Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore!

Living in Spain for a year has not given me any greater understanding of what is going on in the celebration of the festival of Sant Fermin.

This includes the tradition of bull running in Pamplona. A disturbingly large number of people dress up with white shirts and red neckerchiefs and provoke bulls which are set loose in the streets.

In the normal course of events I have no objection to people who indulge in dangerous sports as long as they do not expect the public health services to patch them up again when they get what they richly deserve.

I dread to think what they do the bulls before they set them loose, but if the bulls have the temerity just to stand around then there are plenty of people there to spur them up into more aggressively macho activity to match the fearless alcohol fuelled idiocy of the participants.

The bulls are obviously frightened and confused and on that basis alone this Hemmingway supported piece of cruelty should be banned. And talking of Hemmingway, look what happened to him at the end.

Toni is quick to point out that bizarre things like bull running only occur in places outside Catalonia. Inside Catalonia they have things like castell building and fuet. Things which have a human dimension at least and don’t involve cruelty to animals, though the fuet was once an animal, though I hope it was killed humanely!


There is very much a feeling of end of term and beginning of holidays and that is a moment for me to take the making of lists of tasks more seriously. More seriously because there is actually time to get them done and tick them off – surely one of the more satisfying activities known to human kind. As my list of tasks is on my handheld computer it reminded me that my insurance company have finally decided that the amount to repair the old broken handheld is too much. I therefore needed to return to MediaMarkt to get a refund on the deposit that was demanded before they would give me an estimate for the repair.

The ‘repair’ of my handheld is a long ongoing story which has been complicated by the international nature of the claim and the difficulty of the language in ensuring that the activity or lack of it in Spain was understood by all parties.

For whatever electronic reasons the first attempt to get the electronic copy of the estimate to the insurance company did not work and the delay between the failure and my realization that it was a failure meant that the time limit on the estimate had expired. The refreshing of the estimate and the extra application to the insurance company meant that I had to redo all the paperwork in MediaMarkt.

My presentation of the documentation for the refund was greeted by the assistant with the disturbing information that the repair would be ready in a few days. When I explained that I had not, could not have, authorized the repair, there was immediate recourse to yet more documentation – which could not be found.

You have to understand that I have given no indication of the actual time that this little transaction took or the number of people of increasing seniority and importance that were necessary to arrive at absolutely no conclusion to what is a nice dilemma.

I did not authorize the repair. The broken machine is mine and must be returned to me. I want the refund of the €100 deposit. I await the judgement of Solomon which will be needed to sort out this little mess.

I have, of course, bought a new handheld some time ago. This action was based on an eerie prescience based entirely on past hard experience which told me that the repair would not be simple/cheap/possible/easy/satisfactory or any combination of those words. As indeed it turned out.

The next horror I expect is that the insurance company will send me a cheque based on some gnomic computation to assess the value of the machine which has been deemed beyond repair.

This money will be sent to me by international cheque which I will have to pay into my hated bank, BBVA. This institution’s greedy fingers, unhelpful meretricious obstruction, dismissive attitude and refusal to speak Catalan (that last one was supplied by Toni) suggests that a major percentage of the cheque is going to be taken up with spurious ‘bank charges’ and probably the worst rate of exchange in the western hemisphere.

I can feel a comforting anger beginning to build and, as the cheque takes about 28 days to be processed, there is plenty of time for that anger to develop into an all encompassing fury.

My tasks are still growing with not a single job completed today.

But the sunbathing and a swim took my mind off such mundane concerns.

And I’m now convinced that the ‘dead’ cactus is showing subtle signs of life!