It Would Feel Easier To Just Give Up !

Just a bit of a pre-warning before you do get stuck into reading this particular ramble, ‘It could be a long read’ so best go and prepare yourself a large flask of coffee and, dependent on what part of the day you may be reading this, either a hearty breakfast, a picnic lunch or a generous supper 🤭

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We left home at 09:50, a little earlier than we would normally do when we were just going down to our local beach, perhaps subconsciously we just needed to take a ‘full day’ off from all the hour’s and days of bureaucratic procedures that we were currently trying to wade through, for some reason it seemed much more intense than previously and, we were both aware that there would still be yet more hour’s, and days spent dealing with it, before we could finally settle back into our much more now accustomed relaxed lifestyle. Although, it didn’t help that I had also become aware that I also needed to sort out another bureaucratic issue, this time with the UK HMRC who keep getting my personal tax arrangements wrong, and of course not in my favour. This was the same issue that, I wrongly believed, had been sorted out last Summer when they had to refund me quite a substantial sum in overpayment of tax, but they had not amended my tax records for the current, or future, tax year’s. It would certainly be a bit of an understatement to say that we were both becoming more and more frustrated with each passing day recently, ‘When it rains, it pours’, as the saying goes. So sometimes you just have to disconnect from all of it, force yourself to take a break and allow yourself to take a deep breath to re-set your equilibrium, to re-gain the motivation to continue to fight for the life that we feel that we have worked so hard to achieve.

Armed with our reclining sun chairs, sun umbrellas, bottles of chilled water and a sandwich for our lunch, we were all set up by 10:05am on our favourite stretch of beach, having made a land grab for our personal bit of waterfront territory, with the car, parked in our normal ‘free’ car park, less than 30 metres away, and with the sea a little more than 6 metres from our toes 😎 We arrived to a near empty beach, there were just a couple of other early arrivals, but just how long it would stay that way we didn’t know, neither did we really care, we had got our position, so everyone else would just have to fit in around us if it got that busy, however, spoiler alert, it didn’t, probably because it is still too early in the season for the bulk of the visiting tourists.

The sea conditions were not exactly what you would call flat calm, more a case of generally light swells, with the occasional larger rogue waves sweeping in now and again, just to keep things interesting of course, one of which just happened to wipe Shazza out on one occasion, much to my amusement I do have to confess 🤭 She re-appeared, swept her hair back and just resumed her swimming as if nothing had happened 🤷‍♂️ The sun was already high in the sky and the temperature felt very hot, although it was only 24 degrees(c) when we had initially arrived, but it was forecast to rise to nearer 32 degrees(c) by midday 🥵 Fortunately though, their was a light Easterly breeze, blowing in from across the sea, which kept it pretty bearable although it didn’t really matter to me, for as you probably know by now, I do not do ‘Solar Basting’, so I was more than happy to remain under the shade of my umbrella, keeping a watch for Shazza to ensure that she did keep re-surfacing from between the tall swells that, every few seconds, hid her from my view. But on this particular day I was also on the lookout for the tell tale shape of a large black fin, which would alert me to the predator that may now be lurking somewhere out there in the deep, which could quite possibly have had Shazza for lunch, before she had even had a chance to take a bite out of her own 🫣 Yes, you may think that I am being alarmist but I did actually have a very good reason for this, for that very morning I had read an article, in one of the usual daily ‘Doom & Gloom’ publications 😲 (Turn on scary theme music to the movie ‘Jaws’)

Now okay it was after all only the one confirmed recent sighting of a Great White in our waters, and that was actually quite a substantial distance away, the sighting being off the coast between Sicily and Tunisia, but in reality, the Mediterranean is just one large circular bay, and large predators like these can travel very many miles in a relatively short period of time. Also, I had not forgotten about the Hammerhead Shark sighting in a much closer Spanish Harbour to us last year ? Or the Pod of Orcas that are still attacking boats off the Spanish and Portuguese Coastlines and, if those few encounters aren’t enough to cause some concern, then there were also these……………

