Hola from Spain!
My last email I explained how our last few weeks in the UK felt. In this one I want to give a flavour of what it was like arriving in Spain, and why we had to suddenly leave… But there’s a difficulty, perhaps two. Firstly I don’t have a legal department to check what I can say without incriminating myself. Secondly I don’t know how to describe the rather crazy summer we’ve had. This, after a lot of redrafting, is my best effort…
When we decided to move to Spain we sought expert advice on how best to do it, especially considering the new rules in place post Brexit, and my subsequent need for a visa, but also how to negotiate the very different UK and Spanish property buying processes. As a result we got married(!), became passably competent in high-value currency trading, and cured the dog’s rabies. We didn’t just get our ducks in a row, we had them lined up and dancing… There was literally nothing that could go wrong. No Problemo…
The first problem came on the day we arrived in Spain. This was the day everything was working towards. We’d sold the house in the UK, our furniture was whistling its way through France, and three hours of baffling but apparently necessary meetings had been set up to complete the purchase of the Spanish house. It was going to happen! At that point our immigration lawyer choose to give his advice that it would be helpful if we could now wait three weeks before arriving in Spain. Since we’d literally just arrived in Spain, this was difficult, so we thanked him politely and got on with things. Six hours of meetings later (this is Spain) we had the keys!
From one house to another…
We knew there was a bit of decorating to be done when we found the house, and we planned to tackle the kids’ rooms first. They had a couple of weeks of actual Spanish school to face before the summer holidays, and we wanted them to have something of a sanctuary to retreat to. What we hadn’t remembered was how ‘eclectic’ the previous owner’s taste had been, nor how we could have so underestimated this. I’m sitting writing this in a room painted the colour of Kermit the Frog, and it’s the last one left to do. We’ve dealt with the deep-purple room, the matt-black room, the other deep-purple room, and the slightly deeper purple room. And then there was the turd-brown kitchen, more on that in a moment.
Those first two weeks, waiting for the kids to go to school, we were all pretty scared. It was interesting seeing their different approaches. Alba – the thoughtful, cautious one – was clearly nervous the whole time, but by the night before the big day she had come to terms with it and had the fixed stare in her eye that you see in WW1 movies when soldiers know they’re going over the top. Rafa – carefree and happy-go-lucky – didn’t give school a second thought until the night before, and then he was literally frozen into his bed with fear.
When the dreadful morning came we gave them their last meal as the clock ticked by, then drove them to the school, and marched them towards their executioners (that’s Spanish for teacher, right?). Then we retreated to examine our consciences. But when we came back at pick up time (honestly, just waiting with the real Spanish parents was scary enough), they each came out surrounded by a pack of smiley happy children asking them question after question. Both of them were loving every second of it. I don’t know if that’s the usual experience of starting school in a new country and language, but it couldn’t have gone better. The next day was the same, and the one after. There will be harder times ahead for sure, but it was a biggie to get out of the way.
Soon after the dishwasher caught fire. Not a big problemo, we put it out…
The next two weeks Maria and I got to grips with the decorating while the kids were at school, and in the afternoons explored the nearby beaches. In writing this I feel some might think I’m overplaying the need for the grand re-decoration effort, so I offer the following photograph as evidence in our cause. It’s a special area where the previous owners combined the use of matt-black and deep-purple with a stalactite-effect ceiling to really evoke the feeling of being trapped deep underground. If anyone knows how to make that feel homely, please let me know. But anyway, we began to get a feel for what a wild and amazing area we’d moved into. Amazing beaches, a craggy, rocky coastline, towering mountains. The oven blew up at some point, but we still had the microwave, so it wasn’t like we couldn’t cook…
I decided I would write these blogs, but not a full-blown book on moving out here, because – well, there’s been lots of books written about moving to Spain – it’s not really that unusual or exotic. I still haven’t decided for sure, but a couple of things have perhaps shifted my mind. I’ll tell you one of them now.
Those who know anything about Spain will know that every little village has its own fiesta in the summer, and that everyone who’s anyone turns up. It so happened that our village had its fiesta just a few weeks after we arrived. Outside a few neighbours we hadn’t really met anyone yet, so it seemed a perfect way to introduce ourselves. And as the scaffolding for the stage went up in the appointed field, we began getting ready too, beginning with choosing a costume for the kid’s fancy dress competition. With a little help both Rafa and Alba selected something suitably nice – we wanted to make a good impression – and off we went. Only at the last minute Alba refused to dress up altogether and Rafa changed his mind and insisted on going on as Death, complete with an enormous plastic machete, dripping in fake blood. Again, no real biggie but he did look somewhat creepy when he also then refused to dance, instead standing stock and observing the other children, as if choosing who to murder first. The real problem came after though, later on in the evening, when it had turned into a much more adult affair. By then Maria had gone home to get the kids changed – all the other fancy dress had vanished too, but I stayed, looking to meet the neighbours. It was as I was being introduced around – at the very limit of my lower-intermediate level Spanish – that I realised that, before he had gone home, Rafa had handed me his blook soaked machette to look after, and then naturally forgotten it. And by then I didn’t have the language skills to explain why I was still holding onto a large plastic, blook-soaked sword. I tried to casually drape my jumper over the blade, and hope no one noticed, but they weren’t fooled. None of them have spoken to me since.
This email is getting too long, so I must get to the point. It wasn’t long after this that we realised that a kitchen without any means of cooking, or washing up (the sink didn’t work either) wasn’t really a kitchen at all, so we decided to rip it out. It was also, as I mentioned, the colour of raw sewage. And it was at this point that our immigration lawyer finally explained why it would have been helpful to have not arrived in Spain when we did.
We have some clarity on this now, but for a long while we didn’t. It turned out that the tax systems of the UK and Spain had never gotten along that well, but post-Brexit, they really don’t make sense. It seemed we’d fallen into a grey area where some interpretations of the law could be read that we owed the Spanish government a massive amount of money based on the sale and increase in value of our UK house. But another interpretation didn’t. If we’d moved three weeks later, it would be much clearer, and we definitely wouldn’t owe a penny. Hence it would have been helpful to arrive a few weeks later. After explaining that this still wasn’t possible, because time travel wasn’t yet a thing, he grumpily suggested that the next best thing would be to leave Spain, immediately, for as long as possible, or at least so that we ended up spending a minimum of 183 days of this year out of the country. So, to cut a long story short(er) that’s what we did. We downed tools in the kitchen, packed up our trusty rusty van, put rabies back in the dog, and jumped on the ferry back to the England.
Two days after we got back to the UK, the trusty rusty van blew up leaving us completely homeless and immobile.
More on that next time.