Day 83 - "Hey Ya!"

Spanish Practices

Bad news is good news for us find out why in this episode, also a reflection on the last few months as Andalusia moves into phase three of the Alarma.

Find out more: https://www.thesecretspain.com

Day 83 Hey Ya! (uncorrected transcript)

Saturday, your Sunday and I thought I would take a few moments to reflect, the new normal is becoming normal and throughout the world the death toll from this virus continues to rise, but we are all getting used to it.

I wonder if it was like that during the world war. To begin with everyone was in a state of hysteria worries about bombs dropping on their house, a few years in people become blasé about the whole situation.

“Ere our Tony did you hear that your Aunty Doreen copped it last night, ruddy great Doodlebug fell on her house.”

“Oh, our Ethel that’s terrible, now what’s for tea me love?”

I don’t like wearing a mask, but I am kinda getting used to it. I know surgical masks are in short supply in the UK and the Government have asked you to make your own, rather like the dig for victory campaign in the war.

Here surgical disposable masks can be bought from the chemist at a fixed price of 96 cents and about half the people wear those. Spain bought medical supplies from China so that the masks would not run out in the hospital. To begin with they did, and medical staff were left using bin bags for PPE gowns, but there seems to be adequate supplies now.

So how are we doing, well I am still talking to God, and certainly chatting to my late sister in law, her picture hangs on the wall, she liked the sea, so we put the picture in a place where she gets a lovely view of the Mediterranean.

We get a definite feeling that our neighbours and ourselves are trying to be kinder people, with one or two exceptions. Life will never be the same again, all those big questions you ask yourself like will there ever be a vaccine?

I wonder if there will be, if not will we have to live with controlling the virus, how that will work I am not really sure, I am not a scientist but maybe drugs will control the virus, you get it but the chance of you dying is much less than it is now and the symptoms are supressed.

Who knows? The biggest casualty after the terrible death rate, will be the world economy and how it functions and how we get our head around the massive amount of debt that every country will be racking up to support the economy.

I had a chat with my brother in law a few weeks ago, online of course and we have decided let’s all move the decimal point. You know when countries get into terrible problems with inflation, they just move the decimal point, and everything seems much better.

I guess that is a far too simplistic approach if the whole world just moved all currencies a decimal point.

Our own financial future rather relies on an unsettled world, this is because of the perverse way our pension pot continues to be filled.

We are both ITN pensioners, the UK TV news provider for three major channels in Britain, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. Bad news is usually good news for ITN as more people will watch the TV news shows and the TV companies can sell higher rates of advertising.

For the last few years all the profits of ITN have been ploughed into the hole in the staff pension scheme, they were not required to do this but frankly they are a bloody decent company and it was a pleasure to work for them for seven years.

This year it is different and there is a major downturn in advertising at the moment and that means less money, the company has asked if they can arrest the payment this year. I believe they plan to put the profit money into making more programmes. ITN Productions has produced some very fine shows including “For Sama” or “Ed Sheeran in his own words.” .. not bad for a little TV news organisation that started off in a small corner of Rediffusion London ITV.

So how complicated life is, here we are in Spain, relying on a TV company in the UK to report bad news so that they get a increased audience and keep paying our pension.. but it gets even weirder.

Some years ago after ITN we were employed by Chrysalis who took over the running of the radio station – LBC. One year they enjoyed incredible profits through selling seven notes of a back-catalogue piece of music they owned. The seven notes were used on a platinum number one for the group Outkast and the song was called Hey Ya!

Now they could have squirreled the money away to Panama or someplace similar, Jersey also comes to mind for some reason or another. But again, they were a bloody decent company and put the money into a pension scheme.

Each month I receive a small amount of money from:

So will Chris when he retires fully in a few years’ time.

In reflection the last few months for the whole world have been incredibly hard, full of frustration and fear, full of love and kindness. I truly hope that the outcome of all of this, is that the world will be at least a kinder place.