Now I feel rather certain that all of the Marine Biologists, well okay, perhaps only those that do research in this part of the Mediterranean, will be ‘wetting their pants in excitement’ at all of this positive news around the increase in the bio-diversity that is happening in our waters. But I bet they are not giving a single thought about some of us normal beachgoers, who may actually be suffering from doing much worse things in our pants, just at the thought of actually coming face to face with any of these dangerous sea creatures, just to clarify that statement, I mean coming face to face with the ‘creatures of the sea’ and not the marine biologists 😂 Yes I can actually hear them all now, the young marine biologists and not the sea creatures, having spent years on years of doing several Marine Biology University courses, which would have no doubt involved numerous late night sessions in the Student Union Bar, funded of course by the bank of Mummy and Daddy, but now being able to confidently say to them, in some sort of triumphant and jubilant manner no doubt, “See, I told you it would be worth all ‘your’ expense one day” 😂

Okay Yes, I have digressed yet again haven’t I ? Best I get back to the script before you, my reader’s, start having nightmares about the terrors that lurk beneath the waves 🫣 I can just hear some parents already saying to their ‘Little Darlings’, “No Tommy, we are not taking you and your sister to the beach today, it is far too dangerous, but look, instead of that, we are taking you zip-lining across a gorge that has a 1,000ft drop, then some nice bungee-jumping off a suspension bridge, far safer and much more exciting than the beach my Little Darlings” 😂😂

So okay, where was I 🤔…..Oh yes, we are at the beach and, whilst Shazza was playing with the sharks, in the waves, I had momentarily taken the opportunity to indulge in a moment of ‘personal contemplation’, should anything untoward have happened to my beloved, I was certain that I would have recognised her unmistakable blood curdling screams 🤭 So there I was, just leisurely ‘contemplating’, as I often do, it would have been rude of me not to with all this peacefulness that surrounded me. I was not sleeping you understand, although I admit that I may have been resting my eyelids whilst I partook of this contemplation opportunity. As I lay there, eyes closed, I could hear the sounds of the waves as they broke onto the shoreline a very short distance from where I was sat, it reminded me of the sounds that I have heard very many times, whilst watching my favourite ‘real life adventure’ sailing videos on ‘You Tube’, it was a very similar sound to that of a yacht’s bow cutting effortlessly through the water, the swell of the waves gently lapping on to the sides of the hull as it did so and then, well it just sort of happened really, it was as if I had been beamed up out of my sun chair and transported, right into the wheelhouse of ‘my yacht’, where I was navigating myself across one or other of the world’s Oceans. Now perhaps I should just say at this point that the particular yacht that I speak of, is actually very real, and believe me when I tell you that I know virtually every inch of it, it’s upper decks, bow to stern, the rear capacious cockpit, the internally protected wheelhouse, and down below, the Salon, Galley, Cabins, Heads and Engine Room, for I have studied all areas of that particular vessel in great detail, from the numerous photographs that I have of it. The only imaginary bit, is me actually owning it, but in my imagination, that bit really is quite irrelevant 😂

“Are you asleep ?”, the instantly recognisable voice said, as I was jolted back into the real world, it was like the bubble of pleasurable fantasy that I had been in, had quite suddenly been burst and so, there I was, back in my sun-chair on the beach 😢 Damn it, and there I was just about to drop the anchor in a deserted bay off an uninhabited tropical island. ‘No, I was just listening to the sound of the waves” I responded, well she would only have made one of her ‘Tutting sounds’ at me if I had told her where I had actually been, even if it was only in my own vivid imagination 🙄 It had been fairly quiet on our stretch of beach that morning, with no more than a handful of other couple’s on it, different to a day or so earlier, on the Saturday evening when we had walked passed it, when at 7pm it was still jam packed, but we weren’t complaining, for we do tend to like a bit of our own space, as I feel sure that you probably already know 😉 “Time for lunch, I’m starving” she said, so we sat, eating our pre-prepared sandwiches just people and boat watching.

