Not everything under the sun is cheap

OK the wine is cheap as chips and fresh vegetables are for nothing but some things are damned expensive.

Internet connections for one. I notice in England now you can get a decent high speed connection for under £20. The cheapest company here in Spain seems to be Wandoo who offer a 4mb connection for 39€ (£27) Telefonica have some package deals which include national phone calls for about the same price but the Internet connection is only 512Mb.

Getting English TV is also a tad expensive and to say the least confusing. A lot of people on our estate forked out 1000€ or more to get the 2m (or larger) dishes that you need to pull in Sky from the Astra satellite. They also had to pay for a Sky box and the ongoing cost of a Sky card registered to a UK address (all illegal of course). Originally a 80cm dish would pull in Sky but then Sky re-aligned the satellite. They may do that again and make even the 2.4m dishes useless. Apart from the cost, imagine having a 2.4m dish in your garden. You'd need a good size palm tree to disguise it. Of course some people have had the dishes put on their roof terraces which has made that area useless for anything else. One person had their dish put on the concrete beams that join their villa to the one next door (much neater) but managed to crack the beams with the weight of the thing.

Because we live in from the coast, the cheaper microwave system (Sky re-transmitted over microwaves) doesn't work too well here. In fact it doesn't work too well anywhere. Programs can drop off in the evening even for those people close to the transmitter.

My neighbour tried that and shelled out 600€ for the priveledge. In a desperate attempt to make it work the company fitted a pole to his roof which extended twenty odd feet into the air. In the wind it waved about so much it looked like it would pull his chimney stack down.

Now he is trying another system that uses a small dish which again costs 600€. He is delighted so far because he can get more sports channels than you can count on one hand. I hope it works or him. On the downside, we may not see him again until the end of the football season!