Sunday, 2nd November, 2025
Week 880, Dear Reader. How many of you could keep it up that long ….. to coin a phrase? Almost 17 years. Mind you, I’ve been waiting a lot longer for some things. I never give up!
Hold on
I’m coming ….
Up at 4.00 am and Check-out by 5.00 am. Through to the Executive Lounge and Breakfast. Down to gate at 7.00 am. First on with Speedy Boarding and settled in to Extra Legroom. Watched a Drama downloaded from Netflix – Life Begins. It amused me and kept me engrossed for just over 4hrs of a boring flight.
I even missed an in-flight drama in which there was a call for A Doctor on Board. A doctor and a nurse volunteered and the patient was stabilised at the back.
An emergency ambulance met the plane on landing and we were all held for ten minutes while the patient was removed. Why he couldn’t have been stuck in a body bag and barrowed off, I don’t know. Anyway, Tenerife Sur Airport was quiet, comfortable and welcoming. We stopped for Baguette and a coffee before seeking a taxi and contacting our property manager.
It was 29C/85F. In contrast, Greater Manchester was 7C/45F and our home village was only 14C/57F. These disparities justify the cost of what we are doing. We are buying that contrast at an economical price of £1,350.00 per week.
We were met on arrival by Eric, the property Manager and walked through the facilities of the gated Development and those of the property itself.
Outside the Gates it is certainly more Chavvy than we would choose but inside it is as the name says, an Oasis of calm. Hardly anyone was near the pool and will not interrupt our Health & Fitness in the Sun Campaign.
Had to go back out to the Chav World where people were assembling in ‘Irish’ Pubs to watch Live Football. People were ordering Suppers from Indian Menus and the smell of Curry pervaded the warm air. I bought wine, cheese and tomatoes for an evening snack to be eaten when we had settled in to our new home properly. I watched some football and got on with Week 880 of my Blog.
Monday, 3rd November, 2025
Woken up ABROAD!!! Nearly fell through the patio doors going to the toilet in the dark. I need a dry, old stick to guide me. They exist, Dear Reader. The weather here is a sultry 29C/84F and sweaty.
Anyway, one of the reasons for this for this trip is to break out of comfortable routines and challenge ourselves to the discomfort of change.
I never go on holiday. I just move my life to another location. My job is to install and ensure communication systems. The internet is great here and I have connected up laptops, iPads, smartphones, Kindles, etc.. The TV is a piece of work in itself and has taken 24 hrs to establish all the UK Channels plus Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV. I can watch sport on my laptop. You definitely don’t come to Tenerife for the culture.
It sounds incredibly snobby – ok, maybe it is but I don’t apologise. I am walking past old people shuffling down the road with their copy of The Daily Fail to get their Full English Breakfast accompanied by the strains of Rod Stewart. They are covered in tattoos. People who I would pass in the street in London wearing a suit and think they were accountants. Here they are Wings of the Dove on their chests. Wrinkly old ladies expose their bottoms to display hearts for ex-lovers. Where are these people from? What are they thinking? In the Supermurcado, there was also a girl walking round almost naked apart from a G-String. What are they doing? They’re not in Rochdale now!
I am buying Supper of Smoked Salmon, Anchovies, Manchego cheese and biscuits with tomato and cucumber. Delicious. I am blotting out the Steak & Chips, Chicken Tikka Masala, Chinese Banquet offerings on my walk. Back inside the Gated Community, sanity prevails. People look half sane. The ones who have heard of Farage have rejected his conceit. They wanted to be in Europe not restricted to a bit part by Brexit.
I have to be upfront. These people are not ‘my’ people. They never have been and I have always seen them as an underclass who were deserving of my charity. Currently, the Right Wing, anti-establishment, protest class are asserting their ugly values. It won’t last but it will make us think more carefully about social control. We really shouldn’t have to live in gated enclaves like this with the Barbarians at the door. This is not how life was meant to be.
Tuesday, 4th November, 2025
A warm, even humid night. The alarm on my phone is set for 5.45 am and I immediately set it to play the radio – BBC Radio 4 – Farming Today followed by the Today programme. Of course, this morning it was all about the Chancellor ‘rolling the pitch’ for tax rises. An hour later, I watched that speech on Sky News.
These are routines I would be following back in UK in West Sussex and it doesn’t seem unreasonable these days to halt them because I am abroad. How times have changed. In my early days, the best I could hope for was to queue for hours outside a little wooden shack on a Greek island for a two day old copy of The Times. No mobile phones. No internet. No BBC radio or UK television. Isolation. Goodness knows why I persisted with it. I am a News Junkie. I have to know what’s going on in the world.
