Scams, Shams and Spam

Come Thursdays, and my email fills with unwanted spam. Last week I got a couple from Norton Security sent from two different sites reminding me it’s time to pay their annual subscription (I have never in my life used Norton). The kosher version of this company functions in real life precisely as a spam-buster. Their messages also say at the bottom that I ‘can unsubscribe’ by clicking on something or other; thank you, most kind, I think not.

Microsoft also reaches out, again twice, from two different and rather odd sounding addresses, neither of which appear on their proper webpage – no doubt an oversight on their part. Again, I block them (‘submit as Spam’), but they will return (probably next Thursday – I wonder, possibly this day has an extra significance in Albania?).

Then there was a special deal on a memory-foam pillow. I’m retired. I already have a fucking pillow. 

I got a too-good-to-refuse offer on my ‘auto-insurance’, an Omaha Steak gourmet sampler box (no charge), a free mystery parcel from the American post office (!), a cure for Alzheimer’s from Bill Gates and a message which assures me that ‘my wife says I’ve never had sex like this’.

Again, I can unsubscribe, but well, maybe I should go and get married first.

This is all designed to catch out the unwary.

What I do, what we all do, is mark it as ‘Spam’ and then wait for the next one.

Whatever happened to those exiled Nigerian princes who would kindly offer you half of their five million shillings if they could just borrow your bank account for a few days?

Also on Thursday last week – what a day it was! – a message arrived that very evening from my caja to tell me that it was going to pay on my behalf to another bank which I have never dealt with the unlikely sum of 1,982.44€ within the hour and could I ring this number if I wasn’t in agreement… No, I could not.

The next day, the lady at the caja told me that it hadn’t come from them. There’s a surprise.

I got several bothersome phone calls on Thursday as well. No one rings any more – they send you a WhatsApp instead. Now these calls, and I’ve blocked loads of them, come from Madrid or Valladolid or Myanmar and they want to sell me something. ‘Hola’, they say, ‘buenas tardes. Mi nombre es-’, but by then I’ve already hung up the phone.

All this, and I’m on the Lista Robinson (created precisely to stop these calls) and besides, the Government has just made those call-centres illegal.

Maybe the word hasn’t got through yet.

These days, one is always doing something more rewarding than waiting for a phone call. In my case it was driving (try and get the phone out of your trouser pocket while wearing a seat-belt) or having a siesta and dreaming about how I was going to surprise my future wife.

A useful site called Maldita keeps an eye out on scams. I was reading about how somebody sends you a message on WhatsApp about an earthquake and how you should link to such and such a page which, says the item, will clear out your phone in under ten seconds!

On Facebook last… yes dammit, it was also on Thursday… a series of adverts appeared with the Spanish king trying to sell me a get-rich-quick scheme. Then one from the head of the Banco de Santander, then another with both of them. I wrote to the Facebook poohbahs and said it was a scam and they thanked me for my nice letter, but that the adverts were fine and dandy. Old Mark Chuckleburg must need the money.

I remember last summer there was another Fb scam, where you and nine others received a message about a car-crash and an ‘Oh The Horror! Click here for details’.

I checked with Google AI and got: ‘Spam bypasses filters because spammers constantly evolve tactics—using new domains, rotating IP addresses, and embedding text within images to evade detection. Filters cannot be perfectly restrictive without blocking legitimate emails, and sophisticated spam often masks itself as legitimate, personalized, or "important" content to bypass automated AI-based filters’.

It was almost a relief to hear from a poor French-woman today who was caught by one of those hugger-muggers (Eastern Europeans who wisely avoid stealing from Spaniards). She lost her thief-proof Cartier watch in a tris-tras which, the husband told me, he himself couldn’t have removed from her wrist in less than a minute.

And thus we continue, one eye on our purse, as the world turns.

What’s that? Trump’s dead? Click on this link. 

Breaking Wind

Now I’m getting a little older, I have taken to walking each day. Severe walking. This means, according to those health experts that infest the Internet, that I must haul in my stomach, straighten my back, and walk, purposely, at least six or eight or ten thousand steps a day, according to whichever adviser catches me first.

I used to take the dog with me for my peregrinations, but I’ve noticed that, unlike me, he reckons that age is an excuse to stay home and chew on a book.

To measure my steps, I have an application on my mobile phone. Six or seven thousand yesterday, including the steps I took when I stupidly left the phone on the bed.

Another health expert tells me that I must walk along my route – happily, I live between the countryside and the beach – with a sense of awe as this will refresh my brain.

If you prefer to use a kayak for your exercise, then it would of course be a sense of oar.

And thus, I walk purposefully along the beach, winking gamely at the passersby, and sigh mightily each time I notice a seagull, a flowering sandwort or a naked woman going past on a pedalo.