There are some ‘water toys’ that almost silently creep into your vision, such things as paddle-boards, sea kayaks or canoes, but then there are other’s which you can hear, long before they come into sight, the tell tale sounds of the Jet-Ski’s, and a group of five appeared, playing follow my leader, heading off in one direction after they had first crawled out of the marina at snail’s pace, before then entering the open water and then letting rip, full throttle, then, some time later, they came flying past again with their plumes of water behind them shooting high into the sky, as they headed in the opposite direction, that was until their play time was over and they returned, the engines purred rather than roared, as they drifted at snails pace, back into the marina. I observed one of the ‘Dolphin Trip’ boats come and go, several times, but fully laden each time with it’s passengers in their orange high-vis floatation aids, they don’t call them Life-Jackets these days on pleasure trips as it conjures up the wrong sort of images. However, at €40 each for their one-hour trip, let’s just hope that they at least got to actually see some dolphins. One reviewer of such a trip declared that she had seen ‘Hundreds’ on her particular one-hour trip, but if I have told her once, I must have told her a million times, to stop exaggerating 😂 The ‘Guardia Civil’ helicopter also flew right across the top of us on a couple of occasions, following the coastline, no doubt looking for ‘Illegals’ who were probably attempting to come to Spain to apply for the ‘Migration Regularisation Programme’ 🤭 Perhaps, with the weather and visibility being so good, they may also have been looking for the high speed drug boats, who make their illicit transfers ‘at sea’, or perhaps, as this was the same Agency that processes our Visa Renewals, maybe they were sent out just to confirm that we were actually living in the country (Sarcasm does not become you Eric, as my mother would say to me) 😂 There were the usual array of other vessels, either coming and going from our own marina and also those, that were a little further out, either on their way, or returning from, who knows where 🤷‍♂️ I enjoy coming down to the beach and spending hours, just silently observing the comings and the goings, there are lots of people watching opportunities here too and, apart from Mondays, when a lot are closed, their are a number of nearby Cafe/Bars open if ever we fancied not bringing our own lunch.

By 2pm, the wind had changed direction and was blowing from the South-East, this seemed to impact on the strength and much greater frequency of the waves, far too choppy to swim in safely, enough to deter even certain Little Mermaids from wanting to do battle with them, so we gathered our possessions and went home. It wasn’t long before we were once again sat on the balcony of our apartment with a nice hot cuppa, French doors and side windows fully open, Shazza sat reading a book whilst I chose to just gaze out of the windows and watch the world go by, it had been a lovely day of doing absolutely nothing.

The following morning, and whilst I could perhaps understand why Shazza was suffering with sunburn on her arms and shoulders, I couldn’t work out why my shoulder’s had got burnt, I had been under a sun umbrella the majority of the time 🤷‍♂️ Anyway, our planned day by the pool had to be put on the back burner and we opted instead to drive in to nearby Estepona, well we needed to get our photographs taken for our forthcoming new TIE Cards anyway, we knew that we could get them done in the large ‘Carrefour’ supermarket, our local photo-shop in our own town, where we usually get these done, had closed down since we last needed to use it. Shazza hadn’t needed anything from our Organic Fruit & Veg farm, so this time we drove straight in to Estepona, well our usual place on the outskirts just opposite the Carrefour supermarket. We had however planned to walk from the Carrefour, along the promenade and into Estepona Town, around a twenty-minute walk, but when we got out of the lovely coolness of our air-conditioned car, the external temperature showed that it was already nearly 28 degrees(c) and the hot blast of dry sticky heat hit us, so we got our photo’s and took a ‘rain check’ on the walk into the town. We drove back to our own smaller town, parked up and made our way to the Central Plaza, the location of another one of our favourite Cafe/Bars, but this one was shaded from the rays of the searingly hot sunshine, and more importantly, to us, it served lovely ‘well filled’ sandwiches, and of course they too could supply me with my mandatory Anti-Covid medication 🤭 The Plaza is a great place to watch other people go about their own daily routines, the tradesman collecting supplies from the ‘Ferreterias’, (Small DIY shops), the shoppers, in and out of the ‘Fruiterias’, ‘Pastalerias’ (Bread & Cakes) Tabac’s (Newsagents and cigarettes) etc. etc. People armed with their beach equipment heading both to, and from, the seafront as well as watching, and listening, to our fellow Cafe/Bar customer’s, the only foreign conversation heard were our own, never mind all the ‘Pay To View’ TV Channels these days, this leisurely activity is the real readily available ‘Free to View’ entertainment.

