I am a guest blogger on the TIM Life in Spain blog and have had the following piece published in the May issue of the magazine.



Driving Lessons Greek Style.



The only car I’ve ever owned was a red Mini, DF 214. We bonded in the
autumn of 1969 when I started working in a Greek school in Cyprus. I’d
never needed a car in London and couldn’t drive but now a car was a
must. There was only one solution. Buy one and acquire a Cypriot driving
licence. Getting the car didn’t prove to be too much of a problem - that’s
when DF214 appeared on the scene. Learning to drive took a bit more
effort.
Mr Lambrides, my landlord, introduced me to Panicos Charalambides,
proprietor and chief instructor at the town’s driving school. Panicos was
a good driving teacher but his English was a bit dodgy. I had to give
him an intensive run through of first, second and third after a crunching,
kangaroo-like lesson on gear changing.
His name, Panicos, comes from the Greek word for terror or panic and
when we came to the drama of the emergency stop, I could see why it was
so appropriate. He’d warned me the day before that we’d be doing one in
the next lesson. He prepared me with the instructions: “Imagine sheep in
road. I shout. Your foot on brake you throw hard. Miss sheep.”
I was quite worried about this. So by the following day, I’d worked myself
up into what can only be described as a bit of a state. Mind you, Panicos
didn’t seem to be much better. When I arrived for the lesson, I saw him
in the bar next door tossing back a short. He was puffing nervously on
a cigarette as he approached, which he tossed aside but immediately
put another between his lips. There was an atmosphere of dread and
impending doom in the car and after about twenty minutes I knew the
emergency stop was going to be quite soon. He had begun to look around
uneasily and was fingering both his worry beads and his crucifix. By
this time I was sweating freely and had begun to see sheep everywhere.
Suddenly, I felt him tense beside me. He spat out his cigarette, which had
been clenched, unlit, between his teeth, gripped the sides of his seat and
shrieked: ”Estoppp!!!”.
I threw, flung, and veritably hurled my foot at the brake and DF214
practically did a handstand. Panicos and I were propelled forward and
made violent contact with the windscreen. There was a dreadful noise
from the front of the car as it lurched forward then bounced back to a halt.
In the sudden silence, all that was heard was our heavy breathing and
then the concerned shouts of the customers at the bar outside of which
our drama had unfolded.
We eventually staggered out to see what had caused the noise. No
sheep had been harmed but DF 214 didn’t do so well. Apparently,
something called the engine mountings were jarred from position
and the engine was clinging on for dear life under the bonnet.
Panicos began babbling in Greek. His English went completely
to pot and I didn’t find out till later, at the garage, what was
wrong. But I could tell it wasn’t good and I was unnerved at the thought
of what the repair was going to cost.
We steered DF214 over to the side of the road and tottered into the bar,
where the owner phoned for a tow car. He even bought us stiff brandies
as we had, apparently, livened up a fairly slow morning for him. Panicos
bought the next round and I followed up with another. We had started
to mellow by this time and were seeing the whole thing in a different
light. These things happen. It could have been worse. After all, it was
an emergency stop and I had certainly stopped. So congratulations were
the order of the day. He kissed my cheek and raised his glass “Sheep
survive!” he said.
The actual test, dreaded equally by myself and Panicos, turned out to be a
doddle. I passed first time and returned to the school where Panicos was
nervously pacing the pavement. He grabbed me and smothered me in
hugs and kisses when he saw the victory paper I waved at him. We retired
to the local bar and reminisced over the ups and downs of the preceding
months. A few beers later, I slowly drove home to convey the news to Mr
Lambrides. “You’ll never believe it, Mr Lambrides! I passed!”
I was somewhat taken aback when he grinned, patted my shoulder and
said “I know, I know. The examiner, he is my cousin. I tell him you are
good girl. You not go out driving at night. You have good job and pay rent
on time. He listens to me. You pass.”

