Life in La Unión

As I sprayed the antiperspirant under my armpit my mind strayed to getting in touch with the phone company. The flat is beginning to look a little barer because things have been migrating back to Culebrón for the past few weeks. At the end of the month I will leave La Unión and before I go I need to cancel the phone and Internet connection. I realised I would need to know the number I wanted to cancel. I have no idea of the land-line number for the phone here because I never phone the flat and if I did I would just press something on my mobile. In fact I don't know any phone number except that of my mobile phone. And the address. The phone company would probably need that too. I know the street name but I'm not absolutely certain whether it's flat 3 at number 11 or flat 11 at number 3. When I need a physical address I never use this one so all I need to know is how to walk to the front door. Although some people would disagree with me it's not a memory problem. ...

I don't get a lot of calls on my mobile but you can guarantee that when I do it is when I am stuffing a turkey, cleaning the lavatory or at least driving. It happened today. I was cleaning grease from under the electric hob when the phone exploded into life. It was a Madrid number which usually means someone trying to persuade me of the benefits of some wonder product. I nearly didn't bother to answer. The woman checked who I was, said she was calling from my bank and asked me if I knew anything about a payment from Iberdrola, the electricity supplier. I didn't. She mentioned a name associated with the payment which rang no bells at all. Don't worry about it then said the woman and went away. Five to ten seconds after the phone call was over I realised what it was. The landlady of my new flat, whose name I hadn't recognised, had asked about paying the electric bill directly from my bank account. She'd gone and done that and I'd just told my ban...

I needed to get myself an Internet connection. Now Spain isn't exactly the third world. On the telly the big phone operators like ONO and Jazztel are offering fibre connections of up to 100Mb. La Union is small but it is a town, or at least a large village, not some rural hamlet, so I didn't expect any problem in getting a decent deal on a connection. I thought there may even be fibre. Using a combination of my mobile phone and borrowed internet connections I had a look around the suppliers. ONO looked good but when it came down to it they have neither fibre nor ADSL to my new building. The Jazztel website seemed determined to cause me grief - it has those pages that lose all the details if you want to change something and annoying popups with offers to get someone to phone you. They didn't have coverage either. One of my work colleagues suggested a small local operator but it was the same story for La Union. They suggested another local firm who bragged of offerin...