The following morning, after having had a very nice couple of days relaxation, the bureaucratic business once again reared its ugly head. We became aware, through Spanish media articles and Spanish social media channels, that there were a lot of people, throughout the whole of Spain, who were in a similar situation to ourselves, many were having no luck with obtaining official appointments to do the second bit of the process, which was to apply for the TIE Residency Renewal Permits, apparently, there were just no appointments available ! The few that were actually reporting that they had managed to secure appointments were saying, that although they had been successful, those appointments were for weeks, even months, in advance with some declaring that by then their current Residency Permits would have expired. So my obvious question, to our Solicitors, was ‘What would happen, even though we now had renewed Visas permitting us to remain in Spain for a further 2 year’s, if we could not get an appointment to apply to renew our TIE Cards, before they expired ?’ The answer was that we would still have 90 days (The Schengen Visa Free Period), after the expiry date, but ‘they’ felt confident that we would get appointments before then although they had no ‘priviledged access route’ into the appointments system and had to use the same database that the rest of the public were using 😲 Now a little bit of additional research by ourselves revealed that you can access this online database in two ways, using a Digital ID, or without a Digital ID, although having a Digital ID does not necessarily give you any greater advantage, other than providing you with access to some ‘Immigration Offices’, that will only accept appointment requests through the Digital ID channel, but in our Province that was only two Immigration Offices. Now I am not going to bore you with anymore rambling on the subject of these Digital ID’s, but suffice to say, we did actually have them, one each as it happened, which we had forgotten that we had organised when we initially registered to live here in Spain, but we never really knew what they were for, or how to use them, as our Solicitors always dealt with the official stuff on our behalf 🤷‍♂️ So, armed with this new information, we learnt how to use our Digital ID’s and this gave us access to the Immigration Department Website where we could ‘attempt’ to book our own TIE renewal appointments as well as having our Solicitor also trying to obtain appointments on our behalf.

We put the access to the Immigration websites, via our Digital ID’s, to immediate use, only to discover that even with it, it is an extremely laborious process. We also discovered, that whilst these TIE Residency Cards are physically the same, no matter which part of Spain that you reside in, you can only apply to renew them at an Immigration Office ‘within’ the Province that you actually resided in, so although we were elated, after spending hour’s of searching for available appointments, when we came across two available appointments, both on the same day, and available in just three weeks time, at an Immigration Office in ‘La Linea’, just thirty-minutes drive away from our home, but then disappointed when we couldn’t book them, because that office is actually across the Border in the Cadiz Province 😤 For seven days, including the weekend, literally morning, noon and night and all periods in-between, Shazza and I kept trawling through the appointments availabilities on all offices within the ‘whole’ Province of Malaga, but we kept getting the same responses, ‘No Available Appointments At This Time’ 🥺

The problem we were encountering was probably more due to the timing of our renewals date which unfortunately also happened to be during the recent introduction of the amnesty period for ‘Illegal Migrants’ to apply for a one year Spanish Visa and Residency Permit. That window of opportunity for them was a three month period between 1st Apr- 30th Jun. The Spanish Government had anticipated that there could be up to half a million ‘Illegal Migrants’ currently living in Spain who would be applying during this amnesty period, they were in for a big shock !