Bisons For The Sultan.

This is a piece I wrote recently for a meeting of the Torrevieja Writers´Circle. I was fascinated by the story of this small, specialised Swedish company and thought other people might like to read about it too. So here follows the piece, entitled:

Bisons For The Sultan.



The London Symphony Orchestra has them, you can find them at the Academy of Performing Arts in Hong Kong and now the Sultan of Oman has paid a whopping 1.8 million crowns for them. They are solid, secure, extendable, inclinable, easily moveable, extremely comfortable musicians´ chairs from a small company working from the middle of a forest in Sweden.

The company which produces them, Bison, operates from a typically Swedish red wooden building in the small village of Årjäng in Värmland. It sn´t as big as IKEA with its billions of euros in annual sales . Bison´s profit in 2009 was a mere 9 million Swedish Crowns, which seems like a drop in the ocean by comparison. However, if you consider the fact that Bison has only 7 employees, of whom 2 are the owners, and that the company operates in the very specialist branch of supplies for the music industry, then you have to concede that they´re doing very nicely, thank you.

Bison and Ikea are similar in that they both started in a very small way. Ingvar Kampryd cycled around selling matches at the start of his career.The owners of Bison are Ingegerd Bryntesson and her husband Lennart. She worked as a post office cashier and he was a supply teacher. Their company, which used to sell a variety of things, one of which was a folding axe from Norway, was originally just a sideline. Both Kampryd and the Bryntessons worked from home to begin with until they found their niche. With Kampryd it was furniture while the Bryntessons developed an interest in products for musicians.

It all started with a music stand they liked the look of and decided to retail. Although neither of them are musicians or even particularly musical they decided it was a good item and for ten years they kept their day jobs, sold music stands and supplemented their income by buying and selling berries and mushrooms.

Things took off when, in the mid-nineties, the Berwald Concert Hall in Stockholm contacted them looking for a comfortable, ergonomic chair for its musicians in the orchestra pit. The subsequent collaboration between the professional musicians and the Bryntessons resulted in a chair which is used all over Sweden in concert halls, churches, and colleges of music. It has also become standard in many venues in England, Germany, Norway, Russia, the Baltic States and most recently Oman, where the Sultan´s Symphony Orchestra sits very comfortably while playing for him.

Lennart Bryntesson, like Ingvar Kampryd, has clear ideas on how a good business should be. He is a very Swedish-style boss.He has a Facebook page and writes a blog on the Bison Website, where his photo is, together with those of his wife and the other employees. The building they work in is heated by log burners and all the staff cut the wood for the stoves during working hours. He regards his fellow workers highly and doesn´t believe in inflated salaries for management . Everyone at Bison has the same salary , he and his wife included. It makes things much simpler, and all their jobs are equally important, he believes. He is active in the Swedish Mission Church and 10 per cent of Bison´s profits go every year to charitable projects abroad in countries like Nepal and Ethiopia.

Even if you are not a singer or a musician, you can see from the web site photos that Bison´s products are very high quality.The choir risers look solid enough for a Welsh miners´choir of Pavarotti proportions. Security for the artists who use the company´s products is central to his business idea – hence the publicity photo of a car parked on a Bison stage, patently demonstrating the construction´s strength and sturdiness.

Despite the recession, the company is doing well and after a successful delivery to the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, a recent enquiry from Kansas City makes a breakthrough into the American market closer. Perhaps the Sultan could have a word with Barak Obama?

Great Holiday - Except For the Trent Army.

Got back from my week in Cataluña a while back but haven´t had time to blog as I had a visitor and it took a few more days to sort myself out. So finally I can get down to blogging.

