A lot of people from the UK react with shock horror when I say that I am still Valerie Collins. They expect me to have a Spanish married name: some sort of aristocratic double or triple barreled mouthful: at the very least an exotic and probably unpronounceable surname.
But many of them don’t realise that even [...]

Shopping in Spain reminds me of how things used to be in the UK. Yes, there are masses of out of town shopping centres, and yes, you will find all the major chains in the High Street, but there’s still room for the ‘little guys’, for the quirky independent establishments that somehow manage to thrive [...]

Have you heard the ‘good’ news? Starbucks is coming to Malaga. Or at least to Malaga airport- when the new terminal opens this Easter.  It’s eight years now since the first two Starbucks opened in Madrid. Today there are 71 of them cluttering up the centres of Madrid, Barcelona and Sevilla. There are also two [...]

Recently I fell foul of La Ley de Falta Uno (The Law of One Thing Missing), which, as formulated by us, states that you can never ever complete a bureaucratic transaction in one go. Even something as apparently straightforward as picking up a registered letter at Correos is also subject to the law, as I [...]

We all know what a Garlic Moment is.  Send us yours and we’ll post the best: they should not only be amusing but also helpful and instructive.  To kick off, here’s Georgina Tremayne from Barcelona with – what else? – a telephone problem.
Fatal Construction
Moving from one apartment to another apartment in the same town isn’t [...]