Spanish views from a small town

We have been with this pandemic for so long, that it's taking a back seat in our daily life. We just have to make sure we leave the house with the mask, and then not crowd into places, all while we await the call to get the vaccine. Normality? It's starting to feel like this is all it is, and the past was an illusion. Daily life also consists of major and minor headaches. The fine which I paid, which someone was still demanding I pay, with interest, seems to have been resolved. I called the Hacienda office in A Coruña back again, close to the deadline. Again, they told me it wasn't in their power to cancel the debt, that that was the town hall's job, and that nothing had been done on their end. Since, when I called, it was close to midday, I went into town with all the papers I had.  Now, one has to register at the desk in the entry hall before going anywhere, because of Covid. I explained what I wanted, and the clerk told me to go to the tax office, which had relocated...

When things begin to go wrong, they keep going wrong. There's a type of Murphy's Law that says that if you are short of money, and short on time, at least three inconvenient things will break down in the house.  The first thing was the flood leaking from the cellar ceiling in my father's house next door. My husband had to break the cement blocks that formed the ceiling to get at the pipe. Then, the plumber came, brought a little piece that wrapped around the spot that was spitting out the water, and that was that. We were lucky, except for the inconvenience. Then, the pulley at the bottom of the window that takes up the cord to keep the blind up in one of our kitchen windows, said it had held enough. We dismantled it, took it out of its recess in the wall, and noticed the spring had broken inside. The person who installed the windows and blinds well over twenty years ago, ordered the piece, but it still hasn't come. The likely outcome is that we will most likely hav...

Yesterday afternoon a 63 year-old woman named Josefa had to leave the island of Fuerteventura in the Canaries to go to prison on the island of Lanzarote. She couldn't because, after three days of being on a hunger strike protesting her prison sentence, she fell down in a dead faint before being led onto the ferry and was sent to the hospital. So what? Well, she was being sent to prison for six months because she hadn't demolished the house where she and her two children and three grandchildren live.  Yes, only in Spain. Her story began almost twenty years ago when she found herself divorced with two children and nowhere to go. So she built a small shack on a piece of property she had inherited from her parents. Over time her daughter added three children to the family. They lived off sporadic jobs they could find, and at the moment the grandmother, Josefa, is receiving an unemployment check of 320 euros a month until September, and her daughter 400. Her son isn't receivin...