Salou is a great place for families, I must say. Lovely beach, long, safe
promenade for kids and the adventure park, Port Aventura, only a short distance away. It´s also a great centre for seeing other places in Cataluña - Reus, with lovely modernist houses and the Gaudi Centre; Barcelona - masses to see there; the Ebro Delta, a fascinating rice-growing area and a wonderful wild bird area; Cambrils - a picturesque town full of seafood restaurants - just to name a few. Plana, the local bus company had lots of tours at really good prices and some were guided by very interesting, profesional people of different nationalities.

The hotel was good and there was plenty of really nice food. So it should have been perfect. Trouble was, my holiday coincided with the annual SalouFest. This has apparently been held for the last 10 years. Thousands of British University students decend on the town, ostensibly to be doing sports but from what I observed they were there first and foremost to get totally, senselessly, drunk.

We had 350 of them at our hotel. The worst ones called themselves the Trent Army and were from Nottingham. The restaurant looked as if demented monkeys had been in there when they left it for the other guests. We were actually advised by the Head Waiter not to go in until he and his staff had had time to clean up after them.

Every evening from about 11pm they were outside on the street making an unholy racket, some of the lads urinating, some- both boys and girls- stripping down to the bare essentials, until the coaches carried them off for an evening in the discos. Then it all started again from 2-3 am onwards as they came back , this time lots of them so drunk that they were vomiting on the buses and in the street outside the hotel. I saw one girl collapsed on the pavement, totally out of it, who was taken away by police and ambulance. (One newspaper report said there were 60 cases of alcohol poisoning treated at the hospital).

It was widely reported in the Spanish press and on TV and I felt ashamed on their behalf. They may think it´s great to reel about shrieking at the top of their voices but most of the Spaniards in the hotel (both guests and staff) had a pretty poor opinion of them. I don´t think my hotel was a a special case. There were thousands of them, all over Salou, creating mayhem.

I can´t help but wonder if the money made by the bars and restaurants is sufficient to outweigh the aggravation felt by the service staff in hotels, bars and hospitals, not to mention the police and, of course, the ordinary inhabitants of Salou and the other guests in hotels all over Salou who had their holiday soured by these idiots.

So - I did actually enjoy my holiday but was really disturbed at the behaviour of these students and wonder what on earth it will be like in 10 years or so from now when they are in managerial/administrative positions, since they don´t seem to have grasped the basic concepts of consideration and courtesy. Not to mention the damage that quite a few of them are doing to their own bodies by pouring so much alcohol into them.

I´m off on another trip quite soon. This time it´s with other half in tow and we´re going to Mallorca. Just hope the weather´s a bit better by then and that there aren´t too many riotous drinkers about.

Off On My Hols!

Having another go at the brilliant IMSERSO scheme of subsidised holidays for pensioners. This time I´m trying Cataluña. Staying at a place called Salou, which in itself doesn´t look as if it has anything out of the ordinary more than lovely beaches and a pleasant promenade, neither of which can be fully exploited at this time of year. However, it´s very close to Tarragona and to Barcelona, so I hope to do a bit of mooching there.

I really hope the weather is on the turn and spring comes soon as it´s been grey, rainy and miserable for ages - not at all what we´ve become used to on the Costa Blanca. I´ll be away for a week so will post something when I get back. Hasta luego!

Billy the Bookcase

Billy the Bookcase.

As you assemble your flatpack bookcase from IKEA, have you ever wondered why it´s called ”Billy”? If you scan the Ikea catalogue, you´ll see that every product has a name and it´s usually a Swedish name whether or not the rest of the catalogue is in Spanish, Arabic or Chinese. This is because IKEA´s founder was dyslexic and had problems reading long product descriptions. He found that he remembered them better by giving them a familiar one-word name.

So chairs and shelves have men´s names, which explains Billy. Sofas have place names – there´s one called Karlstad, a town in central Sweden. Other terms used are grammatical, musical, nautical or chemistry. Also women´s names, those of animals, and adjectives. There´s a set of knives called ”Sharp”, ”Doze” is a line of bedlinen, ”Forty Winks” is a bedroom blind, ”Stubborn” a spatula and a line of children´s toys goes under the name of ”Well-behaved”. Occasionally, despite great care and attention being paid to the naming of the items, a gaffe is committed. Thus, in English speaking countries,the unfortunate bench christened ”Fartfull” had to be withdrawn until the sniggers had died down and a new name could be found.

