Day 88 "Plastic not fantastic"

Spanish Practices

Thursday and the wind is blowing and driving us mad, a new Spanish law on plastic waste might change the way we use single use plastic and three good legs cat gets a scare, oh and something in Spain that has taken longer to build than the pyramids and still isn't finished.

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Day 88 Plastic not fantastic - uncorrected transcript

Thursday and we spent the morning gathering the paperwork for the car sale, a mind-boggling pile of every single transaction and certificate, we are missing the MOT, as the MOT centre has only just re-opened and there is long complicated waiting list to get your car MOT’d.

The Government has given an extension to the end of the year to sort that out, but Covid19 rules currently mean that for a lot of the centres it is you that run through the car, checking the lights and brakes etc,the MOT engineer shouting instructions in Spanish through a walkie talkie at you.

The wind has returned with a vengeance as is whistling and blowing around the house, the result of the Azores high spinning up north due to ocean temperatures, so summer is so far cancelled, which is probably a good thing as Brits are not welcome abroad just yet.

Thursday and we patiently wait for the completion of our awnings, there is just one small piece missing, they might turn up tomorrow or Monday to fix.

Patience is something you will need in sack fulls if you are thinking of living in Spain, take the mighty Sagrada Familia the Roman Catholic church in Barcelona, they began building that in 1882.

Designed by Gaudí when he died in 1926, only a quarter of the basilica was completed.

They hope to complete it in 2026 it didn’t actually get a licence for construction until a few years ago either. In the end the Sagrada Familia will have taken longer than the Egyptian pyramids to build, and only 50 years less than the Great Wall of China.

A few years ago, we visited the Cathedral, early in the morning we arrived just before it opened. That meant we beat the coach tours. The place is truly amazing, one to put on your bucket list when you are allowed to travel again.

Thursday and the paperwork has been sent to the Administrator, not the one that couldn’t find our car but a new one that has decided that the thing on the drive with four wheels and an engine actually exists. So we will see tomorrow how that pans out.

Days here follow a weather pattern, the morning is quite calm and then the wind builds up at lunchtime, white horses fill the ocean and it is hard to stand up against the incredible strength of the wind.

It makes me think that Global Warming is slowly screwing the whole of the world, with terrible fires in Australia killing millions of wild animals, freak weather popping up all over the world, a plague in the form of Covid19, all we seem to be missing is a river of blood.

Tonight, we are going to have fish for dinner, that might very well contain microplastics, 8 million bits of plastic get chucked into the ocean 100% of baby sea turtles have plastic in their stomachs. We really have done a pretty poor job looking after the planet.

Every day I take down a plastic bag full of what mainly amounts to packaging. Supermarkets seem to shroud everything you buy in the stuff. Slowly slowly that is changing but it would be nice to see the legacy of this pandemic is that we all stop and take a bit more notice of how we are turning the place into a human shite hole.

On Tuesday the Spanish Cabinet approved a draft law that introduces a new tax on plastic waste. According to El Pais Newspaper “The indirect levy will tax the manufacture, import or acquisition of non-reusable plastic packaging from other European Union countries for use in the Spanish market, according to the Spanish Ministry for Ecological Transition.”

So slowly some Governments are waking up to the fact we must change our ways.

Ok that’s enough, I shall be knitting my own muesli next and wearing a kaftan. Chris believes that the Azores High will move down slightly in the week to come and the weather here might settle down.

An almighty crash, the piece of wood the cat was hiding under has come crashing down, and frightened one of the lives out of the three good legs cat. I heard mewing at the side door to be let in, he is not amused at all.

Our biggest worry is we have put up the sail now as it is summer. It is a large canvas thing that gives us shade, currently it is blowing around like a, well like a sail and in danger of ripping its mooring out from the garden wall.

Our challenges tomorrow include a trip to the big town for Chris to be trained in Covid19 sanitation for his job as a Gym Instructor, followed by a trip to the Administrator with our friend Carmen, oh and there is yet more wind.

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