It is why I now ensure that all these services are available in an place I travel to. Of course, it isn’t always straight forward. The say, Free Wi-Fi available but I have found it can be so slow as to be almost unusable. Here it is genuinely superfast. That makes all the difference and can cover up for a multitude of other weaknesses. If it came to it, I could get all the News Channels on my laptop. At one point, I thought that is exactly what I would be doing.
Eventually, after struggling with three separate set top boxes, three separate handsets and three separate languages, I managed to squeeze out of the system all the UK channels BBC/ITV/ Channel4/ Channel5/ Sky News. Then, after a severe bending of the system, I managed to establish my Netflix / Amazon Prime and Apple TV accounts.
If you go away for a few days, these things are not important but moving your life for a month or more means getting to grips with the washing machine and dishwasher and buying products for them. Just simple, initial provisions like soap and toilet paper, kitchen towel, washing up liquid, fly spray, etc. has to be bought in. Security, and emergencies have to be prepared for. How do you deal with a power failure? Where do you put the rubbish? Where do you buy food and how do you get it home? All of these ‘challenges’ are why I like to do this. If you sit at home in comfortable familiarity, time just passes you by. The challenge of building a life in unfamiliar surroundings keeps the mind alive.
The local newspaper tells us we missed the new, European digital entry system by 6 days. The also tell us that we are going to experience an unusual heatwave of 34C/93F over the next few days. Call that a heatwave? They don’t know the meaning of it.
Wednesday, 5th November, 2025
I am one sad, old git! A fortnight before I came away, I kicked a steel chair leg in bare feet and broke my little toe. Who knew that was important for walking? It has been incredibly painful since and, although I am forcing myself to do my walking, it is recovering very slowly. Yesterday I spent sneezing violently all day and this morning I have woken up with a heavy head cold. I haven’t had a cold for at least two years. I really must get a grip.
Warm weather makes a streaming cold just stream more and it is warm and I am streaming. In fact, I think I’m dying. The temperature didn’t fall below a steamy 24C/75F and, at 10.00 am it is already 28C/82F and climbing. It is on the top edge of what the Canaries expect and higher, heatwave temperatures are forecast. In fact, everywhere we have travelled recently, weather has been more extreme than normal.
It is hard to avoid the involvement of Global Warming … and goodness knows I have tried. I have been on a huge journey over the past two decades from complete sceptic to interventionist to largely accepting. The argument goes – Yes, the world is warming but it has gone through similar patterns across history and this is another of them. Yes, this is a more extreme and extended edition of those historical patterns but we will deal with it. We are an inventive and scientifically advance race which will come up with interventions for our follies.
Eventually, the intellectual deceit cannot be sustained and I have to accept that climate change is a thing, is man-made in large part and needs urgent intervention. I am at that stage. I have two fall-back positions neither of which entail the medieval choices of changing our heating and eating customs, driving/travelling less or not at all, flying less/not at all, etc.:
- Nothing is beyond our minds, inventiveness and Science. We will come up with solutions.
- I am 74. This won’t really be a drama until well after my death. To hell with them. Let the future Generations sort it out for themselves.
I can go on reaping the rewards of Global Warming on the beaches of the Canary Islands for the next 20 years and leave others to worry about the future. I have no personal Future Generation to worry about but I like to think of myself as a good person with reasonable morality. I will try, within my parameters, to contribute.
If you are a regular reader, you will know that I bought £20,000.00 worth of Premium Bonds largely for fun but with a serious purpose. I have taken out our maximum ISAs for the year which harbours £40,000.00 tax free and I wanted some Easy Access money which Premium Bonds offer but with tax free winnings. I worked out that I needed to win just £750.00 each year to break even and anything else – like a £1 million win – would be a nice little extra. Well, it is announced on the 1st of each month. October 1st brought £50.00.November 1st has just brought another £50.00 + £25.00 so we have £125.00 up to now from two months. Over 12 months that would hit my £750.00 target and I hope to do better than that.
Thursday, 6th November, 2025
Well, if I thought I was dying of Man-Flu yesterday, I almost did in the night. I was woken gasping for air at 2.30 am, gasping, fighting to breathe and making an ugly, animalistic, guttural noise. Quite scary for my bed-warmer who was jerked out of peaceful sleep to deal with what looked like a life threatening situation. …. As you can see, I survived the emergency and live to wheeze another day …. but, I’m not well.
