On line at last

This morning I went to meet the lawyer who deals with church property affairs from an office at the boundary of the boundaries of Los Boliches and Torreblanca barrios. From her, I obtained the key to the basement room of our urbanizacion housing the vital telecoms control unit. I went home straight away and started composing a text message to the Telefonica/Movistar engineer who had kindly given me his mobile number to contact him when I could give him access. Before I could press the send button, he was ringing the door bell! Is this telepathica? I thought and later tweeted. 

Within ten minutes the line was connected, phone and broadband working perfectly. Such excellent service, delivered cheerfully. Before he departed he put me on to his trouble-shooting supervisor, who spoke excellent English, so I congratulated him on the concientous delivery of this service, far superior to anything I have ever experienced from British Telecoms or TalkTalk back in the U.K. He seemed bemused to be thanked profusely. It seems handling 'complaints' was his primary role. 

So now we have our internet enabled devices attached and working without glitches or peak time outages. Why can't it be like this in Britain, I ask myself. The answer lies in reluctance to invest big time in infrastructure upgrading when it was needed, a decade ago. It may be happening now, but here and there, not everywhere. Mind you, it may well be the same in Spain if you live out in the remote campo. Grand plans, beloved of politicians, can be devilishly difficult to implement on the ground. We live in an age of breakthrough technical achievements, but vision and imagination can easily outstrip the practicalities for implementation, even with the most capable people on the job.

After lunch I went down to St Andrew's to join the church Craft Group, assembled to make Palm Crosses, with fresh palm leaves taken from someone's garden. The last time I weaved Palm Crosses was when I was Chaplain in Monaco, thirteen years ago. There was a variety of palm tree in the church garden which produced useable leaves, and a handful of us, including octogenarian sacristan France Ametis, made our crosses ahead of the Sunday service. France was the one who remembered how to weave the crosses. She'd been doing it for sixty years, most of them with her late husband who'd inherited the sacristan job from his father.

It took me a few fumbling efforts to weave my first palm cross. I had to be showed by two kind patient neighbours on the production table. Then it was as if my fingers remembered what my brain had failed to, and took over. I managed to weave about ten crosses to add to the couple of hundred to be given out at the five chaplaincy centres of worship next Sunday. It was a happy experience that reconnected me to another period in ministry among the expatriates of Europe.