Oh dear water calamity

Ibiza's not designed for anything but sunny weather. The roofs are flat. Nowhere's insulated and drainage is unheard of. But, actually, the island has as much rain as some parts of England, except it comes all at once.

So now the wonderful new motorways resemble rivers, the power's going out intermittently and half the people I know have flooded homes. Still, a bit of discomfort's good practice for winter and joys such as scraping the black mold off walls.

The good thing is that we're suffering now, but it's in the knowledge that within a few days it'll be warm and dry again. The rain will bring out the flowers. Yes, even in October.

Fair fares

One of the benefits of being resident on Ibiza, or on other Spanish islands, is you get a discount on flights and ferries of about 50% for travel within Spain. There's a continuing debate about how this should be applied. One proposal that flights from the islands should be a flat 27 euros has been bombed out. Now the politicians are trying to decide how to administer the scheme so it's fair for all.

Obviously a lot of people will think it's unfair that somebody should get to live on Ibiza and enjoy cheap travel. But the island is an expensive place to live and there are real problems attracting teachers, doctors and so on to run essential services. And, of course, there can't be any real competition as residents have to travel across water somehow, so it's boat, plane or stay put.

The thing is air fares in particular are very much tied to demand. Of course it's cheap at the moment when nobody wants to fly, but come the summer even with a heavy discount the price would be too much for some. And without the subsidised tickets the airlines and ferry companies would stop services throughout the winter. As it is there are very few flights direct to anywhere outside Spain and none to the UK from November to April.

So the idea seems to be to fix the price so there's a maximum and minimum. It's got to be sorted before January 1 so what odds on a solution being announced on December 31.

Meanwhile, when the rest of the world seems to be discussing how to limit flights to reduce global warming it's a bit much that we're talking about increasing the number of passengers.

Tax and too many men in Ibiza

Anyway I haven´t got time to cover much more of the news except to say that the latest survey from La Caixa bank shows the number of foreigners increasing faster than the indigenous population, and more of them are men. The other thing is our equivalent of the council tax is going up by about 7%. For an average family that'll be about 300 euros a year extra. Work that one out.