In case of any confusion I am writing this a year later, so the new year I am talking about is 2009! Don't worry: now that I have internet access at home, I will soon catch up.
We discovered a lot of differences between buying a property inland using a local Spanish estate agent and trying to buy a property using British estate agents based on the costas. There was no sense of urgency, no request for money to secure our property and no pressure to sign a contract. Manuel told us that the apartment was reserved for "John y Sue", even though we hadn´t parted with any money. He drove us to Orihuela to talk to Evaristo, the manager responsible for the development and also to talk to the "chica" at the bank who spoke English. Carmen had approved our mortgage application in principle, however had a few questions for us. Particularly for me, as I have three pensions as well as the state pension, which clearly was confusing her. Carmen went through our paperwork and seemed satisfied with my explanations and then she gave us the good news that, due to the state of the economy, our mortgage payments were likely to be less than the original quote, which had been well within our budget anyway.
I had asked Evaristo if we could look round the actual flat that we planned to purchase, as all we had seen so far was the show home plus the outside of the new building. He agreed, so Manuel drove us there once we had returned to Jumilla. On the way back, he asked me if I fancied a "cerveza" as we were a bit early for viewing the flat. Once we were inside the restaurant, Manuel ordered lots of tapas for us, and as I said I would prefer "vino", we also shared a bottle of red wine. Before we left he bought us a lottery ticket, which sadly wasn´t a winning one.
We met the supervisor at the site office where we donned fetching hard hats (luckily no photos exist to disprove this) and walked around our soon-to-be new home. Our apartment has plenty of light, great views of Sierra de Santa Ana and Sierra del Carche, and more than enough room for two people to live in. We both said that we would be happy to live there and were keen to go ahead and sign the contract. Having lived here for nearly nine months now, I can safely say that we made the right choice. In many ways we are better off living on the edge of town rather than several miles outside it, especially as we don´t have a car. All we need now is to get the money back from our first disastrous venture into buying a property in Spain, but that isn´t proving to be an easy process.
Good news on the book front though, as I eventually sent the revised manuscript to my patient editor Debs, and "Retiring the Olé Way" was published in May 2009. John and I decided to celebrate moving into our new Spanish home and my book being published by throwing a party, to which we invited Spanish friends and neighbours as well as two couples who appear as case studies in my book, telling their own stories about retiring in Spain.
Having heard horror stories about Spanish punctuality, and having experienced it first-hand living in Jumilla, we were amazed when the door-bell rang five minutes before the party was due to start and we found our Spanish friend Toñi standing there! Our Spanish neighbours weren´t far behind her and they were all bearing bottles of wine or contributions to the meal, which was also a pleasant surprise. Hours later, after our English friends had long since departed for their homes near the coast, two of our Spanish neighbours invited everybody to their flat for coffee and liqueurs. As my daughter observed on one of her visits here: Jumillanos certainly know how to party!