If you're planning a holiday in Spain, beware!

The gullibility of Brits in the Spanish Costas, and not only tourists, never ceases to amaze me.

Virtually every day I hear that someone or other has been the victim of a pickpocket or handbag snatch.

The experience of being mugged in public is both traumatic and disruptive, particularly if your passport happens to be among the stolen items. Which is why I have always been ultra-careful when it comes to protecting my possessions.

I have never been robbed – unless you count the evening I found 45 euros in notes on the floor of the Irish bar in El Raso and gave it to a tipsy punter who claimed he had dropped it. I realised when I got home that the money had fallen out of my own purse!

OK, that was stupid – but nowhere near as daft as those male tourists who wander around Spanish markets with their wallets wedged in the back pocket of their shorts. And the women who leave their handbags on a table or chair while they chat to friends, only to discover when they come to pay the bill that they have no money…and no handbag.

It happened to a friend of mine a while back. She went for a coffee after a busy day at work, plonked her handbag down alongside her and when she next looked - whoosh, it had vanished.

The sting was that this particular lady invariably carried all her documents, including her passport, in that bag, not to mention a considerable amount of money. It was an experience that will live with her until her dying day – and the saddest thing of all is that it could have so easily been avoided.

My friend has been living in Spain for some time, but most of the victims of the petty thieves tend to be tourists. They are so hell-bent on enjoying themselves that being robbed is the last thing on their minds. What juicy pickings for the villains...

I follow a regular procedure with my handbag. When I am in a public place, I always wrap the strap around my wrist so it can’t be snatched. And when I sit down, the strap goes under a chair or table-leg so it can only ‘vanish’ accompanied by an entourage of furniture.

Oh, and I NEVER take a bag to market – I carry cash in notes and wedge them into my bra. It means that no-one can rob me without being arrested for indecent assault!

My advice to men is that if you go anywhere where there’s a large crowd, leave your wallet at home, in your hotel, or hidden under the carpet in your car boot. Put the cash you need in your trouser pocket (not the back one!) and to make the fortress impregnable, how about keeping your hand in your pocket as you walk around?

While the lowlife element of Spain’s impoverished Moroccan and Romanian communities is thought to be behind the majority of bag-snatches, I suspect the perpetrators come from more diverse roots. What one does have to concede is that these ladrones, however much reviled, have a remarkable skill.

One person I know had her purse stolen from the handbag on her shoulder as she browsed her way around a crowded department store. The thief not only unzipped the bag and removed the purse without anyone noticing – but also zipped the bag up again!

It was the best part of half an hour before my friend realised she’d been robbed. And the way it was done suggests that the perpetrator could make a decent living as a stage magician or in a circus.

But then, theatre audiences are not quite so generous to the sleight-of-hand merchants as the mugs they feed off every day…

The three lost kittens - a Grim furry tale with a happy ending

The wilderness bordering La Mata salt lake in the southern Costa Blanca is home to all sorts of wild life. The network of abandoned access roads makes it ideal territory for dog-walking at El Raso...and for inhuman humans who think it is acceptable to dump unwanted pets in the jungle of overgrowth.  


I hope the people responsible for leaving a mother cat and her three mottled white kittens in the bushes recently have some sort of conscience. I doubt they'll care that mum was too weak to survive, leaving her six-week-old triplets to fend for themselves.

Fortunately there is a happy ending to this particular furry tale, thanks to the handful of caring dog owners who left food and water which helped the tick-infested trio to stay alive. 

My friend Iola and her husband Mick were among residents who fed the kittens. When they told me about them last weekend, I called Christine Hoggett at Impact Charity. “If the poor things are left in this heat, they will certainly die,'' I was told. “We are really struggling for space, but we'll find room for them.''


So, armed with a rusting cat-trap and my caring friends, I paid a couple of visits to the El Raso jungle over the weekend. By Sunday afternoon the three waifs, all girls, were safe in the hands of Christine, her son Andy and their team of carers  – and are now tick and infection free and purring happily
. 
Veterinary care and inoculations will follow and within weeks the triplets, pictured here following their rescue, will hopefully have permanent homes.

Many thanks to the caring dog owners of El Raso, particularly Iola, Mick, Susan and Simon, without whom the unprotected kittens would surely have perished. Also to Jackie Loosely for her help in catching and transporting the three waifs to Impact HQ in La Marina.

