If it isn't one thing it's another!

It was hardly a shock today to discover that my new bank book when fed into the BBVA machine completely buggered the thing up.

The bank manager, who must now shudder each time he sees my cheery face looming towards him, had physically to dismantle the machine to extricate my miraculously unmangled book. His attempts to change my foreigner’s account to a Spanish resident’s account took on a more and more desperate tone as he desperately punched at the keyboard of his computer!

My BBVA file is now bulging with incomprehensible sheaves of paper (all of which I’ve signed) which are the inevitable consequence of having anything to do with a bank. The papers a bank forces on you are exactly like the essential information that you never read when downloading some program on the computer. I should imagine it more than likely that most of us would find out that we have probably sold ourselves into slavery if we care to read the detail of the small print which never sees the light of a pixel when we impulsively click on the ‘accept’ button in our desperation to add to the growing stack programs that we never use.

I reckon that we have all sold our souls to the devil (aka Bill Gates) and all it needs for the bargain to be sealed is for a drop of our blood to fall onto the screen and we will find ourselves living through a modern version of Dr Faustus. Bill ‘Lucifer’ Gates will tell us that we have had our days of power and importance by using the internet and that our souls will be instantly taken to Silicon Valley to be imprisoned on a duo core processor. After all, if you think about it, how does a simple little bit of metal and goo manage to do all those tasks if there wasn’t an entity physically there to ensure that the thing actually worked?

When the administration in the bank was finished I was gifted (how else to describe it?) by a call from the lowlife in the estate agency who, only three and a quarter hours later than promised, told me that the contract for the flat could be signed tomorrow.
This I will believe when the contract is placed in front of me.

To celebrate this unlikely tardy competence on the part of the overpaid leeches of humanity Toni, his Mum and I went out for a menu del dia. This is the first in a series of experimental comparisons to ascertain the real differences between Catalonia and Wales in the value for money lunch stakes.

So, the first restaurant in this scientific comparison was Cal Gendre in the Carrer de Baix in Terrassa. Although smoking was allowed downstairs, upstairs was smoke free and, though the service was a trifle tardy, we were soon given a bottle of rose (taking Toni into account) a bottle of casera and basket of bread.

Since the meals were all comparable I will only describe mine: Fideuá to start followed by chicken cooked in Cava with boiled potatoes and a sort of Cornetto to finish. I also ordered a further bottle of red wine and we had three cortados. All of this came to under 30€ that is under £21, that is £7 per person. I think that Terrassa is a clear winner over Cardiff! I look forward to cataloguing further successes for Catalonia and eating the evidence!

Just when we felt that the saga of finding of a flat was beginning to deflate into a simple tale, the problems with buying a car appear to have risen from the slime and start to pose insuperable barriers to successful completion.

The real problem (or rather problems) is (or indeed are) that I do not have a regular income and have no recent records of continuing money being paid into my account. Such a person in modern Spain should not and cannot exist; at least cannot exist and ask for credit, no matter how healthy his balance at the bank is.

The whole of Peugeot in Castelldefels has been thrown into confusion by my having the barefaced audacity to ask for 33% of the payment for the car to be in the form of finance when I do not have a regular income! Such (as the Catalans would say) face! I look forward to the struggles ahead with an anger fuelled exasperated exhilaration.

And when all is said and done, who can ask for more?