Ingvar Kampryd, the founder of IKEA, was born in 1926 on a farm called Elmtaryd near Agunnaryd village. When he started his company he used his own initials and those of his birthplace to create the now world-famous company name. The logo uses this name, IKEA, in blue lettering on a yellow oval which rests within a blue rectangle. It is a strikingly simple and easily recognisable trademark in the Swedish national colours and is now a company operating in 35 countries around the world with over 300 stores, thousands of employees and billions of euros in sales annually.

Yet Ingvar Kampryd started very small indeed in 1943 by buying up matches in bulk and re-selling at a profit. He cycled from customer to customer at first then, when his business expanded, hired the local milk van to deliver goods. He introduced furniture into his range in 1947. It caught on so well that by 1951 that was his sole product. His concept for IKEA was, and still is, to sell fuctional, well-designed furniture at prices so low that as many people as possible could afford them. In order to cut costs and facilitate transport, IKEA was also a pioneer in the concept of customers assembling the furniture themselves - hence the flatpack.

To reach potential customers, IKEA produces an annual catalogue in its home town in Sweden, where they have Northern Europe`s largest photo studio. More copies are printed each year than the Bible - 190 million of them, in more than 25 languages. The company has also produced TV ads,usually funny and very effective but also a number a bit too near the bone or in poor taste which have been banned and can now be viewed on You Tube.

Kampryd himself is probably one of the richest men in the world but has the reputation of being frugal to the point of meanness. The story goes that, if he stays at a hotel and uses a soft drink from the fridge in the room, he´ll go to a local store and buy one to replace it rather than have it put on his bill. He flies economy class , and has often popped into a local IKEA for a cheap meal of meatballs and lingonberry preserve. But his frugality is part of a carefully managed image presented to the public as part of the IKEA concept. He does in fact own an estate in Sweden, a vinyard in France and a villa in Switzerland. But his image took a severe knock when it came to light in the 1990s that he had belonged to a post war Neo-Nazi group for several years. However, he admitted this and said it was the greatest mistake of his life. It didn´t stop the customers coming through the doors and 2009 saw 660 million visits to IKEA stores worldwide.

Despite the present recession, IKEA goes from strength to strength and is constantly developing in innovative ways. One of its recent ventures is flatpack apartments and houses. IKEA is working with the construction firm Skanska and so far they have built over 4000 apartments and houses in 5 countries. Unsurprisingly, following their founder´s original idea, they´ve got names for these,too. The latest ones built in Sothern Sweden are called ”Bags I !” I´d like to bet that most of them have a Billy bookcase in one of the rooms.

Flat Pack Nightmare

My computer room was looking like a poorly-run charity shop, so stern measures were needed. A swift check on the local furniture shops led me to the sobering fact that a decent, ready-made cupboard would be painfully dear. The nearest thing to something half-approaching what I wanted cost around 80 euros. At this point I wandered into the local DIY shop, saw a cupboard which was just the job, costing 30 euros less. I´ll have one of those, I said and asked them to bring it out to the car. It was when they arrived with a large, oblong package that I realised I was about to enter flat-pack hell.

I was under no illusions - I knew what I was in for. After all, I´ve lived in the flat- pack´s alma mater for 30 years and have on many occasions been party to wild hysterical scenes where demented Swedes have threatened to hurl themselves like lemmings at the nearest Ikea, screeching curses and bloodcurdling Viking oaths at Ingvar Kampryd, its filthy-rich founder. I´ll bet he doesn´t have any flatpack furniture in his Swiss hideaway!

