Mission Statement

"Mission Statement - a summary description of an entity's purpose." I suppose mine would be 'surviving the future with my family'. A modest ambition but I'm sure the future will be very different from the present and it's hard to prepare for that. The more we carry on with 'business as usual' the more likely the most depressing predictions become - peak oil shocks, climate change chaos, flu pandemics or even world war three.

I live in a small town in Spain, surrounded by agricultural villages. It's 80km to the nearest city and I've no car. It's a warm, damp, green area and one of the last places you could go to catch bubonic plague in Europe. The Kings of Spain packed their expendable administrators off here. It's a good place for a hermitage, and it's still the head-cold capital of the world. But it's a tight community and I'm lucky enough to be a tolerated foreigner. I don't suppose I seem much stranger to the 'old families' than a urban Spaniard in designer sports gear up here for a long weekend in the 'campo.'

There's only one school and every child goes to it. This is a huge improvement on my childhood in a similarly sized town in England in the 1970s. There were two schools and everyone wanted to go to the good one. If you couldn't, you went to the one for failures. It doesn't sound as though things are much better there now.

My 2 sons are bilingual and happy but I just lost my job and can't find another. Cleaning, childcare and shop-work attract a list of applicants from the villages as long as your arm and there's no graduate work at all - at least not for people with weird, foreign degrees in philosophy.

Immediate ambitions - I'd like a garden, a dog and a bit of financial security. Wish me luck.