The day before yesterday, I had to go to the townhall to get a paper. This means in our fragrant dorp, parking at the back then walking up to the village itself: through, up and over and down the narrow streets on the other side. And then back. Steps mostly, and no cheating. Then (fortifying myself en route with a cold glass of beer), I drove down to the urbanisation on the beach where there’s currently no parking because the city fathers are building a parking-lot (enjoy the irony) to see a lawyer, who promptly sent me back up to the village again for another bit of paper.  

And that day, wonder of wonders, I scored around 9,000 steps just chasing documents.

This made me think: what kind of numbers does a waiter do, or a barman – just with his daily toing and froing between the coffee machine and the icebox? Probably a hell of a lot more than nine thousand. Come to think of it, I once did 20,000 without leaving the stables. 

It’s been windy though. Wind is not kind to those who travel on their own energy. I used to particularly hate cycling into the wind. It’s worse than rain or probably (although I wouldn’t swear to it) snow. The wind makes forward motion very stressful, and the sense of awe can go and hang itself.

On this occasion – last weekend – the wind was blowing strongly. With gusts, says my phone knowledgeably, of up to 75kph carrying old bits of cardboard, leaves, some small branches and a surprised looking seagull apparently flying backwards. I started out on my enjoyable power-walk, tummy in and gamely taking notice of my surroundings (including a plastic wheelie-bin that suddenly overtook me on the straight), but decided, as the rain started, that I should probably turn around and head back to the car: leaning forward into the wind with tiny faltering steps.

Then, as I passed the supermarket, I had an idea: twice round and up and down the aisles would easily put me in the black for the day.

As for the awe, I bought a chocolate bar.  

... 

The figure struggling against the wind is our local totem: the Indalo.  

The Mojácar Library

I was sorting through some old books of mine found in a few boxes in the attic and came across a handful I just knew the local English Library would kill to get their hands on. Treasures like ‘Fodor’s Amsterdam 1957’, Maigret’s Second to Last Case’, and a virgin copy of ‘Teach Yourself Swahili’.

At the bottom, hidden under the ‘Collected Works of Alistair MacLean’s Greatest Poems’, I found a peculiar scientific magazine about pets, or rather: ‘Anthrozoös – A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People, Animals and Nature’.

Where on earth did that come from?

The library was closed for the day, giving me a chance to dive into the mag, thirty years old this month. All a bit beyond me, although I found an article about cockfighting – a pastime apparently still legal in Jeréz de la Frontera.

Another book, and I’ll keep this one, has seventy-five front pages of Almería newspapers courtesy of the Almería Press Association.

One of the newspapers featured was mine: ‘The Entertainer’ (if you remember it).

I found another treasure: ‘Mi Mamá me Mima’ – a book about how Spanish women were treated during the Franco years (Spoiler: not good), with useful tips about cleaning the kitchen and so on.

In reality though, once I’ve dusted off all the classics, the dictionaries and the Latin primers, and put them lovingly either in the dustbin or aside for the Chief Librarian to worry about, I turn with more interest to the large remainder.

See, I’m more of a thriller reader.

Spy stories are good, plus bug-eyed monster books and the better detective yarns. By now I’ve read over seven thousand of them I reckon (apart from War and Peace, which took over a month, I can usually get through two or three books a week).

When we first moved to Spain, before the Age of Television, my dad shipped half a ton of novels to keep us (and a number of English-speaking neighbours) amused. It was hard finding shops that catered for the English reader back then. There was one shop in Granada which had a shelf of very old paperbacks – probably printed in the fifties – and a couple of second-hand places in far off Torremolinos on one side, and Benidorm on the other. Not much to be going on with unless you brought your own with you (or fancied a merry weekend in T-Town).

I was an unwilling student in England in those tender days of the second half of the sixties and was a keen reader (there wasn’t much else to do at my school). So, with a suitcase full of books, records and teabags, I would be welcomed three times a year by my parents (or one of their friends if there was a party going on) at the Almería airport.

My bookcase, or rather, my several bookcases, are full of treasures and as I get older and more forgetful, I discover, ruefully, that I can read them all over again.

As for an electric book, a Kindle (with a thousand books stored therein), I think it would look a bit silly and self-conscious leaning against the wall all by itself on an otherwise naked bookshelf.

I still prefer books to the soulless TV, which now – for a small consideration – brings you shows in your own language (one might never know that the neighbours are Spanish).

These days, I can’t afford new books in English (where available: the nearest store in is Almería) and don’t approve of Amazon, so the second-hand or charity shops (we have at least eight within a ten-minute drive) keep me happy enough, four for a euro.

And then, there’s the library. They say they will accept books in good condition but are probably thinking of someone bringing in just two or three. They have a fine collection, it must be said, and I’m a keen member (also – it’s nice to talk with the volunteer librarians about books). I brought them four boxes-worth last week.

I was wondering though: the English Library still doesn’t have a computer, using instead a card-filing system; but one day, in the far future, I suppose one could just avoid a visit and download interesting reading matter via the Internet onto the trusty Kindle – leaving me and many like me with no one to talk to.