. Alternatively the skin ...

Driving back to Culebrón from La Unión on Thursday last week I spotted a Guardia Civil van just as we were about to enter a 100 kph zone. I'm pretty law abiding anyway but I double checked my speed and slotted in behind the van doing just under the speed limit. When the limit dropped to 80 kph so did I but not so the van which steadily disappeared into the distance. Some time ago there was a bit of a rumpus in Cartagena when drunken lads forced one of the Easter floats to retreat because of too much pushing and shoving. The next evening there was a big police presence outside the culprit bars. One of the police cars parked on a pavement causing both a traffic hazard and forcing pedestrians to walk in the roadway. I've just watched something on the telly, on la Sexta, about the police in various cities. Sorting out domestic fights, dealing with date rape drugs in a bar, chasing people breaking into cars. Typical fly on the wall type documentary. As the police drove to...