This could be YOU!

Have you seen the new Tenerife Magazine yet? It is FAB! Being 100% virtual, I can’t say it has hit the streets running but the very first issue comes with a brilliant competition giveaway – a holiday for up to four at the gorgeous Sands Beach in Lanzarote!

All you need to do to enter is become a fan of the Tenerife Magazine page on Facebook. The draw is to be held on November 30th and results will be announced via Facebook.

It is hard cheddar if you are not on Facebook, I am afraid but not to worry. I have it on good authority that the next competition will be run through a different medium – maybe Twitter.  Perhaps the next competition will even be for a Tenerife related prize?

Modern Halloween, as in kids getting dressed up and going trick-or-treating, is not a traditional Spanish festival. In fact, the Spanish Bishops are getting a bit hot under the collar about the whole thing and are urging parents not to dress up their kids in costumes in celebration of this pagan event.

That doesn’t seem to bother my neighbour, Lola, much. She has been fussing and fretting over her kids’ costumes since the beginning of the month and seems quite bewildered at my lukewarm attitude. To be honest, I am just delighted that Gaga and her sidekick, Linda, are going to be throwing a party for the local kids which gives me the excuse to go out for a bit of kid-free gallivanting of my own. Let’s face it, Sami is a wee diablo for much of the year anyway, while Hania, well let’s just say she can be a little bruja when she feels like it.

Regardless of what the Bishops have to say, you can guarantee that unless you are smart and offl0ad the kids and shoot off out for the night or sit in pitch blackness with the telly off, your front door is going to ring off its hinges on Saturday night. So, just to help you out, I have prepared a little  list so that you  may have the right response handy.

Just fill in the blanks…

¡Caramba! ¡Qué un esqueleto espantoso! (Yikes! What a scary skeleton!)

• monster = monstruo
• witch = bruja
• fantasma = ghost
• vampiro = vampire
• werewolf = hombre lobo
• zombi = zombie

If you are having a party of your own, then there is nothing that screams Halloween more than pumpkin soup for which Andy Montgomery has provided a devilish recipe in the new online Tenerife Magazine.

And finally, I’d like to leave you with a little Halloween riddle that has bothered me for some time. Why do witches never have babies? Because warlocks have hollow weenies. Bwahahahah

So there we were, obviously a shifty looking crew, me, two kids, a grandmother and a big daft dog with a halter-type face mask on. We were plodding along the street at snail’s pace, the dog, huge as he is was neither pulling nor showing any interest in anything other than his ‘weans’ as he likes to keep an eye on them when they are gadding about.

On the other side of the street, a wee hairy mop of a dog was yapping its head off and slinging bribes in our direction, but Tito, to his credit, didn’t blink an eye at it.

That didn’t stop a police car from coming to a stop a couple of feet ahead of us and the coppers inside it, giving me a stern talking to about the fact the dog didn’t have a muzzle on. Actually the face mask he was wearing gives me more control than a muzzle would and also effectively pulls his mouth shut if there were to be any trouble. The pc on the other side of the car got our and bobbed about shouting that this was a dangerous dog. “No, he’s not!” my mother scoffed while Tito threw himself to the ground with a huge sigh of boredom.

Only a couple of days before an elderly lady had been mugged in the area by three local boys on a scooter. One got her round the neck, while a second grabbed her bag. In total they got away with about €150 in booty but they left the woman feeling very shaky and upset. Worst of all is that the locals say even the police know who the wee thugs are but can’t touch them because they are under 16.

Meanwhile, Tito’s eyes had glazed over and he rolled on his side totally disgusted with this interruption to our pleasant family walk. We were finally let off the hook after being threatened with a steep fine and assorted dire penalties if the dog was not wearing a muzzle the next time they saw me with him.

Do you think it would have made a difference if I told the police that Tito was under 16?

Spanish labour law tends to come down on the side of the worker but that is only true if you know what your rights are and when they have been trampled on.

Take one boss I know of who happily agreed to a Spanish worker taking some vacation time. Off the employee went to spend two glorious weeks with family on the mainland only to come back and find she had been fired for not turning up to work. Because the employee did not have a signed letter stating the vacation period she could not prove that the boss’s permission had been given for the time off. Her non-appearance at her place of work was just cause for firing her and the company  did not have to give her any severance pay (finiquito).

The same boss later called a British worker into his office and asked him to sign a paper. The document written entirely in Spanish was notification of dismissal and included a clause which stated that the man was being fired because he was slacking off. In signing it, the worker was ‘admitting’ to this fabricated transgression and therefore blew any chance he may have had at receiving severance pay (finiquito).

This employer, whom we shall call The Joker for his predilection at playing tricks on his employees, is a wily old bird. He juggles employees between companies, holds back salaries to afford materials for production and is currently conducting a manufacturing business in a place that is unsafe to work.

You have to wonder why The Joker has not been denounced yet. I can only guess that the staff he mistreats are afraid of not finding any other jobs in this current economic climate. Is it better, to work for pay that will come late than not to be working at all?