After yesterday’s Blog, today’s article was apposite. No wonder the place is populated by scores of red-skinned, tattooed and wrinkly, old people shuffling along uneven pavements in scorching sun to the nearest Irish Pub where they watched the ‘match’ on the big screen last night over a Guinness or three and just happen to advertise service of breakfast this morning. They can pick up their copy of the Daily Express or Mail on the way to be shocked about UK immigration figures over a Full English. And soon they can enjoy A Vision of Elvis. What more could you want?
Well, I am trying to think myself healthy. I’m sure optimism and determination will do it. Pauline, on the other hand, is committed to over-the-counter, Farmacia potions. I was told I needed Lemsip to soothe and help me sleep. The Canarian alternative is half the strength for double the price. This pack of 10 sachets cost me €12.00. Next time I’m trying witchcraft!
I’ve said I rarely get a debilitating cold like this but, amazingly, I’ve just looked back to my records from 10 years ago and on this very day in 2015, I wrote that I had just come down with a heavy head cold – the first in 7 years. And where was I? Spending the month of November in Tenerife in Los Gigantes. Got to stop doing this. It’s too unhealthy.
Friday, 7th November, 2025
Had a slightly more comfortable night and feeling a bit better this morning. I knew you’d be worrying, Dear Reader. My wife has even cancelled the Hospice place, reluctantly. I am still not well but I live to feel ill for another day.
I am being given healthy things to eat to build up my strength and fight infection. Salmon and Green Beans for Supper last night. Freshly squeezed Orange juice and chilled fresh Papaya for Breakfast. This is one of the joys of Mediterranean/Canarian travel. You can get papaya in UK but it is always expensive, under-ripe and rather bland. Here it is cheap, huge, very ripe and dynamic.
I have orange juice freshly squeezed by my Housekeeper every morning in UK but here, and in so many continental supermarkets, they provide a juicing service. It is absolutely great and the juice is delicious.
This is sounding like one, old person splurge. One of the things that I have to manage is repeat prescriptions for life-saving drugs like Warfarin. Doctors and Pharmacies are tightening up procedures and do not allow them to be ordered from outside UK. They are always ordered online using the Surgery’s online consultation & triage platform called Systmconnect. It is a national system adopted by many surgeries. Unfortunately, surgery services are much more used by the older than the younger Generations and there are still lots of little, wrinkly people who prefer to collect their Daily Express in paper form from the shop and order their prescriptions in person at the surgery.
Anyway, fortunately virtual private networks (VPN) are now so easily available, intuitive to use and cheap to buy that all these attempts at control are pointless. I am in Tenerife but I go through my current favourite – NordVPN which has servers in four places across UK. I can choose which one at any given moment to point to including London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Glasgow and that’s where I will be digitally until I turn it off.
Currently, I’m in Manchester. It’s dry but cloudy and a chilly 13C/55F although I’m actually in Tenerife where it is a warm and sunny 26C/79F and I’ve ordered my prescription which my neighbour will collect for my return in December. I can safely access my bank account, savings and investments accounts without my internet provider monitoring and scamming me. I could even instantly get around the UK’s farcical age verification pornography sites at one click of a mouse. The internet still represents freedom as it has since I first accessed it over 40 years ago.
Saturday, 8th November, 2025
Tenerife may offer a culture but is utterly sublimated to that of their visitors. As soon as we get out of our gated community, we are greeted by loud signs outside a Café/Bar announcing Full English Breakfast for €9.40 and Dinner of the Day which seems to cycle between dishes like Sausage, Mash & Gravy – Fish, Chips & Mushy Peas, etc. for €12.00.
A short walk to the sea goes past all sorts of Blackpool Sea Front Attractions and the beach is packed and I really mean packed with wrinkled beached whales reading about the failings of post-Brexit Britain which so many of them helped to bring about.
They don’t walk anywhere. They rent the equivalent of motability scooters to drive along the pavements stripped to the waist, cigarette in mouth, from tawdry entertainment to grubby beach bar.
At first I thought that there were so many disabled, old people enjoying the sunshine but was shocked to see them almost knock me over on the pavement before stopping at a bar, parking up and walking in without problem. It is not as if many of them are that old. I would estimate that most of them are years younger than me. Well, most people are, Dear Reader. We used to have a phrase referring to the Lame, Sick & Lazy. I know what I am seeing here.
This morning, I am going to walk a 4 km round trip to buy things to get us through the weekend. Supermarkets are closed here on Sundays. It’s a Catholic thing with echoes of old England which is probably why the Brexiteers come here in such large numbers. While they park up their scooters and pile into the pub with a huge wide screen to watch Tottenham Hotspur v Man.Utd., I will watch it in peace on my laptop.
Tomorrow will mark the end of our first week here. It has been interesting, eye opening and deliciously sunny. Not my favourite place of all time but it is doing me good.