Terry Didcott - Freedom Writers

Archive for the ‘Life in Spain’ Category

What we do to make money!

Offline, I still have to work to pay the bills. I do some casual work for a guy who runs his own builder’s business, so I usually get a day or two a week here and there as well as my own gardening services that at the moment take up just one day a week.

The last two days have been hard work… painting some freshly rendered walls on a building - two days solid work. As I don’t do this every day, the old muscles never get a chance to grow accustomed to heavy work as they should, so each new job kills me once I’m finished!

Now I’m recuperating with aching muscles and a stiff neck, but instead of lying down and relaxing, here I am in front of this thing desperately trying to catch up on all the writing that I’ve gotten behind on!

I’ve also just revamped one of my blogs with a new theme, if you want to take a look, its at: Make Money Blog - I think it’s a definite improvement on the old one, which was a bit slow to load up thanks to the pre-historic HTML used by the author - I mean tables in a Wordpress blog?

How very yesterday!

The new theme is much better at dealing with all the add-ons and widgets that blogs carry these days.

I’m actually thinking to update this theme, as I’m already growing tired of it - it’s a little too cartoon-like for what is supposed to be my self-branding, “hey look at me and what I can do,” site!

Needs to be a little more professional looking…

Watch this space!

Terry Didcott

PS: Alexa today: 792,377

This has been almost a mantra mumbled by ex-pat Brits over the years when living in southern Spain.

The truth of it is that the water that comes out of your tap is not fit to drink! Don’t believe me? Then don’t, it’s not my health that you’re putting at risk by drinking the stuff.

Why is it so unsafe?

Well for starters, there is no true water main anywhere on the Costa Del Sol, at least not as we know it in the UK. All the water that comes out of the tap comes from a mixture of reservoirs and subterranean aquifiers which is pumped into local “depositos”, large concrete bunkers that are built into every new urbanization. These depositos are not particularly well sanitized and can be accessed by vermin, insects and other nasties. To combat the high levels of bacteria in the local water supply, a large amount of chlorine is added.

Add to this the local water is also very high in calcium, as your kettle and electric water heater element will attest to! Include the dangerous levels of heavy metals like aluminium and lead, then add the high levels of pesticide residues that the over-zealous farmers pump onto their land several times a year that leeches down into the water table and you have a cocktail of unhealthy particulates in every glass of water that comes out of your tap!

By World Health Organisation standards, particulate levels above 150 ppm is considered dangerous to health. Guess what the levels are on average coming out of your taps? Between 250 and 300 ppm is regularly found in local tests. Oh yes it is!

By the way, the authorities will not admit to any of this, naturally.

So ok, you only drink bottled water, but…

Boiling the water won’t get rid of the pesticides, heavy metals or a lot of the calcium. So if you’re drinking a nice cup of tea made with water from your tap, think again - is it really so nice?

Ok, you make your tea with bottled water…

Do you cook with water from the tap?

Then your food will soak up all those nasties that are dissolved in your water and you end up with it all in your blood stream anyway.

Chlorine, like flourine binds with other particulates in the water to form compounds which are… wait for it… carcinogenic. That means cancer. If you doubt this point, do you remember the scare in the UK several years ago about the addition of flourine into the water and links with cancer - and how it suddenly got swept under the carpet? Wonder why that was…?

Think how much it costs the local health services to deal with a few cases of cancer, compared with a major outbreak of cholera or dysentery…

Excess calcium in water causes digestive problems as well as helping to cause gall and bladder stones.

Aluminium poisoning has been hailed as a major cause of Alzheimer’s disease.

Do you still think the water out of your tap is safe to drink, or cook with?

Would you also like to hazard a guess at how safe that bottled water is you’re lugging home from the supermarket and drinking?

That’s for another time…

Terry Didcott

I’m sitting here, writing for my blogs and lenses (and have been for about seven hours) and I need to go to sleep. I also ache all over and I have to go and work on a garden tomorrow.

Why do I ache all over?

Yesterday, I had to move my motorbike - by pushing it uphill for about 50 metres and parking it in a different spot. I had to push it because the battery is dead and I can’t start it. Being  Virago 1100, it weight the best part of a metric tonne. And it has sat stationary for three years so the brakes were binding. So that was bad enough.

Then today I had to work on a building site - don’t ask…

Now it has caught up with me and I really do ache.

I must be stark raving mad…

Terry Didcott

I can’t believe my last post was way back on Monday and it’s Saturday already!

What’s been happening here in Spain?

Well, although I’ve been out and about quite a lot, I don’t seem to have achieved a whole lot in that time. I’ve done a couple of small jobs and worked on some building, but a lot of time has been spent between writing online for my other blogs and some offline stuff that I don’t think is interesting enough to even mention here!

Well, some stuff has to stay private, right?

Where I live here on the coast, we have what is known as an urbanization, which is just a collection of duplex apartments that all surround a large communal garden and pool. The owners of these apartments all belong to the communidad (community) and we have periodic meetings to discuss things like the upkeep of the gardens and pool, general maintenance and that sort of thing.

Well, we had one of those meetings yesterday evening because a lot of people are getting concerned over some of the financial goings on and the administrator who chaired the meeting came under fire from the residents over money that seems to have gone missing from the community’s account! At this point, I’d better mention that we also have an elected community president who is one of the residents and that job is held for one year. Well, this year’s president has done some unpopular things, one of them being appointing a new administrator (the guy who chaired our meeting last night).

The flack was flying from all directions (as you can imagine) and one of the biggest concern was why the president was not present at the meeting!

The arguments went on for ages until one of the residents (who works for the local social security department) accused the administrator of unprofessionalism (he was almost impossible to reach on the phone) and of not paying the social security contributions for the gardeners! With that the administrator slammed shut his brief case and stormed out of the meeting!

There was a lot more going on, but the gist of it all was that the residents want a new president asap and will probably denounce the administrator over the missing money. What a fun evening!

Terry Didcott