Feral kittens can be tamed in just one week...the living proof

The View newspaper, Torrevieja, Costa Blanca - June 19, 2015: I fell instantly in love with the five tiny pairs of eyes staring at me from the patio terrace, even if it was tantamount to experiencing ­Heaven and Hell at the same moment.

As the only local resident soft (or stupid) enough to feed the neighbourhood waifs and strays, I’ve been sitting for years on a potential Mog-otov Cocktail in the form of a feral population ­explosion outside my back door.

However, since the alternative would have been to lie awake each night feeling the hunger pains of starving cats, I felt I had no option.
Trapping and neutering the ferals has cost me a fortune in food and veterinary fees – and I’ve also missed out on a few holidays for fear of the menagerie going unfed. There’s no question of putting them in kennels since it’s virtually impossible to lay hands on them.

I’m told some animal charities have feral-cat programmes which include helping to catch adults and assisting with veterinary fees. If that’s true, all I can say is ….HELP!

Meanwhile, I apologise for any offence caused by the shameless behaviour of an exhibitionist mother-of-five on my patio. Multiple breast feeding is not permitted in full view of passers by – and certainly not when those involved are occupying rent-free accommodation.

A kitty of hope for my doorstep pussies galore 

The View newspaper, June 26, 2015: Christine Hoggett’s email was both music to my ears and an instant cure for mew-sickness.

“Most people agree that if you find street kittens and can trap them before they are 12 weeks old you can domesticate them,’’ wrote Chrisitne, who runs the Impact charity for cats and kittens in La Marina Urb+.

And there was silly old me believing I’d have to spend the rest of my life feeding the five baby moggies delivered to my back door by their feral mum three weeks ago.

I felt trapped, unable to resist the the demands of tiny eyes pleading for food, yet deeply concerned that if I continued to indulge them in Mercadona goodies, they would never learn the art of hunting out their own food.

And at the same time so fearful of human beings that there was no hope of them ever being adopted as family pets.
Now, in Christine’s response to my article last week, here was a glimmer of hope for my mini menagerie – and with it a chance to conduct a fascinating public experiment to prove her point about domesticating street kittens. By the time you read this, Christine will hopefully have trapped and collected the kittens, which I guess are eight or nine weeks old, and taken them to join Impact’s 72-strong community of moggies seeking homes.

I will pay their food bills and veterinary fees and also provide regular updates on their progress on this page. At the end of the experiment, the Famous Five will hopefully be not only irresistibly appealing, but also big enough celebrities to top the bill in the next series of Kitten’s Got Talent.

Next week I hope to publish photographs of the quintet in their new environment. Two are black, one black and white and two are blue-eyed tabbies. At present, it is only possible to stroke them while they ar eating but I now have real hope that, with Christine’s expert guidance, they will make perfect pets in due course.

Impact is a registered charity based and operates out of a tiny shop in La Marina. Christine tells me: “The urbanisation is pretty much free of feral cats as three years ago we ran a big campaign.

“The odd kitten(s) are still found but anything over 12 weeks old is pretty much near-impossible to ­domesticate as by that age they are independent and have there own routine.

“We have just registered as a protectora which gives us a wider scope. Legally you need to be a protectora to take animals off the streets. Spain is a dog country and with retired people moving here at a fast rate, they do prefer dogs to cats.’’

Christine, who moved to Spain in 1996 when her husband retired from the police force, added: “This kitten season has been huge. We are having dog charities contact us asking to take kittens. “In all honesty, if it was not for the PayPal donations from the British back home we would not be able to do what we do.

“And without the help of the local community and people in the surrounding areas donating their unwanted goods we would not be able to keep the charity shop open.

“It would be great if more talk was concentrated on kittens and cats in local papers but it seems it is all about dogs.’’

Meanwhile, Impact is giving a big discount for spaying cats. Says Christine: “If the vets started taking notice of how high their prices are and lowered them drastically, there would not be this huge problem with feral and unwanted kittens.

“To ask a member of the public to pay between €120 and €140 to spay a female cat is quite horrific. This is why people won’t use vets and let their cats breed.’’

My local vet does at least give me a 30 per cent discount – but I’m not expecting any thanks for forking out €200 last week to have two pregnant females and a straggly tom neutered.

The only benefit, a far as I can see, is that I won’t have two more litters of kittens delivered to my back door in the next couple of weeks. 

The View newspaper, July 3, 2015:  I call it Close Encounter of the Purred Kind – and I promise I’m not taking the puss. The voluntary exercise to domesticate six feral kittens brought to me by their proud mum got under way last Wednesday under the expert eye of Christine Hoggert.

Chris, who runs the Impact charity in La Marina, says wild kittens up to the age of 12 weeks can normally be domesticated. And the last few days seem to indicate this theory is largely true. During the three weeks they lived in and around my garden, all six kittens seemed petrified of human contact, and only allowed me to touch them while their heads were jammed into a food bowl.

I feared it would never be possible to pick any of them up, let alone give them a cuddle. Christine quickly discovered that this was not the case. This is how the first few days of the experiment went…

Wednesday June 24: In the roasting heat of a 34-degree afternoon, Christine, volunteer helper Jackie and I managed to trap four of the feral kittens – two black, one tabby and one black and white. Later in the day, I caged a second tabby, together with the mother, and took them to join the others at the Impact shop.

Thursday June 25: The kittens’ mum was taken to the vet for sterilisation and found to be two weeks into a new pregnancy. It was a timely intervention as the black-and-white female had been carrying two deformed kittens. Meanwhile, Christine and her team began to concentrate on the kittens. The initial prognosis was not encouraging. “I must admit they do look like they are beyond help,’’ reported Chris, “but this afternoon I caught them playing in their crate and that gives me even more motivation. If they are playing, then they have the domestic side in them. Our main aim tonight is to separate them and treat their eyes with Trobex. The two black kitties are considerably more friendly than the others.’’

Friday, June 26: Christine received a nasty bite from one of the tabbies as she attempted to clean its weepy eyes. “The bite was purely because her eyes are a mess and she can’t see out of them,’’ she reported. There was, however, ‘’great success’’ during the evening with one of the black kittens. ‘’He/she actually let me clean his/her eyes with Trobex, which is great to use on cats with bad eyes and costs only a couple of euros from the chemist.’’ Christine added: “We have managed to separate this cat from the others and have named him Reggie. His brothers are all eating fine, too.’’

Saturday, June 27: At 5am the kittens were already singing with all their lung power. “Reggie has pretty much turned now and can be picked up,’’ said Chris.’’He/she purrs away while being stroked and the best thing about it is that he/she is boss-eyed!’’

Sunday June 28: Now that the kittens are reasonably settled, it’s a process of taking them to the vet one by one. Whenever a feral cat is taken off the street, a blood test is performed for FELv. The great thing here is that Mummy cat was tested negative, which means the kittens would all be negative, too. Nevertheless they will all be tested when they are a little older.

Monday June 29: Reggie is doing great, though still a little nervy. He will be going for his first vaccination this week but there is great joy in in the camp with the way things have gone so far. The one kitten Christine’s team were a little afraid of – the black and white one – is at this moment running around playing with other kittens. Christine says it will be a slow process but she is confident it will work.

Tuesday June 30: All the kittens are now able to be handled. Obviously if something spooks them they run for cover but this is a big step. They are eating well and their eyes are clearing up, thanks to twice-a-day eye drops.

No pussyfooting about - they're tame after one week!

The View newspaper, July 10, 2015:  I headed off to the UK a fortnight ago happy in the knowledge that the latest additions to Casa Donna’s feline family were in safe hands. Even so, I had huge doubts as to whether Christine Hoggett and her Impact Charity volunteers could really convert the five sickly feral kittens into gentle, loving family pets.

So imagine the shock when, just six days after they had been trapped and taken to Impact HQ in La Marina, I received the following Mission Almost Accomplished message from Christine. "One week on from trapping the kittens and their mum, and everything has gone far better than we could have imagined,” she reported, reflecting on the settling-in period and successful spaying of Mum

“We can already say that Reggie, the black kitten we separated from the others early on, is ‘domesticated’. He still likes to have a nip at you when you play with him, but this is down to the fact he is still learning.

“The process over the coming weeks will be pretty much more of the same stuff – spending time with them, stroking them, eye cleaning. They are all touchable now and able to be handled.

“As these kittens have effectively come straight from the street we have to be careful how the vaccinations are done. They all showed signs of mild cat flu, runny noses, bad eyes and sneezing.

“Giving a kitten its first vaccination when it is like this can sometimes be lethal.

They all need to recover before vaccinations start.

“Reggie is free of all these symptoms. This boils down to us splitting him from his siblings in the first 48 hours.”

And there I was, convinced I’d return to Spain next week to find a cage full of snarling mini-moggies dumped in my overgrown garden behind a hastily-scrawled placard reading ‘Wild and Untrainable’.

How could I ever have doubted Christine’s assertion that feral kittens can become loving family pets with a little help from those who really care? OK, there is still a long way to go, but I’m now convinced the experiment will have a happy ending.

Whether it’s Impact or any other animal charity, just to know there are people out there who really care gives hope to every cat and dog lover in Spain. Particularly in an increasingly cash-strapped Spanish society where the dumping of unwanted pets is in danger of becoming a national pastime.

Say R...it's all about Rosie, Reggie and Ronnie now

The View newspaper, July 24, 2015:  Meet Rosie...the gentle living proof that feral kittens can not only be tamed, but also become gentle, loving pets. 
Four weeks ago, Rosie and four of her tiny siblings were adopted by the Impact Cats Charity after spending the first few weeks of their wretched lives in the overgrown garden of an empty El Raso house. 
Their mother, a very protective black and white feral, had reared them in the jungle next door to my home before bringing them cunningly to my back door at meal times.
The wide-eyed kittens were both fascinated and frightened by the two-legged monster that fed them, each day and it was only at meal times that I was allowed to get near enough to touch them. Stroking was taboo - their mother made sure of that by hissing every time I came too close for her comfort.
So when Impact’s Christine Hoggett heard of my little problem, she agreed to take part in an experiment to confirm that feral kittens can be domesticated as long as they are caught early enough.
It’s exactly one month since Chris, her volunteer friend Jackie and I began our mission by trapping all but one of the kittens, along with their Mum, and taking them to Impact HQ for assessment.
Mum was sterilised wthin 24 hours and Chris, her son Andrew and the Impact team then got to work on the two black, two tabby and lone black and white tots.
I returned from the UK last week  to see the impact of Impact for myself. In Rosie, the change was astounding. No longer was I faced by a frightened feral; here was a beautiful relaxed creature happy to sit on my lap and be stroked. Black boys Ronnie and Reggie (I wonder who they were named after?) had  also lost their aggressive streak and the whole entourage were clearly responding to treatment to cure minor ailments like weepy eyes.
Christine tells me: “Rosie should be ready for a home from the middle of August, as will Ronnie and Reggie.’’
Rosie’s identical twin and the black and white kitten are taking longer to adjust but Christine assures me the omens are good.
Last Friday, I managed to trap Charlie, Ronnie and Reggie’s black sibling, and took him to the Impact shop, where the petrified puss leapt up the window shutter and spent the next few hours hiding in the blind’s inner workings.
“We got Charlie down from the window about 8pm,’’ reported Christine later. “He was exhausted and at this very moment is asleep under a bed. 
“He has completely relaxed and calmed down and hopefully will also be ready for homing from mid August.’’ 

Impact Charity can be contacted on 634 330 135. There is also a dedicated PayPal for donations via mail@impactcharity.net
Reprinted from my weekly column in The View (www.theview.es)

ALAS MYTH AND CONES: A STERLING BILL IN THE RED-LIGHT DISTRICT

I’ve had a traffic time – now just get me to the airport on time!

I am lucky enough to have two homes. One is a sunshine villa 30 minutes’ drive from Alicante airport, the other a modest semi 18 miles north of Manchester’s three flight terminals.

An airport trip at the English end is subject to an electrifying hazard in the form of 50 sets of traffic lights. The consolation is that no more than 47 tend to be stuck on red at any given time.

If you are lucky enough to actually catch your flight, you do at least face a delightful evening discussing traffic lights with the Spanish cabbie driving you to Guardamar on the N332.

Mention the super-hazard of every street corner in Britain and the taxi driver’s conversation is likely to consist of a quizzical look and the words ‘Que es trah-fick-lie-eat?’

Odds are he won’t know what you are talking about because, believe it or not, there’s not a single set of the things between Alicante and my Costa Blanca home.

At the Manchester end one can, of course, avoid the red-light menace by heading for the airport via the city’s Park-And-Don’t-Move service, otherwise known as the M60 motorway.

That trip is no fun either, and unless you give yourself at least two days to get to the airport, a couple of hours with your head immersed in 50 Shades of Red may well be less stressful than counting traffic cones.

Either way, both routes to the airport provide ideal material for a ‘100 Reasons to Escape Manchester’ publicity blitz.

What sort of voyeur gets a kick out of watching traffic cones breeding on the M60, for heaven’s sake? Last time I used the so-called ring road I counted 428 million giant ice-cream cornets during a six-mile crawl to the Trafford Centre. The 14-hour trip was marginally quicker than taking the car but my knees didn’t half hurt by the time I reached my destination. And I was suffering from orange-and-white colour blindness into the bargain.
One of the few perks of driving to Manchester airport via the city centre is that you can stop off for a coffee and a bacon butty. The down side is the £60 parking fine you’ll inevitably get in addition to burning off eight gallons of unleaded in a desperate attempt to park sideways on the single metre of kerb untainted by double yellow lines.

I appreciate that comparing the Costa del Salford with the Costa del Sol is akin to confusing Bury Market with the London Stock Market. But that’s a bourse-case scenario.

There are, in fact, many leisurely compensations for those who choose not to drive in what must surely be the wettest part of the UK. One is enjoying a morning swim to the office in downtown Mancunia’s high-street ocean, known to the aquatic community as the Sea of Umbrellas. The rush hour is so busy that there’s no choice but to do the crawl, and not only because the breast stroke is illegal and a butterfly as rare as an English Mark Spitz.
Which brings me on to football or, for the gob-fearing amongst us, the mouths of Wayne Rooney and Kompany.

Manchester is of course home to two top football teams, namely Bury and Oldham Athletic. Fortunately I don’t support Man United or Man City either, which is a bit of a relief since I don’t speak German (heaven help whoever puts the names on United players’ shirts) and with my flight back to Spain only 24 hours away, I’m pretty low on Sterling too (boom boom).

Oh, a geeky friend just called to say there are actually 49 sets of traffic lights between my Whitefield home and Manchester Airport. Using the bacon-butty route, that is.

I believe there are also 49 million traffic cones between Anfield in Liverpool and Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium.

All paid for in Sterling, of course.

Compared to Spain, Britain's binmen wheelie are a load of rubbish

My dispute with the guys who collect the household refuse at my home in the UK is not so much a game of cat and mouse. It’s more like prat and house.

Bury Borough Council is not the only local authority that refuses to take bags which protrude above the lid of the grey wheelie bin provided for every household. But what a petty rule it is!

Believe me, when it comes to rubbish collection, the guys who empty the bins around my Costa Blanca villa are in a different league. I’ll tell you why in a minute.

The fact is some households generate more rubbish than others – particularly if hordes of children either live in the house or descend upon it almost incessantly. Such is my home in the Bury area of Lancashire – courtesy of the fact that my five grandkids all live within 200 yards of my pad.

And while I can accept the local council placing some limit on what they will collect, it takes a true jobsworth to remove and dump any bag that happens to protrude above lid level of the wheelie bin.

Bury Council’s official website requests householders to ‘‘make sure your bin lids are fully closed’’ on collection day. But why? Will the bin attack a neighbour or something if the lid is raised just a teeny bit above horizontal?

It beats me that the binmen bother to enforce the ‘empty closed wheelies only’ policy because moving a piled-high bin onto the ramp to be tipped automatically into the bowels of their wagon is surely quicker than having to remove the excess rubbish first.

You’d think the £178-per-month I pay in council tax would entitle me to have ALL my genuine household waste taken away each week. Instead, I often have to wait three weeks for my separate recycling and garden-waste wheelie bins to be emptied.

It’s all so inferior to the quiet, efficient way refuse is collected in the Costa Blanca, which has become my home of choice over the last few years.

To start with, the Spanish binmen come in the evening, when the roads are quiet – so there’s minimum disruption to traffic. It’s so much better than the chaos British bin lorries cause during the day as they back up into side streets and cul de sacs.

In Spain, household refuse is also collected EVERY DAY, not just once a week. In the winter, as well as summer. And rather than stopping at every house, the binmen remove the rubbish from large communal containers placed a couple of hundred yards apart.

Garden refuse is collected once a week from the same point, while recycling containers are dotted conveniently around the urbanisation for people to use at their convenience.

It’s anything but inconvenient for householders – even the laziest of individuals should be able to walk 100 yards to dispose of their household waste. Oh, and last year the council tax on my three-bedroom villa amounted to just 386.08 euros (equal to £333.78 as I write). That’s roughly 20 per cent of what I pay to Bury Council.

It’s one of my old chestnuts, but Britain is being held back by the old colonialist attitude that still lingers in decision-making areas. Namely that if we didn’t think it up, then it can’t be any good.

That sort of thinking is a massive load of rubbish! And no, Bury Council, I don’t want your bolshy binmen to come and dump it all on my drive in Prestwich.

Put the lid on it, boys. This jobsworth behaviour wheelie is too much.