I know that the company in question provides services for some of Spain’s major tourist attractions – including several here on Tenerife. Would they still give the work to The Joker if they knew how shoddily he treated his staff?  Sadly, I guess the answer to that question is yes. I am sure The Joker is undercutting his rivals to the bone and if the marketing department of the large tourist companies can save a few thousand euros on production who cares how The Joker manages to keep his prices so low, right?

As an expat in Tenerife or Spain, you should be aware that it is not a good idea to sign any document that you do not understand.

If you feel you have been unfairly treated, wrongfully dismissed or had unlawful deductions made to your salary you do have 20 days to take the case before the labour courts (Magistratura de Trabajo) but your rights may be seriously affected if you have signed any document that would allow your employer wriggle out of his obligations.

Yippeeee! Only a few days to go till Tenerife schools are in!

Having had the week from hell (or to be honest the last thirteen weeks from hell)  I am prepared to admit that mothering is not my forte. Love them to pieces as I do, I find my two darlings in concentrated doses makes me go more than a little round the bend. How I envy those unruffled women who glide through parenthood so smoothly while magically keeping their homes clean and sparkling at the same time.

In comparison at the end of each day my hair is standing on end and I am having palpitations at the scary thought of the mountain of clothes to be washed toppling over and suffocating me in the middle of the night. Then having finally said my last goodnight and waiting half an hour for the inevitable squabble and squawk to die down in the kids bedroom I can then enjoy a precious nugget of silence before Tito starts baying his silly head off at some innocent person out walking their dog past the garden gate.

Having never been a religious person I am more and more drawn to the vow of silence.

But I digress. Back to school or at least back to the subject of school. Oddly where in the past the little ones were taken in a day earlier so that they could get settled, it seems this year that the intake for both infantil and primaria is on the same time at the same day. That can’t be right, surely?

With one set of buildings on each side of a main road and a janny (a janitor to those who do not speak Scottish) who seems to take great delight in ramming the gates shut if you are a nanosecond past the 9.10 am while galloping from one school building to the other, there will be utter chaos on Tuesday.

There is also the matter of the subsidised school books. At third year in Primary, my daughter is entitled to have her text books paid for by the cabildo but what a holy mess they made of that last year.  The list of books was not handed out till the last minute and there were not enough books on the whole island to cover the demand.  If this is your first year dealing with the state school system in Tenerif e you can get an idea of what to expect by reading  The Tenerife TexBook Fiasco and Tenerife Textbooks – the Saga Continues.

So with crossed fingers and a song of hope in my heart I am skipping off down to the school reception this morning with my babies in tow to find out just WTF is going on. Tra la la.

The local website Lo Que Pasa En Tenerife is a good place to check up on the daily complaints of Tenerife’s residents.

Today one of the topics is the proliferation of shopping carts that are left in the streets of Santa Cruz.

The citizen reporter who scooped this story gripes that this is becoming so common it’s almost fashionable and why won’t people just return the effing  things. Well, okay maybe she didn’t say that exactly but I bet she was thinking it.

The comments on the original page are funny.

One person opines that it is obviously the fault of the South Americans and globalisation. Boy, is that a leap or what?

I don’t think the invasion of the shopping trolleys is a new thing at all. I seem to remember my hometown being festooned with the things when I was growing up (in fact I am sure most people reading this blog must have trolley-jousted at last once when they were small) and I don’t remember one Peruvian or Brazilian living in Cumbernauld at the time.

Where I live in Tenerife there is a bit of community spirit. We swap dishes and gossip at garden bbqs, attend each others kids’ birthdays parties and share two communal shopping trolleys. They are used to ferry shopping from the car park to the houses. As the driver parks the kids scamper off along the path to retrieve the trolleys from the gate of whoever had them last.

Strictly speaking only one of the trolleys is communal. My neighbour (yes, she of the poo-slinging scandal) got so fed up of having her shopping trolley purloined by the vecinos that she wrote her house number and family name on it in big black felt pen. Quite bold of her, I thought, considering she must have half-inched it herself from somewhere. It’s not like you can stop off at the €1 shop and buy yourself a Mercadona or Netto trolley, is it?

You would think that as the government seems committed to doing absolutely nothing to stem the burgeoning number of abandoned, neglected, maltreated and unwanted dogs in the south of Tenerife that it would at least go out of its way to support local charities that have been set up to do so.

Unfortunately that is not the case and while dog sanctuaries in the south cry out for facilities and funding, the government  sees fit to remove 60 dogs from local dog home where they were receiving water, food, shelter and shade. They were not living in the lap of luxury that is true. But they were loved and cared for, off the streets and fed. Owner of Dingo Dogs, Phil Nelson also does not live in the lap of luxury because every last penny he earns goes to feed and shelter his beloved dogs.

The dogs were removed from Phil, in a scene that must have been traumatic for everyone involved, transported to a  goat pen with little shade and no food or water and left there in the baking heat. One dog was dead within an hour. Live Arico were called in to help and a temporary sanctuary has been found for the dogs. They will have to move within 21 days but for now, they are out of the sun and being fed and watered.

The full story can be found on Tenerife Dogs- the website for all the island’s abandoned dogs – and here below is a video showing Phil Nelson and Dingo’s Dogs before the government’s hack-handed interference: