I Don’t Want to Say I Told You So…

Mainly because saying “I told you so” is one of the least attractive things a man can say, ranking somewhere between “have you heard my prog-rock demo?” and “The Big Bang Theory is much funnier than Friends.”

Nonetheless...

A year ago I wrote a blog post about preparing for a world that seemed to be inching, blindly yet belligerently, towards a really nasty cliff edge. When I posted it, I half expected people to read it and conclude I was one step away from lining the skirting boards with tinfoil and muttering about fallout patterns. Yet here we are, twelve months later, and the world has done very little to reward complacency. If anything, it has promoted my cranky rantings from the realm of the absurd to something more like prudent contingency planning. As I write this, America is actually at war with Iran... for no apparent reason!

On a positive note, what I’ve learned in the year since is that preparing for disruption has an interesting side effect: even if the worst never happens, you still end up improving your life by acquiring a whole new bunch of skills and knowledge.

Though my starting point was “I should probably have enough food, water and basic kit to sit tight for a while if the world goes belly-up”, this soon morphed into a broader fascination with resilience in the everyday sense. I haven’t bought a leather trench coat, a crossbow, or anything that would look good on the cover of Prepper Monthly, but I have started to look at the practical systems that matter to my day-to-day existence and gradually sought to improve them to make life smoother for those times when it decides to be a nuisance.

I’ve developed the habit of asking a certain type of question and then coming up with a solution. For example, how would I turn on the air-conditioning if the remote control broke? Answer: either use a universal remote or rig up an IR interface that can be wired up and triggered by an app on my phone.

Soon I found that the search for these sorts of answers pulled me into a rabbit hole that led to home networking, local servers, Home Assistant, IoT gadgets, backup power, battery banks, smarter lighting, better monitoring, and the general art of making a house behave less like a random collection of temperamental appliances and more like a military command centre.

I’ve rediscovered skills that I’d forgotten I had, like soldering and decoding resistor colour codes. While normal people are recycling jam jars, I’m stripping components out of old electronic equipment and mumbling things like, “That bit of wire might come in useful.”

There is, it turns out, a lot of overlap between “mildly anxious middle-aged prepper” and “bloke who gets excited about network topology.” Once you start asking sensible questions like “What happens if the power goes?” or “What happens if the internet dies?” or “What happens if some essential service I’ve lazily assumed will always exist suddenly doesn’t?”, you find yourself building useful things. Not bunkers, maybe, but infrastructure.

So now I find a lot of reassurance not merely from the tins in the store-cupboard, but in knowing how my own home works. I like knowing which devices matter, which ones are fluff, what can run locally, what depends on the cloud, what can be automated, what can be monitored, and what can be made robust for relatively little money. There is something deeply satisfying about replacing vague dependence with practical understanding. It scratches the same itch as stockpiling, but in a more technical and, dare I say it, more interesting way.

And the lovely thing is that none of this only applies to war, or civil breakdown, or whatever flavour of geopolitical idiocy happens to be trending this week. It applies to everyday disruption too.

Case in point: the power outages we had during the storm season just after Christmas.

A year ago, that sort of thing would have irritated me. This time round, I largely breezed through it. Not because I had built some apocalypse compound on the South Island of New Zealand, but because I had quietly, bit by bit, made life more resilient. I had backup options. I had lighting sorted. I had ways of keeping key kit going. I had thought in advance about communications, charging, local control, and the boring but vital question of “what stops working first?”

That is the real dividend of all this stuff. You don’t need World War Three for it to pay off. A storm will do. A router outage. A brief blackout. A flaky service provider. A burst of bad weather. The future always arrives dressed as an inconvenience before it turns up in uniform.

And maybe that is the point.

Preparedness is often mocked because people imagine extremes. They picture conspiracy cranks, underground bunkers, and fifty kilos of dried lentils. What they miss is that resilience is simply competence with a torch in its hand. It is understanding systems. It is reducing single points of failure. It is making sure that when something goes wrong, your first reaction is not blind panic but mild annoyance.

If I have become more interested in technology over the last year, this is why. Not because I’ve fallen in love with gadgets for their own sake, though I admit I’m not entirely immune to a blinking dashboard. I actually spent the best part of a morning figuring out how to get my servers, of which there are now four, to power down gracefully and come back online automatically when there is a power outage. The answer involved a magic packet and the status of a smart socket attached to the fridge. (Long story). It’s because technology, used properly, can make a home less fragile. Home Assistant, local networking, IoT sensors, backup power arrangements, all of it is really just practical anti-chaos engineering. It’s a way of pushing back, however modestly, against the modern habit of building everything on assumptions of permanent stability, which where I live feels like a somewhat fragile position.

And that brings me back to Spain.

Looking back, one of my better life decisions has been moving here in the first place. Spain stayed neutral in the First World War and remained nominally neutral in the Second, even if Franco’s sympathies were hardly mysterious. More recently, Pedro Sánchez has made a habit of resisting pressure to follow the most excitable military drumbeats, including pushing back on NATO’s 5% spending target and, this month, refusing to let U.S. forces use Spanish bases for Iran-linked strikes.

That, for once, is exactly the sort of national character trait I’m happy to lean into.

So no, I don’t want to say I told you so.

But I will say this: thinking ahead has served me rather well. It hasn’t made me richer, cooler, or more relaxed, but it has made me more resilient. And in an age where fragility is built into almost everything, that feels less like eccentricity and more like common sense.

Maybe the biggest lesson of the last year is that preparing for catastrophe is not really about catastrophe at all.

It’s about building a life that copes better with wobble.

And, in the 21st century, we seem to have wobble in abundance!

 

For the longest time I've kept a notebook with business ideas in it. Most are complete nonsense, others get promoted to the lofty rank of “business plan” yet go no further. They march, chest out, straight from vaguely plausible scribble to failed start-up, without ever troubling the world with pesky details like customers, profit, or taxation. Others never see the light of day at all. They remain in the notebook, fermenting quietly like an under-ambitious cheese.

I was flicking through it the other day and came across an idea I still think is properly banging, except for one tiny flaw: it fails on capital. It needs a shop. An actual, physical shop. And it would cost a small fortune to stock, because the whole concept revolves around imported inventory. You can’t run it as a pop-up on Etsy because the purchase is, in a weird way, location-dependant.

Anyway, I present it to you here. Run it up the old flagpole and see if anyone salutes. If you want to pick it up and sprint off with it, it’s all yours. I gift it to you in the spirit of Gnu. (Which are currently out of stock, but I can offer you a charmingly wrong substitute from Helsinki.)

The business is called: Anywhere But Here

A souvenir shop in your city that sells souvenirs for every tourist destination in the world except the one you’re standing in.

So for example, if you’re in Madrid, you can buy:

• Arc de Triomphe paperweights
• Moscow fridge magnets
• a “Greetings from Singapore” tea towel
• a miniature Statue of Liberty (that looks faintly embarrassed to be abroad at the moment)
• A fluffy kangaroo in an I ❤️ Sydney T-shirt

…but absolutely nothing Spanish. Not a flamenco doll. Not a bull. Not a “Madrid” keyring. Not even a postcard of a breakfast churro. If you ask, the staff look at you with the polite concern reserved for people who’ve tried to pay with a Blockbuster video card.

“Spain?” they say. “Is that near Belgium?”

The Mission Statement (printed in tasteful italics on the wall)

We believe travel is about disappointment, confusion, and buying objects you do not need.
We specialise in the disappointment and confusion, and we’re open seven days a week.

The Branding

The shopfront is beautiful. Warm lighting. Tasteful shelves. A little bell on the door. Everything says curated. A place for discerning travellers.

The sign says:

ANYWHERE BUT HERE Souvenirs for places you’re not in

Inside, a big world map with pins everywhere except your country, which is just… blank. A tasteful void. A cartographic snub.

How It Works

You walk in. You’re a tourist. You’ve got that “I’ve just paid €4.60 for a coffee” glaze in your eyes. You want something to take home. Something that says I was here.

We give you the opposite.

The categories are:

1) The Wrong City Wall

A whole display dedicated to the nearest famous landmark you are not visiting.

So for example, in Madrid you would see:

• Paris: Eiffel Tower keyrings, Arc de Triomphe paperweights, “I ❤️ Paris” berets (made in a factory in a country that has never heard of Paris).
• Rome: Colosseum snow globes (no snow, just small bits of dust that may or may not be historical).
• London: “Mind the Gap” mugs, tiny red buses, a Queen’s Guard figurine that looks like it’s been through a long day.

If you point out you’re not in those cities, the assistant nods sympathetically, as if you’ve just told them about a long illness.

2) The Deep Cut Shelf

This is where you earn your keep as a retailer of nonsense.

• “Greetings from Reykjavík” oven mitts
• Ulaanbaatar shot glasses
• A hand-carved wooden moose from “somewhere in Canada, probably”
• “I Survived The Hague” t-shirts (nobody survives The Hague, they simply endure it)

3) The Confusion Range

Souvenirs that are wrong in more than one way.

• A Stonehenge dinosaur diorama
• A Dubai rain poncho
• A Venice beach towel
• A Sahara lighthouse ornament
• “Welcome to Edinburgh” flip-flops

A customer will stare at these items like they’ve just seen a dog solve a Rubik cube.

4) The Ethical Luxury Corner

For people who want meaning, but also want it to be inconvenient.

• a recycled-glass ornament shaped like Mount Fuji
• artisanal “authentic” New York subway tokens (made yesterday)
• a candle called Eau de Glacier that smells like expensive melancholy

5) The Kids Section: “Where Are We?”

Little plush toys and sticker books, all themed around places you are not.

• Furry Aardvarks in a city where the only wildlife is pigeons with opinions
• a sticker sheet titled “My Trip to Antarctica”
• a cuddly toy gnu (sold out, again, obviously)

Staff Policy

This is the important bit. The shop only works if the staff commit.

Rules:

1. If a customer asks for a souvenir of your city, you act genuinely confused.
2. If they insist, you offer them something nearby but wrong.
   • “Madrid? We’ve got Marseille?”
3. If they start getting angry, you guide them gently toward the Customer Support Penguin, a life-size cardboard penguin wearing a lanyard that says “I’m Listening.”

If someone demands to speak to the manager, the manager appears wearing a Clown costume and says, “We don’t carry local.”

The Loyalty Scheme

The Frequent Disappointer Card
Collect stamps. Redeem for rewards available only in:

• countries you have never visited
• cities you cannot pronounce
• places that may be fictional

After ten stamps you qualify for the Golden Wrongness tier, which gets you a free upgrade to “a bigger version of the same mistake”.

The Best Part: The Reviews (already written, because the internet is inevitable)

⭐☆☆☆☆
“Asked for a magnet that said Madrid. They sold me one that said Minsk. I don’t even know where Minsk is.”

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“Absolutely brilliant. Bought an ‘I ❤️ Tokyo’ t-shirt while standing 50 metres from my Barcelona hotel. My wife hasn’t stopped laughing.”

⭐☆☆☆☆
“They told me Spain is ‘out of season’. This is ridiculous.”

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“Came in angry. Left with a Chicago Cubs 47 Brand Wrigley Field Marque Fitted baseball cap. Couldn't be happier. I respect the commitment.”

Why It Would Work (in a parallel universe where I had money and serotonin)

Because tourists don’t buy souvenirs. They buy a story. They buy a prop. They buy the ability to say:
“Look at this. I don’t even know why this exists.”

Also, the shop becomes a destination in itself. People don’t come for the merch. They come to experience being gently gaslit by tasteful retail shelving.

The Fatal Flaw (and why you’re reading this instead of visiting my shop)

Capital. Rent. Stock. Shipping a thousand tiny monuments to a thousand wrong places. It’s a money bonfire, and not the warm cosy kind.

So instead, I’m doing what every failed entrepreneur eventually does: abandoning my dreams and blogging about them.

The Flagpole Bit

If this idea made you smile, here’s my offer:

Take it. Steal it. Launch it. Franchise it. Build it into a global empire of tasteful nonsense. I officially gift it to you in the spirit of Gnu.

(Still out of stock. Supply chain issues. Try again next week.)

And if you do open one, please do me just one small favour:
On the quiet, put a single, lonely postcard of the local city behind the counter, face-down, like contraband.

Because we’re not monsters. We’re just… curated.

 

Last year I wrote about ten things that get under my skin in our supposedly advanced modern world. The response was surprising - turns out I'm not alone in my exasperation. So here we are again, because the world hasn't stopped providing material, and I've still got things to get off my chest.

Smash Burgers and the Americanisation of Everything

Let's start with smash burgers, shall we? For those blessedly unaware, a smash burger is what happens when someone can't be bothered to properly mould a burger patty. Instead, they slap a ball of mince onto a grill and flatten it with whatever comes to hand. Bits fall off, you lose weight (from the burger, not yourself), and what should be a quarter-pounder ends up considerably lighter. But it's sold to us as "artisanal" and "trendy" when the real reason is simple economics - shaving seconds off prep time to maximise profit.

I grew up in South London and remember the pre-fast-food era, so I've witnessed this invasion from the start. McDonald's and KFC at least offered value initially. Then came the late-80s wave where "Americana" became part of the experience. I recall visiting Sticky Fingers in Kensington - owned by one of the Rolling Stones, if memory serves - and thinking it was vulgar, overpriced circus masquerading as cuisine.

Fast forward to today, and these establishments are proliferating across Spain, a country with its own magnificent culinary heritage. Every time I see one, I wince. For God's sake, exploit your own cultural tradition instead of importing smoke and mirrors from America. I left a comment on a Malaga restaurant's advert about their smash burgers expressing this sentiment. They blocked me. Quelle surprise.

Pot Noodle: An Abomination in Plastic

There should be a law against pot noodles. Without their packet of E-numbers, noodles are utterly flavourless. They have the texture of ear cartilage and possess a perverse ability to resist being eaten - too slippery to wind around a fork or cup in a spoon. Who invents food that actively fights consumption?

And the container! A plastic pot is entirely the wrong vessel for something already difficult to serve. Of course it's plastic - the fossil fuel industry's darling - wrapped in a cardboard sleeve because plastic won't take decent printing. Want 43% of your daily salt intake in one sitting? Pot noodle's got you covered. That's the nearest thing to praise I can muster.

The Right-Wing Press and the Death of Decency

I've been hate-reading the Mail Online for years, mainly to understand what the establishment opposition is saying and to do battle with the hard-of-thinking in the comments section. I've always despised its undercurrent of racism and blind monarchism - a set of values I've termed C.R.A.P. (Colonialist, Royalist, Authoritarian Patriarchy).

Increasingly though, I can't stomach the C.R.A.P. for even brief visits. The Overton window isn't pushing the envelope - as Pratchett might say, it's burst a hole in the wall of the post office. All pretense of the common decency that characterised one-nation Conservatism has evaporated. The Mail, Express, and Telegraph have embraced post-truth Trumpism with gusto, firing story after story at the public not for news value but for their ability to shock and enrage.

AI Slop and the Death of Truth

Shortly after the widely publicised boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, a story appeared claiming Anthony Joshua had nearly died in a car accident in Africa. It had red flags - the timing, the location - that made me suspect AI-generated clickbait. Except it wasn't fake. It was true.

That's precisely what infuriates me about AI. The days when a critical mind with decent technical understanding could separate truth from fiction without third-party confirmation are gone. We've entered an era where real news looks fake and fake news looks real, and none of us can trust our instincts anymore.

Phones as Phones (Or Rather, Not)

Remember when phones were for calling people? Now they're messaging devices, cameras, and tiny computers that occasionally ring. The problem is threefold: spam calls have made us afraid to answer, you can never extract the bloody thing from your pocket before three rings, and your actual friends have migrated entirely to messaging apps. The voice call is becoming an anachronism, which seems perverse for a device literally called a phone.

Passkeys: Security Theatre Gone Mad

Many of you probably don't know what passkeys are, and explaining them without diving into cryptography is tricky. Essentially, an app verifies your identity through information it can authenticate. Google and Microsoft are hastening the death of traditional passwords, which I think is a mistake. Passwords aren't inherently less secure than passkeys - they're just easier for users to mess up by choosing "password123" or writing them on Post-it notes.

The problem with passkeys is they're often device-dependent. Recently, I tried accessing a shopping site while away from home. The app recognised I'd previously logged in with a fingerprint, but I was on a different computer. Cue the authentication paper-chain: "We've sent a message to device X." Device X was at home. "Try an alternative method." The email went to one of fifty addresses I keep on my desktop but hadn't bothered transferring to my laptop.

I have password managers on all seven of my devices. I'd entered my correct username and password. Yet it took fifteen minutes and several emails to access a site where I was trying to give them money. Is this really sensible business practice?

Academia's Emperor's New Clothes

Remember that Good Will Hunting scene about dropping a hundred grand on an education you could get for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library? I just watched a video listing ten degree-level courses available free online. No networking opportunities or certificates, but all the materials are there.

Here's the question: is it easier to ask questions in a crowded lecture hall or have an AI language model as your one-to-one education partner? The traditional university model is looking increasingly like an expensive way to make friends and get a piece of paper. 

Fake Profiles: The Uncanny Valley of Social Media

I encountered a YouTube account recently - a woman talking to camera. Something felt off, so I investigated. Full social media presence: Instagram, TikTok, the works. Videos of places she'd "visited," but even when she appeared in thumbnails, the actual footage showed her from behind, going up stairs, always in situations making it hard to confirm she was real.

After fifteen minutes of detective work, I concluded she was fake - an exceptionally well-constructed fake, but fake nonetheless. It gave me insight into the extraordinary lengths people go to for content and clicks these days. We're living in an age where you need to be a forensic investigator just to determine if the person you're watching exists.

Enshittification: Everything Gets Worse

Cory Doctorow coined this term for how platforms decay: first they're good to users, then they abuse users to benefit business customers, finally they abuse everyone to benefit only themselves. It's the perfect word for our times. Every service you rely on is on this trajectory. Your streaming platform has ads now. Your search engine is mostly sponsored links. Your social media is algorithmic rage-bait. Everything that was once good becomes progressively worse, and we're powerless to stop it because there's nowhere else to go.

Spanish Winters: The Influencer's Reckoning

I'm quite cold writing this in Olvera on 24th January 2026. Despite an hour with the gas fire on, it's too expensive to adequately heat a draughty Spanish house built for sunshine. Years ago, when money came more easily that it does now, I heated the place to 23 degrees for the whole Winter quarter and spent the best part of five hundred euros. That's why Spaniards wear coats indoors.

I've lived here since 2003, so cold winters aren't new - I had -9C and burst pipes in Murcia years back. But we've been spoilt lately with five years of mild winters and uninterrupted sunshine. This cold snap has been particularly amusing because of TikTok influencers posting "WTF" videos, moaning about ice and snow they didn't have on their Mediterranean bingo cards.

Caveat emptor, as they say. Beware what you wish for - you just might get it.

And with that warming thought, I'll leave you to your own irritations. No doubt you've got a list brewing too.

 

I bought a new piece of kit this week, that really made me reflect on how far things have come. Long story short, I blogged about prepping for Armageddon earlier in the year, and one thing I realised needed a major overhaul was my 'home network' - the ever-growing collection of tablets, phones desktops and the ways they connect to the Internet. I've been looking for ways to make the whole thing more robust yet less power hungry.

When 'El apagón' - the big blackout happened here in Spain earlier in the year, I found out a lot about what would happen during an extended period without electricity. During those 17 hours, one of the things I noticed was that my local ISP failed before the Internet on my mobile phone. Not 100% sure why that is but my guess is the local ISP has less emergency power backup. So in the following months I mulled this over in my mind, and the more I thought about it, the more I came to see that I had underestimated my local Internet connection as a single point of failure. I live in quite an isolated little village in the 'Sierra de Cádiz'. I've long suspected much of the Internet coming into and out of the town comes through line-of-sight microwaves as the connectivity often gets worse in adverse weather, particularly storms and low lying cloud. The town's electricity supply is on a knife-edge at the best of times - I personally use two uninterruptible power supplies to keep the network up as I'm used to the electric tripping out mid-poker game. The chances of losing Internet due to an electricity outage is therefore always on the cards. Then there is flooding, terrorism, meteorites - OK and straw-clutching with that one, but you get my point, it became apparent that having a backup to connect my local network to the Internet made a lot of sense.

So I began to research solutions. I could have figured out away to make my smartphone a hotspot, but the phone assumes a higher level of importance during an emergency so I didn't want it occupied on network duty. After lots of research with my friends, Claude, Grok, and ChatGTP I arrived on a solution which was to buy a second Wifi router with a 'fallback' option. It works like this. My ISP router connects to the second router, so all my network traffic passes through it. I use the new router for both Wifi and wired connections. Should the ISP connection go offline, the new router makes a 4G connection through the phone network. Within 60 seconds, I'm back online. It's like magic. I had to get a new SIM card for the router, but I shopped around and found a pre-paid card with no contract. All I have to do is put 10 euros on it every six months to keep it 'alive'. During normal operation the SIM is inactive and only makes a connection during an emergency.

After I set this up, feeling very smug and pleased with myself, I noticed on the box that the router is capable of 300Mbps - over 4G? I thought this was a mistake, but apparently due to a thing called 'carrier aggregation', under ideal conditions the thing can weave together different mobile bands making 'one big one' (given there aren't too many other folk online). This is what triggered my reflection on my path as a user of the Internet in Spain.

Back in the late 1990's when I first considered moving to Europe, Spain was one of a number of countries I was considering. Internet connectivity was a key factor, since I would be working remotely for my company in England. During my research I stumbled across an article that wrote in glowing terms about the broadband rollout in the Iberian peninsula, and how the country was 'forging ahead' as a European leader in high speed Internet connectivity. This must have been a puff-piece for Movistar or something because when I finally arrived, the truth was rather different.

The house I bought in Murcia was less than three kilometers from town. The house had mains electricity and potable water, so getting an Internet connection would be just a question of running a phone line, no? Oh how wrong I was! I made overtures to the phone company who said they would be quite happy to help if I paid several thousand pounds to install telegraph poles! There was another problem in the form of a big hill at the back of my house that made line-of-sight connectivity impossible. I was so screwed. Caveat emptor. (Some years later, I met a smarter guy than me, who had his lawyer insert a clause in the compra-venta - the presales contract that determines the conditions of sale - that broadband internet connection would be available in the property before the sale would go ahead)

I was anxious to get connected because of work, so I had a word with the owner of a local Internet cafe and negotiated a preferential rate, given that I was spending five mornings a week in there with my laptop! There was a lady who did shifts looking after the place who was a chain-smoker. I used to go home reeking of tobacco smoke and coughing like a laboratory beagle, so I was keen to find a practical alternative.

There was a Vodafone shop in the town and, although mobile phones at the time were more geared towards calls, they were offering a new card with a data tariff. It was expensive so I'd have to ration my connectivity - a bit like the early days of Compuserve where we would use an off-line-reader program to login, download a bunch of messages and log off again to minimise connection fees! So I signed up for one of these cards and a condition was I had to have an ordinary phone SIM as well. This is where something happened to my disadvantage. The lady gave me the SIM card for my phone and said the data card would arrive in the following week. While muddling through with my schoolboy Spanish, I got the impression that I could use the SIM card she gave me to connect to the Internet until the proper data card arrived. So that weekend, I made a few sojourns in to Hotmail and Google, nothing too lengthy, then swapped over to the data card in the following week. At the end of the month I got a bill for 400 euros! I remonstrated with the girl in the shop arguing that she told me I could use the other card, but she just said 'you did - it worked'. I spent hours complaining writing to regional and national offices, sending faxes at their request etc, but never did manage to get a refund.

After about a year of struggling with the SIM solution - it did work when I had the right card, a Spanish neighbour helped me wade through the bureaucratic minefield of Telefonica's Sales Order Process to get a 'fixed line' telephone. Due to the poles issue, this was provided over radio, which capped the Internet connection to a ridiculously low speed, but at least I was on all the time without the same level of metering that I suffered with the SIM card. That did me for another year or two, until an enterprising couple of English chaps in the village put their heads together and, realise there were a lot of folk in the 'campo' like me with a need for broadband, started a wireless network company.

I'm a software guy rather than a hardware guy, so a lot of what they did remains a mystery, but it seems they figured out how to bundle together a bunch of consumer internet connections from the local cable company, then bounce these around the village and then on into the houses in the country side. If like me, line of sight was unavailable, they would angle dishes on other client sites to share the signal around. However they managed it, the system worked great and at last, after about four years I finally had a fast Internet connection in Spain.

When I moved to another little village in Andalucia, most folk were using a similar wireless systems because it was cheap - subsidised either by the townhall or the regional government or both. It was pretty terrible with speeds slowing to a crawl at that time of day when the kids came home from school. The support closed on Friday afternoon and if the line went down, which was often, there was nobody to help get it back until Monday morning. In time however a couple of new entrants to the market emerged offering fibre to the home. Considering we are fairly remote I'm very impressed by this.  A friend in Portland, Oregon with a holiday home here was telling me the Internet we get here is faster and cheaper than he has back home. I pay 20 euros per month and on a good day my fibre will test at 600Mbps. My ISP has a higher tariff - for a fiver a month extra I can get double that!

All of which makes me think, why on earth isn't everybody grabbing a digital nomad visa and coming to Spain to work. I often see posts on social media, especially TikTok from Americans who have moved, or are thinking of moving to Barcelona and are moaning about the price of property there. Well here's the thing, there are plenty of other places, many of which have amazing property deals. Whole villages are for sale for peanuts in some regions due to the phenomenon of rural depopulation, yet now, with Starlink in the mix providing broadband coverage through the whole of the country, there isn't a place where you can go in Spain where you would have to endure the same painful journey I did to get a good online connection.

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If you own property in Spain, you probably understand the importance of having insurance coverage to protect your investment. However, even the best insurance policies can't always protect you from unexpected events like earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters. That's where the Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros (CCS) comes in.

The CCS is a public entity in Spain that was established in 1954 to ensure that everyone in the country has access to insurance coverage for certain risks, including those that are difficult or impossible to insure through the private market. One of the key functions of the CCS is to provide coverage for natural disasters and other catastrophic events that cause widespread damage, such as earthquakes, floods, and terrorist attacks. The CCS is responsible for compensating individuals and businesses for damages caused by these events, even if they do not have insurance coverage themselves.

Compared to similar systems in other countries, the CCS is widely regarded as being on par, if not superior. In Japan, a public insurance program called the Japanese Earthquake Reinsurance System (JERS) provides coverage for earthquake damage. Like the CCS, JERS is funded by premiums paid by insurance companies, and it provides coverage for individuals and businesses that are unable to obtain coverage through the private market. JERS is widely considered to be an effective system, and it has been used to compensate victims of major earthquakes in the country, such as the 1995 Kobe earthquake. However, while JERS is a comprehensive system, the CCS in Spain is unique in that it provides coverage for a wider range of catastrophic events beyond just earthquakes.

In the United States, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) provides assistance to individuals and businesses affected by natural disasters through a variety of programs, including disaster relief loans, grants, and insurance. However, the US system is generally considered to be less comprehensive than those in Japan and Spain, as it places more emphasis on individual responsibility for disaster preparedness and recovery.

In other countries, such as India and many African nations, disaster coverage is provided primarily by private insurance companies, and there is often limited government support for those affected by natural disasters. This can make it difficult for individuals and businesses to obtain coverage or recover from losses caused by catastrophic events.

Overall, the effectiveness of national disaster coverage systems depends on a variety of factors, including the level of funding, the scope of coverage, and the quality of implementation. The CCS is an important part of the Spanish insurance system, providing coverage and compensation for those affected by catastrophic events and helping to ensure that everyone in the country has access to insurance coverage for certain risks. The CCS is also unique in that it provides coverage for a wider range of catastrophic events, beyond just earthquakes. In addition, the Spanish government has taken steps to increase funding for the CCS and improve its capacity to respond to catastrophic events, making it a reliable and effective system for property owners in Spain.

If you're a property owner in Spain, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with the CCS and the claims process, so that you know what to do in the event of an earthquake or other natural disaster. Whether you have insurance coverage or not, the CCS can provide compensation and support for those affected by catastrophic events, helping to ease the burden of recovery and ensure that you can get back on your feet as quickly as possible.

If your Spanish house was damaged by an earthquake, flood, a meteor strike or alien attack, you would need to make a claim through the Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros (CCS) to receive compensation for your losses. The process for making a claim through the CCS is as follows:

1. Contact your insurance company: If you have insurance coverage for earthquake damage, you should contact your insurance company to report the damage and begin the claims process. Your insurance company will then contact the CCS on your behalf to request compensation.
2. File a claim with the CCS: If you do not have insurance coverage for earthquake damage, or if your insurance company is unable to provide compensation, you can file a claim directly with the CCS. You can do this by visiting the CCS website (www.consorseguros.es - English version available from the menu on the top right of the page) and completing the online claims form, or by visiting a local CCS office in person.
3. Provide documentation: To support your claim, you will need to provide documentation of the damage, such as photographs, repair estimates, and invoices. You may also be required to provide documentation of ownership and any insurance policies you hold.
4. Wait for a decision: The CCS will review your claim and make a decision on whether to provide compensation. If your claim is approved, the CCS will provide compensation directly to you or to your insurance company, depending on the circumstances.

It's important to note that the CCS is only responsible for providing compensation for damage caused by earthquakes and other catastrophic events that are considered to be "acts of God." Damage caused by other factors, such as poor maintenance or negligence, may not be covered by the CCS. Additionally, there may be certain limitations on the amount of compensation provided by the CCS, depending on the specific circumstances of the damage.

Among the things that make me a very dull man is that I'm very risk averse. I'm a safety guy, in fact some who know me might say ‘excessively so’. (Some of the other things that make me dull, which are legion, include a fondness for prog-rock, an obsession with vintage television shows like “The Prisoner” and a self-belief in my potential as a musician that after five decades that has yet to be realised)
 

Anyway, back to risk. I've never ridden a motorcycle. Well I went on the back a few times, but the feeling of exhilaration and freedom that I'm told makes the experience desirable never manifested in me strongly enough to overcome the warning my brain signals to me of the dangers. I saw a dead guy covered in newspapers lying in the road after a bike crash when I was single-digit old and I remember thinking – 'note-to-self, do not end up like that'.
 

There were many things that led to me quitting the UK and moving to Spain in 2003, but one was certainly 9/11. The old risk-calculator in the noggin kicked in and I decided that the increase in terrorism renders cities as targets. However slight it may be, if you live in London, New York or Paris, you do so under the possibility that you may at some point be attacked. The larger the population, the greater the risk. Moving to an ‘out of the way’ country like Spain and to a small village rather than a big city seemed to me to be a logical move.
 

Even when choosing a property, my risk aversion kicked in. I was looking for a house with an elevated aspect that would be resistant to flooding (and couldn't be overlooked by snipers - OK I'm teasing about that one, I'm not completely paranoid!)

Given my lifelong focus on minimizing risks, Trump’s election marked a turning point where, in my mind, the threat of World War III escalated to DEFCON 1. This isn't because I see Trump as some maniacal tyrant with a wargasm fetish. The problem with Trump as I see it is his hair-trigger. He's easily upset and his responses unpredictable. He could take the actions or words of another world leader the wrong way and press the big red button out of spite before anyone sane has the opportunity to talk him out of it.
 

The flag-shagging right-wing press in the UK, which I monitor to see what lies they're trying to brainwash folk with each day, seems equally expectant, having carried numerous WW3 scenario stories, some so painstakingly researched and presented that I strongly suspect military involvement behind the scenes. Some of these helpfully point towards websites where the likelihood of nuclear attack and the possible damage inflicted can be accessed for any geographical location, simply by entering one's address.
 

With this as my starting point I decided to assess my own risk, should 'the reds decide to push the button down' (apologies to Donald Fagan). It turns out moving to Spain was a very smart move on my part. Spain managed to stay largely neutral in two world wars, so is more than likely to keep its distance from any bust-ups once again. There are possible targets near me - the US military bases at Moron and Rota, though to destroy runways and ports there are better conventional weapons to do this rather than use nukes. So far, so good - I'm not a direct or indirect target.
 

The problem though is fallout. Nuclear conflict in Europe would inevitably lead to clouds of Strontium 90 and other dangerous sources of radioactive material that could blow my way causing all sorts of problems. Google is my friend, and I consulted so you don't have to.
 

The scenario for me in my little village is that following an incident, the best thing to do is to stay inside for at least two to four weeks, while the fallout settles. Ideally during this time I'd have the house completely sealed off with a separate air supply, but this is obviously impractical. Instead I found advice that in a house like mine on three floors, the best thing is to stay downstairs, taping up the doors and windows with duct tape. Then tape up some sheets on the doors in the upper levels. Air would still circulate through the upper levels of the house, with some of the dirtier air captured in the sheets.
 

I would not be able to leave the house for a month at least, so I have to ensure there is enough food and bottled water to last that time. Since November I've been over-shopping, buying a few items for the cupboard each time I go shopping for myself. I consulted with ChatGTP to get advice about the best foods to get to provide a reasonably balanced diet which would not subject me to nutritional shortfalls, so lots of tinned fish, tinned fruit and so on. The water supply can no longer be relied upon during this time, so not only have I stocked up on ‘potable’ bottled water but I have saved hundreds of litres of grey water for flushing the toilet etc.
 

Electricity cannot be guaranteed either so in order to make sure I can cook the food in the store cupboard, I've invested in a small portable alcohol stove. These are supposed to be used outside, but I've done some tests in the stairwell and for short usage there is not enough carbon monoxide to be problematic as the heat carries it up the stairs. Yes, I also bought a carbon monoxide detector! For light I've also bulk-bought some candles and I have a wind-up radio/mp3 player for news and entertainment!
 

Finally, in order to know when it is safe to venture out again I need to be able to know the level of residual radiation in the outside world, so I've bought a cheap and nasty Geiger counter - twenty euros from Ali-Express, but hopefully this will give me a rough idea of what is happening to the current ambient levels. I've also stocked up on facemasks and disposable gloves, to be worn when first going outside to minimise my personal exposure. Like I said, I'm a safety guy!
 

It may sound like a lot, but apart from the food for the store-cupboard, the hardware spend has only been about 70 euros – hardly breaking the bank for a little peace of mind.
 

So how about you, are you worried about a conflict? Do you think ahead? Are you a ‘prepper’? Do you have any tips, or have you spotted any flaws in my own preparations? Let me know!

Of sun-born olive-branch bonfires

Of over-revved two-stroke engines

Of early morning bleached pavements

Of just-baked loaves off the bread-man's van

Of coiffured old women pebble-dashed in talc

Of elderly men dripping in Tabac

Of expresso and tostadas 

Of the secret smell of budding ganja

Of churros and chocolate

Of workman's sweat and builder's dust

Of puros scenting up the street

Of frying squid and boiling octopus

Of brandy, ponche and anis

Of sun-scorched earth and tar then rain, reminding us of life again

These are the things I smell in Spain, of life, of love, of being sane.

I wanna job in Spain and basically need to know if there is work out there for me, I’d do anything I just wanna move for the sun.  Please help!!