Swim to forget?

It is a reflection of the uniformly depressing nature of the ‘news’ nowadays that gaining an empty lane in my swimming pool for the whole of the duration of my metric mile crawl is enough to make me feel that not everything is ill with the world!

            I am still trying to get my head around the fact that Galicia, for the umpteenth year in succession, has elected a majority government of the criminally corrupt PP (Spanish Conservative) party!

Given the welter of adverse publicity showing clear maladministration throughout the PP organization it takes a particularly strong peg to block the nose from the stench of corruption to actually vote for such an undeserving bunch.  But vote they did and they have thereby promoted their president to be the most likely person to take over from the walking joke that is the acting president of Spain.  God help us all!

            The Basque country voted as it always does for parties who loathe the politicians in Madrid, and we get ever closer to the break-up of Spain.

            Enough.  Disgust with the present political situation is becoming an idée fixe with me and I am aware that I am repeating myself, and powerless fury becomes boring after a while.  Although I can vote in local elections, I have no say in national ones and I can not take a direct part in the changes that are essential if Spain is to develop from its long post-transition malaise.  Frustration does not even begin to cover what I feel.

Self-interest is always more refreshing!  I have had a message on my phone telling me that my state pension has achieved a “resulta favorablemente” and that I will soon be getting something by post telling me the “resolucion”.  I am not sure what this means as my pension is going to be paid by the UK and the few years that I worked in Spain are not going to make that much difference to how much I get.

            The whole process of getting my state pension has been interesting one.  The initial application form for people claiming from overseas was horrific in its demanding detail.  A panicked phone call to the UK revealed that, if you have worked in Spain, you have to apply via the Spanish social security system and not via the UK.  Given the propensity for revelling in pointless bureaucracy in this country I was, to put it mildly daunted.  The reality was a delight!  It took about five minutes with a bloke in the local social security office and the administration was done!  Unbelievable!  I dully received a notification for Newcastle that things had been processed and I am now waiting for the cash!  I will be interested to see what the Spanish system has to say as I had assumed that everything was done and dusted.  As far as I am able to work out, I think that the work that I did in Spain gives me an extra quid a week: not much, but I’d rather get it than pay it.

            I fear that the lurking missive from the Spanish state is more likely to be about taking money rather than giving it.  If you live abroad then your state pension is paid to you in toto with no tax deductions.  At this point the omnipotent hacienda or Spanish tax people take an unhealthy interest and demand that it be taxed by them: not unreasonable as I do actually live here!  

          I will try and empty my mind of the numerous graphic instances in the recent past (vide The Panama Papers) where many of the rich and famous in Spain have taken to heart the notorious words of Leona Helmsley who said, “We don’t pay taxes.  Only the little people pay taxes” and have done everything in their power to ensure that none of their hard earned cash (!) goes to the taxman.  As a teacher who has been ‘taxed at source’ for the whole of his working career I feel that I occupy the moral high ground when it comes to the payment of taxes, and certainly on a higher plane than the new Duke of Westminster who has paid a laughable amount in death duties and I am sure will continue (legally) to pay the absolute minimum of tax, resulting in a retired teacher (e.g. moi!) paying a higher proportion of his income in tax than a man who owns Belgravia – among other choice chunks of London!

            Ah well, one mustn’t be bitter as it only shortens one’s life and affords merriment to those, like His Grace, above!

My new phone (complete with un-exploding battery I trust) is now set to be delivered in the first week of October.  I have bought a charging station; a case, and extra memory for it already and so, quite apart from the horrendous price of the thing, I am now left with a further investment that will be nullified if I decide that I have waited long enough and cancel the order.

            To look at my frustration from another point of view, I could retexture this enforced period of waiting as a Zen-like meditative interlude of delayed gratification.  Which is good for the soul and is, of course, entirely foreign to modern expectations – and therefore I will be practising a dying skill.

At this time of the year, the weather can be gauged by the degree to which the foam cushions on the sunbed have dried out.  Although we have not had a great deal of rain during the day, we have had theatrical OTT storms during the nights, and the intensity of the sun during the day is sometimes insufficient thoroughly to dry out the material to the intensity of ‘bone’.  Today, for example, I have had to turn the mattress upside down on the terrace to allow the sun to do its work.  I was confined to plastic chair to lounge about a bit.  In fact I have just checked and the mattress is almost dry: it should be perfect for a little light sunbathing this afternoon!  There are advantages to living this close to the Med!