The package stood in the hall for 2 days and I slunk past it, dreading the moment of truth. When it finally came, the actual checking of the bits, it was exactly as it always is. Various vital chunks of wood and quite a few screws were missing. Back to the store, where it took half an hour to identify the neccessary spare parts and by the time I arrived home, I was totally fraught with the thought of what lay ahead. The job was put off for another 2 days.

Finally, Other Half and I started to peruse the instruction sheet. It reminded me of when I got my first computer. Whoever had written the instruction manual for that had left out the really basic steps assuming that nobody could be so stupid that they didn´t know how to switch on. Similarly, you needed to guess what the intervening steps were between illustration A, which was a bare, pristine cupboard side and illustration B , where screws and plugs were attatched to holes and a hand with a glue pot was about to stick a long narrow bit of wood along the edge.

Why does it have to be this way? Why is it always so obscenely difficult? Why are there always bits missing? I´m sure it´s tested in the factory to see if it can be easily assembled. But they do it all the time so of course it´s easy for them! Do they never test it out on ordinary thick-heads? It took us 4 hours, without the breaks for strong drink. When finally assembled, the cupboard isn´t too bad, although the doors aren´t flush and there´s a bit of a gap where the 2 halves of the chipboard back don´t quite meet. Still, I suppose it was worth it. I saved a bit of cash, didn´t I? It´s just that Other Half and I are not speaking to each other after a heated dispute over which way round the door hinges should go.

Actually, come to think of it, every cloud has a silver lining.

The Green-Eyed Goddess.

I was watching Skye News the other day and saw, to my amazement, a couple in the UK , who had just scooped 56 million on the lottery, celebrating with champagne and getting their faces imprinted on the bitter, envious minds of all the many who didn´t win and resent the fact. How naive can you be? Didn´t someone warn them to keep it under wraps? Or didn´t they have any choice in the matter? I would imagine their lives will change drastically and probably not all to the good after this.

At about the same time, in their newspaper commentary section, Skye showed a screaming headline denouncing all the British expats who receive winter fuel allowances abroad. I didn´t read the article but I suppose it ranted on about the luxury lifestyle in the sun blah blah and how the poor Brits freezing at home shouldn´t have to divvy up for people sipping G&Ts on the Costas. They should try a winter out here and see what they think then! I don´t get, nor ever have received, this benefit, so I´ve no axe to grind. It just seems to me to be yet another display of envy from the don´t have as much as you do lot.

I´ve lived in Sweden for 30 years so can testify that envy flourishes in the frozen wastes of Scandiavia too. People assume that you must be very well-heeled to have a place in Spain. And to be well-heeled in Nordic countries isn´t that easy with the grinding tax burden, so it´s often assumed that you have probably beaten the system somehow.

Once you have made your move and live abroad, the Swedish Inland Revenue pursues you with vigour to make sure you follow the regulations. As a Swede living abroad, all your income is taxed at source and arrives, 25% depleted, in your bank account. You then pay income tax here in Spain, send the bank receipts to Sweden and wait nervously to see if the authorities there will OK everything.

If they do, which isn´t always the case, they eventually send you back the tax you have paid in Spain. Thing is, if you end up paying, say, 18% in Spain, you don´t get all the 25% back. Oh no, you only get the 18% back. The other 7% is kept and used there for something you don´t get a whiff of. How grudging is that? It reeks to me of envy! It´s like somebody is saying: We´ll show the buggers! If they can´t stay here and pay 55% tax, we´ll damn well see to it they won´t be able to enjoy the tax benefits over there!

What´s wrong with people? Are there any truly genuine, pleasant types who are pleased when others have a bit of luck or do well, and celebrate with them , not feeling twinges of envy? I can´t understand it at all. I would never be like that…… It´s just that the couple I go to a quizz with have been on 4 cruises that I know of and I´ve only managed a week in Majorca. They must be up to some fiddle, for sure. I´m blowed if I´ll give them a lift next quizz night.