Translate

Sunday, March 15, 2009

A touch of months to come!


Today is hot enough for sun cream, but the persistent breeze stops it being so like a summer's day that you can kid yourself that it has come early.

Today is even busier on the beach than yesterday. It is obvious that the season has started and that, of course, fills us with dread. This is not because we resent the numbers of people who come quite openly to OUR beach and flaunt themselves on the golden sand. Though, thinking about it, we of course do. No, it is because the start of the season means that our neighbours will come to take possession of their long empty flats.

As I have explained previously, there is a rigid caste system in our block of flats. There are the Brahmins who own their own property and there are the Untouchables who rent.

When the Nabobs deign to return to their flats for the few weeks of the summer that they use them and the odd weekends of festivals they have loud conversations with each other from balcony to balcony in which their sole topic of conversation is what they are going to do to their flats because they are in a condition to do so by virtue of the fact of possession by ownership.

As these moneyed ‘visitors’ only come here in the summer, they tend to act as if their flats are the equivalent of holiday hotel rooms and they feel that they can behave with rather less reserve than they would at home.

The Spanish are not like the British; they do not need the alcoholic fuel of beer to release volubility and generally make an aural spectacle [is that possible?] of themselves. They self cater with a vengeance and have high octane shouting matches (which is what passes for conversation in these parts) on their balconies, so that the whole population of our flats can feel a vicarious part of their meal.

Many of these summer visitors arrive complete with rat dogs and matching children (both equally noxious) and generally act as if they owned the place – which, of course, they do!

All the economic experts that I have consulted (or the business teacher in my school) are glowingly pessimistic about the probable course of the present Financial Crisis and they are especially suicidal whenever they try and formulate the future of Spain into words. The ‘building boom’ which has fuelled Spain’s economic recovery from the repressive years of the fascist dictatorship has also been something of a hostage to fortune. Yes, people have been employed in building and vast fortunes have been made, but now that sober reality is forcing a long hard cold look at what has actually been done, the Spanish government is discovering that the boom was actually a bubble and that there is a vast amount of housing stock which is now vastly surplus to requirements. Economic gloom and doom is the order of the day as recession seems inevitable.

This, of course, should be good news for me as the price of housing should be tumbling down to such low levels that even I can consider buying something. Alas! As all my savings are in Britain and in sterling, I have had an effective devaluation of some 25% as well as seeing a horrific loss on money invested in ‘low risk’ accumulation funds – how ironic is that! The end result is that house deeds would have to be given away in packets of crisps before I could consider purchase!

There is of course the nearest that we come to economic planning: drawing the winning ticket on the lottery.

Some things never change
.

No comments: