Burger the calories, Yankee Noodle Candy has come to Spain

MY 2014 diet is already heavy going - and I’m only two weeks in. Hardly anything lost in the last week...but it’s not my fault I’m only marginally slimmer. Honestly.
 It’s those so-called friends who’ve been encouraging me to join them for meals at disgustingly inviting restaurants - and flatly refusing to take my emphatic ‘no’ for an answer.
Well, I’ve had enough of it so I have made an executive indecision (I’m a Libran).
The idea is to Name and Shame ANY individual or group who lure me into an over-eating session, or who encourage me to join them in filling my face with Chinese, Indian, Spanish, French, English or virtually any other kind of culinary delight. The only group I don’t need protecting from are the burger-the-calories  pot-bellied pigs - or fat Americans as they are sometimes called. As befits an aging journalist with a degree in headline pundamentalism,  my current favourite bathtime songs are I'm A Yankee Noodle Candy and New York New Pork.  Anyway, the 2014 diet started so well with my losing 2.5lbs during the first week. But this last seven days, two Chinese banquets  plus a Sunday special at the Portico Mar (everyone's favourite down our way) have  gutted what was becoming a concerted attempt to hit my goal weight in record time.
Anyway, the Shame Game lurks in wait for those still intent on leading me astray in the world of fine dining. Their only escape will be  to have a large box of chocolates waiting for me at the table.

YOU'RE ten years old, have just moved to Spain with your family, and it's your first day at school. To help you pick up Spanish more rapidly, no English is to be spoken during school hours. Problem is, you know very few Spanish words...and asking to go to the loo is not among them. A dilemma in any language...
The daughter of a friend of mine faced that scenario not so long ago. The poor child just sat there, minding her pees and Q's, until her mother whisked her home in the car ...to everyone’s relief. 

Spain v Britain: The sunshine life is for you - as long as you don't need a job

In the misery of a cold, wet Manchester day, my daughter Lisa left a depressing message on Facebook this week.

‘‘What are we doing in this bloody miserable country?’’ she asked despairingly. ‘‘Can someone give me reasons not to move abroad, please.’’

Family, friends and making a living were the most popular responses she received – and when you have three children of school age, that is a BIG, BIG consideration.

Over the weekend, my local community here in Spain has been saying a tearful farewell to a family as they headed back to the UK after seven happy years on the Costa Blanca. The main reason they have returned to their roots is that their 15-year-old daughter pines for an English education and has understandably found it difficult to build a social life in the ageing expat community.

But even though Mum and Dad struggled to make a living while they were here, they loved the Spanish lifestyle so much that I reckon they will be back once junior has passed her A-levels – and leave her to her own devices at university.

When one looks at the pros and cons of moving from Britain to Spain, it is no contest until one gets down to the thorny question of employment. Spain wins on virtually every front – but if you are going to need a job, then my advice is to tread very carefully because there’s very little work available in these crisis-wrecked times.

As for family and friends, no problem there. They can always come out to visit. After all, it probably takes longer to drive from north London to Birmingham as to fly from Gatwick to Alicante or Malaga.

Personally, I reckon the best thing about modern-day Britain is that it is 1,500 miles away from where I live. But then I fortunately have sufficient pension income to keep going without a fulltime job,

But since there are two sides to every story, I took a straw poll of other exiles’ thoughts via the ExpatForum.com website. And, believe it or not, the UK more than held its own with some of my fellow expats.

Some of the areas which won a ‘Britain is best’ vote included jobs, mid-summer weather (in other words, Spain is too hot in July and August), home healthcare, keeping homes warm in winter, better tap water, no price rip-offs by utility companies, natural scenery, faster legal processes, broadband speed, TV, Sunday opening – and of course shopping.

Also, in the UK things actually work. It’s unusual to get a power cut, for instance, something that is all too common here in the Costa Blanca, with the attendant danger of losing all your freezer contents if you happen to be away when the switch trips.

Then there is a widely-publicised town-hall corruption that has blighted Spain in recent years. Not that it doesn’t exist in Britain, of course – it’ just not anywhere near as obvious. Not at local council level, anyway.
I can also confirm from personal experience that the service in UK shops, banks and other service outlets is vastly superior to the couldn’t-care-less attitude of so many workers out here.

As one ExpatForum member put it: ‘‘I hate waiting in a queue for an hour at a bank because the cashier is chatting to every Pablo, Pedro and Jose about their *abuelos/hermanos/gato/perro etc. Then it gets to your turn and. . . SIESTA TIME. Cashier is now shut!’’

Whereas banks and shops in the UK invariably put the customer first, prepare for a long wait if the clerk or shop assistant’s mobile rings while you’re being served. Because the chances of the caller being told curtly ‘I’ll ring you back’ is virtually nil.

My local vet Julien is a lovely young man who is unusually good at multi-tasking but suffers from acute ‘mobile attached to the ear’ syndrome. When I took one of my two cats to his surgery for a checkover recently, his phone rang just as he called me into the treatment room.

‘‘Un momento,’’ he said, taking the call from a pal. During the next 15 minutes, chatting throughout to his mate, he checked the cat, treated her, put her back into the cat box, ushered me out into the reception area and then signed some papers for a delivery man who walked in as I waited to discuss the bill.

Ultimately, seeing my face growing increasingly crimson, he mouthed the words ‘’14 euros’’, took my 20 euro note, rang it up on the till, gave me change and whispered a swift ‘’hasta luego’’.

As I closed the door of the surgery behind me, Julien was ushering in the next patient and its owner…still talking on the mobile that may one day need removing surgically from his ear. Because not everyone is going to be as patient as I was.

On that occasion, I had little choice but to wait – or to go to another vet. But I’ve walked out of a Spanish shop more than once when a staff member has put a phone call or chatting with a friend or colleague ahead of serving me. Unbelievably, it is as likely to be the boss as an assistant who snubs you – the person with most to gain. It simply could not happen in the UK but is so typical of the ‘mañana mañana’ Spanish mentality.

Having said all that – and factored in the menace of the myriad midsummer mosquitoes – Spain scores highly on so many fronts that it really is no contest which country has the most going for it. Particularly if you are looking to retire out here, rather than build a career.

The sunshine and healthy air obviously tops the lot. But then there are other aspects like the quality of life, cheap eating out (if you avoid the tourist rip-off joints), inexpensive housing, the third lowest crime rate in Europe (though you could fool me with all the handbag snatching and pickpocketing that goes on in the Costas), the fiestas, the family-orientated culture, the gentler pace of life and the golden beaches.

Oh, and pharmacies that sell prescription drugs without a prescription – something I have personally found very useful. (And no, I am not a junkie!)

ExpatForum members also gave Spain the thumbs-up for healthcare, public transport and less-congested roads. But sadly there was no mention anywhere of motorbikes.

Why motorbikes? Well, my Lisa’s fella Rob is a motorcycle training instructor and if they ever did come out here with the kids he’d be looking to open a training centre wherever they decided to settle.

And much as I would love to see them on my doorstep, I haven’t the faintest idea how he’d do that. Come to think of it, I don’t even know the Spanish word for motorcycle…

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.