Although we had taken a couple of days off from our search for appointments, we had actually still been trying first thing in the mornings and during the evenings. The start of a new week arrived, Shazza for once was up before me and had started looking at 07:45, commencing as we always do with the Immigration Offices nearest to us, however, it was the same old story ‘No available appointments’, we were pretty much despondent by now as all the other offices up and down our coastline continued to reflect the same responses 🤷‍♂️ But then, we couldn’t believe our luck when we logged in on our next round of attempts, to the Immigration Office in Malaga City, two appointments within 15 minutes of each other came up 😲 Now you have to apply for these appointments using your own personal Digital ID, so she booked one appointment for herself and I quickly booked the other, YES ! YES ! There were no words to express the relief that we both felt right at that moment. Within a matter of seconds of completing the appointments bookings on-line we both received our ‘Official Confirmations’, one by text message on our phones and another via Email. Of course we were absolutely elated but, in our haste to book them, as you only have five minutes in which to complete the appointments reservation procedure otherwise the opportunity ‘times out’, so we were in somewhat of a hurry to annotate all our details on the form, however, in that haste we had not actually checked the dates of these appointments, were they for next week, next month, the month after 🤷‍♂️ We went back to look at our appointment confirmations and to say that we were totally gobsmacked would be an understatement, they were not for next week, or the week after, or for the following month no, these appointments were both for the following day, one at 11:15am and the other at 11:30am 😲 We immediately contacted our Solicitor’s and informed them of our good fortune, but could they have all the documents ready for us to collect from their offices that same day, as we needed to leave early the following morning to drive into the City and find a parking space close to where we needed to be ? Other than the usual documentation, there was also a little matter of the Application Form and Fee, which had to be paid at a bank with an official receipt issued, this had to be presented along with the rest of our documents. Of course they could they said, and they would also arrange with their Malaga Office to have a member of staff meet us at the Immigration Office, in order to provide translation services, if required.

We attended our appointments, suffice to say that there were delays with even our supposedly ‘pre-booked’ appointment times, and we found that we were delayed by nearly an hour before we were each sat, individually, and at different desks, in front of our respective Immigration Officers. These delays were purely down to the large number of people who were queuing outside to do exactly the same thing as ourselves. The procedure itself actually took no more than 5 minutes 🤷‍♂️ the Officer’s checked that all our documents were in order, re-took our fingerprints and then handed us the duly stamped form to confirm that we had renewed our Residency Permits, just in case we were stopped by the Police for any reason, who would note that the dates on our current cards had expired. We will have to make a further appointment to go and collect our new physical cards when they are ready, in around 4 weeks time, but our relief that we were now ‘officially’ legal residents once again was almost tangible.

Interestingly enough, Hannah, the Para-Legal that met us at the Immigration Office, stated that we had been extremely lucky, as she had been trying for nearly three months to get TIE renewal appointments for two of her clients who reside in the Province of Granada 😲 Perhaps, we said to ourselves afterwards, those client’s were not aware that they didn’t have to rely solely on her to obtain the appointments on their behalf, and that they could have attempted to do it for themselves as we had just done. Just how long we ourselves may have had to wait, if we had left it completely up to them to obtain them, would have been interesting, as we knew that they could not spend all day just trawling the different Immigration Websites, they had other clients who required use of their ‘other’ legal services and of course, other client’s trying to get appointments for Initial Residency Visas and Residency Permits, as well as those like ourselves requiring renewals, so where would we have been in the pecking order of their priorities 🤔

We rarely visit the bright lights of the city, although we have done so on several occasions for different reasons, either visiting with friends and relatives or when we have to have our car serviced, for this is where the nearest dealership to us is located, so we did very briefly consider staying and looking around, as we were already here and had secured a ‘free’ parking space with no time limitations but, it would be a forty-minute walk into the heart of the centre and the seafront and, with midday temperatures already at 36 degrees(c), neither of us fancied trawling around just for the hell of it. To be honest, it was also as if a pressure valve had been released and, whilst we both felt jubilant and a great sense of relief, we also felt mentally and physically drained, we just wanted to get out of the extremely noisy and busy city, back to our much quieter environment and familiar surroundings, and of course back to the sanctuary of our home.