Tomorrow I go to the third of my classes in Spanish here in Castelldefels.  I am, it has to be said, dreading the experience as I fear that I will be way out of my depth given the extent of the knowledge of all the other people in the class: they seem to approach the use of verbs with delight while I am like some medieval cartographer inscribing “Here there be dragons” over those parts of a sentence which allow it to make sense!

            I shall, however, give it a go and see if I can survive and, as one friend has already pointed out, it will be an invigorating experience for me to be the inarticulate one in a language class for once in my life!  I only hope that there are revealing pictures in the textbook that we are due to be given tomorrow!

Life really does have a relentless quality that is both exciting and intimidating at the same time!

Aftermath!

 

Spain has voted. And it is time to consider what the people of Spain, or at least those people of Spain who could be bothered to vote, have done.

On the positive side it is clear that 71% of the voters did not want Bromo and his bunch of shameless criminals to continue 'governing' this country. The conservative PP party lost 4 million votes compared with their showing in the last election – which at least is something. It shows that relentless discovery of astonishing corruption does have some effect on die-hard right-wing voters. Unfortunately many of those votes were transferred to a nasty little newcomer party in the form of the 'centre-right' C's.

The situation now is that while PP had the largest number of votes (Shame Spain!) it is nowhere near an overall majority. It cannot even form a government with the seats of the C's and it is very difficult to see any of the other parties wanting to link their precarious vote to the toxic poison of PP.

The appalling picture of what happens to small parties when they give one of the larger parties the working majority they need is clearly remembered from the recent fate of the Lib Dems in the UK. Although Bromo (as I call the walking joke of a Prime Minister we have still) is in no way an intellectual equal of That Woman, he has managed to provoke a similar quantity of opprobrium. He has also surrounded himself with a bunch of grotesques as ministers where, when a group photograph of them is taken, the graphic work of Goya comes appropriately to mind, especially in the etching called, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”! Still, it has to be admitted, that when I see a group of incompetent, chiselling, mendacious, arrogant, sneering liars, the 29% of voters who lowered themselves to vote for PP must presumably see stability and competence! God help us all!

Spain is capable of odd alliances. Fifteen or so years ago PP found themselves in government thanks to the support of Catalan (!) and Basque (!) independence parties! I think it is highly unlikely that will happen in this election (!) but PP have shown themselves quite shameless in the way that they have treated reality over the past four years and so I firmly believe them capable of anything, absolutely anything to retain power. It is also in their very immediate interests to keep power, as their misuse of government is the only thing that has kept so many of their illustrious criminal ranks out of prison. Who knows what might happen if actual justice was allowed to operate free from the political manipulation of the ruling party? Especially if they weren't if you see what I mean. After the recent local elections when PP were kicked out of what had been strongholds for many years, the paper shredders were working overtime getting rid of the evidence that might (and should) be used against them!

One of the fundamental problems in Spain is a direct result of Franco. When the dictator finally died the form of democracy that was set up gave the political parties what is now seen to be far too much power. They were thought to be the safe repository of the democratic ideal and, to a certain extent that was true. But, over time, the power of the parties led to its own insidious form of corruption and the judiciary is far too close to the politicians; the separation which is necessary for the fair distribution of justice is woefully lacking in this country.

The use of lists of candidates in elections, where the voter does not put a cross or a number next to a particular candidate, but instead chooses a printed list of candidates from one party is also a disaster. The list is a single party's collection of candidates who could fill all the available seats for a particular area if all the votes were just for them. The order in which the candidates are printed is very important as the number of votes will elect candidates in numerical order progressing down the list. It means that candidates feel much more loyalty to their party than to their electorate, as their position on the list is crucial in their election: the higher up the list you are, the more it is like being in a 'safe seat' in the UK. The lower down you are the more problematic your election becomes. You therefore need to work within the party to ensure that your name is printed as high in the list as possible: the party decides, not the people!

So, we have a 'hung' parliament. Bromo, as the 'winner', will be given the chance to form a government and I shudder with horrified anticipation at what shameless inducements Bromo will offer to future partners in crime to get them to shore up his discredited sleaze.

Happy Christmas to us all!