Dawn

Dawn

Friday, March 26, 2010

Interestingly different perspectives on the UK’s pre-election budget:-
- The right-of-centre Daily Telegraph – Gordon Brown hammers the middle classes with new taxes
- The left-of-centre El País – Gordon Brown courts middle class voters with new benefits

Well, anyway, here I am back on Merseyside. Our trip from Pontevedra to Santander was largely uneventful, helped by the fact the weather was perfect and not the rain-sodden experience we’d feared. Company always shortens journeys, of course, but in this case I had the added pleasure of Mike’s sat-nav. A couple of hours into the trip - and for reasons we could only guess at - this went haywire, issuing regular instructions for us to turn off the N634 and into adjacent fields. And then – once we were on a new autovía stretch – it got it into its head we were driving across pastureland and so repeatedly told us to turn onto minor roads the motorway was crossing. But, in truth, this wasn’t the fault of the gadget, as Mike had failed to make the last software update and it had no knowledge of the new road. I say ‘it’ but - because we’d opted for the female voice - we kept referring to the machine as ‘her’. Which is a little odd, if you think about it. Actually, Mike calls it Grace, because it’s amazing. Most of the time. But, anyway, I think I’ll get one of the things, if only because I will surely enjoy disagreeing with and shouting at it from time to time. Now that my daughters live in homes of their own, I miss this little pleasure in life.

I have long thought the perfect cohabitation would involve the partners living in adjacent cottages (or flats) with a connecting door that could be bolted on either side. I mention this because, from a BBC podcast I listened to on the boat last night, I learned that 10% of the British adult population are now LATs. Which are people Living Apart Together. Most of these do so because they either can’t afford to rent or buy a place. Or because they’re working in different towns.Bbut a third of them are said to live apart by choice, as each needs his/her own space. At 3% of the adult population this means, I think, around 900,000 people or 450,000 couples. I wonder what the Spanish numbers are.

In a recent post from Notes from Spain, Ben Curtis delved into the mystery of the comunidad to which you perforce belong if you live in a block of flats in Spain. Or, like, me in a housing development. Apart from paying a monthly bill, my only real experience of my ‘community’ has been attending a three-hour meeting nine years ago which agreed only one thing - that there’d be another meeting in a month’s time. Which there wasn’t. My community of thirty-plus houses stretches, in fact, over three phases of development and, during the years, I’ve noticed a certain correlation between the improvements we’re all expected to finance – new ground tiles, a new security gate, etc. – with the location of the then-current president of the community. Feeling that we were being neglected in our phase, I recently wrote to this year’s president congratulating him on the improvements down near his house and asking whether we poor relations in our phase could have the rotten boards on our gangway to the pool replaced before one of the kids fell through them. As I’d done with the previous boards a couple of years ago. I got an immediate call from the company which we pay to manage things, to the effect that the president was not really to be bothered with these matters and that the work was in hand and would be done very soon. Well, that was three weeks ago and it will be interesting to see whether my neighbours’ kids are any better protected when I get back from the UK in 3 weeks time. Meanwhile, I spoke to my close neighbour about this, as he has two young daughters. His response was that he was, in fact, vice-president and would be taking over the head honcho role quite soon. After which boards of gold would be installed. So, that’s how it’s done. Which might come in handy if you ever get to live in a comunidad.

Finally . . . The Spanish police have uncovered a massive fraud around the buying and selling of carbon dioxide credits in the EU. Well, who’s going to be surprised at that?

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