My own personal feeling of elation and relief was soon short-lived though, for I knew that I now had to sit down and commence my call to the UK HMRC Tax Office to sort out their administrative failings. Fortunately, my initial call was answered within 15 minutes, in the past such calls were not answered for over an hour, ‘must be my lucky week for good karma events’ I thought to myself. I spoke to a call handler, who of course wanted to know what I was calling about and then tried to give me ‘advice’ on why my tax ‘may have looked’ as if it wasn’t correct. I quite politely advised her that I already knew why my tax payments were incorrect and that it was in fact ‘their error’. She then re-directed me to ‘Brenda’, in the ‘Manchester Office’, who listened attentively to my very detailed, and pre-orchestrated dialogue, providing full dates and financial information, some from my own facts and figures but also from my personal financial and tax data obtained from their own official on-line records. It became obvious to me that whilst listening to the information that I was divulging to her, she was, at the same time, checking these details against my tax records on a screen in front of her. She was a very pleasant lady who confirmed, almost immediately, after listening to me and checking my records, that an error had in fact been made by them and confirmed what we both already knew, that I had been paying too much tax since April of this year. She confirmed, as we spoke, that she was amending my records and my tax code, so that I would not have to keep making this ‘Annual’ phone call (That bit is yet to be seen to be believed) and that the overpayments from April would be refunded. She was true to her word as far as amending my records were concerned, as the following day I received a notification through the official Government HMRC website, that my tax code had been amended and that my State Pension had been removed from any further UK Tax Liability (Although of course I do still pay tax on it, but to the Spanish Tax Authority and, at a higher rate than I would do in the UK, but at least now I am not being double taxed on it). I am now just waiting to be issued with the refund. All in all though, getting both these issues resolved, it has turned out to be somewhat of a rather productive and fruitful week, so Shazza and I can now get back to the more ‘uncomplicated and relaxed lifestyle’ that we have become accustomed to although, I have to admit that, recently there have been many occasions when I have said to Shazza that, personally speaking, ‘It Would Feel Easier To Just Give Up ! Perhaps I am just getting too old, and beginning to lack the patience, tolerance and motivation for us to keep fighting the fight to live the best lives here that we can, but on this occasion I am glad that we did. However, in two year’s time, when I am another two years older and into my 70’s, when it comes to the time to apply for our ‘Permanent Residency’, I am not sure whether I will have the energy or motivation to go into battle with Spanish Bureaucracy once again 🤷‍♂️ I do appreciate that Shazza and myself are ‘Foreign Immigrants’ living here in Spain and that there are procedures that have to be undertaken, it would be the same for any other foreign country that we may have chosen to live in, and the same for those ‘Immigrants’ who choose to want to live in the UK, we are no different to them, but perhaps, when all is said and done, and for all its imperfections, there actually is no place like home.

The Fiesta season is well and truly upon us, just a couple of weeks ago it was the local Manilva International Communities Festival. This last weekend (13-14 June) was the annual ‘Gay Pride’ festivities, which is actually quite a good atmosphere with street parades, various stalls selling a multitude of products, a large stage with ‘Live Acts’ performing, and of course plenty of flowing liquid refreshments throughout the day and night and, just by way of confirmation, being a member of that particular persuasion is not mandatory 😂

Then, on the 23rd June, it is the big festival of ‘San Juan’, which goes on from early evening on the 23rd until around 4:00am the following morning. At midnight (23rd June) they burn the large structure that has been built on the beach, in previous year’s the theme has been related to Nursery Rhymes but, as yet, the base structure is just being erected so we do not know what this year’s theme will be.

A few weeks after the ‘San Juan’ festival it will be the, ‘La Luna’ festival, a similarly large celebration, well the Spanish do love to party and they need little excuse to hold one. We have actually attended each of these annual events several times over the last eleven year’s we have owned our property here, so whether we will attend all, or any, of this year’s events, will be one of those on the spur of the moment decisions and, if we do, well you already know that I ‘may’ just write a line or two about them 🤭

So yes, it has been a bit of a turbulent few weeks for us personally, but upon reflection, as I once again find myself sat here on my sun-drenched balcony contemplating it, after partaking of our usual morning walk, which is conducted slightly earlier these days due to the heat, but each time we have encountered bureaucratic issues we have always seemed to get through them in the end, albeit after a few irritations and frustrations. However, the reality is, that we now have another two years to continue to enjoy the lifestyle that living in Spain has provided us with, with of course the occasional bumps in the road, here and there 🙄

So, on that thought, and until my next ramble……………..

Hasta Luego mi Amigos, La Vida Es Buena (once again)