Today is a holiday in Spain.
The restaurants were all competing with each other offering great value Menu del Dia's but the supermarkets and most of the stores were closed.
In most of Continental Europe and America, public holidays are taken on the day they fall which can mean that depending on the actual day people may take an extra day to make a long weekend, which of course explains why most people seemed to be out and about yesterday.
Our American visitors have left via Flamenco in Madrid and are now en route to minus temperatures and snow flurries in Vermont.
This is the fourth time that we have exchanged virtual reality for the real thing, we met in Bolton in 1974, Cambridge, Mass in 1985, In Cumbria in 2005 and now in Spain in 2012.
Stuart came over to the UK in 1974 as a volunteer with Community Service Volunteers, thirty eight years ago with our long hair and beard's we were asked were we brothers? This Sunday in Alhaurin with our shaved heads and goatees we were asked the same question.
But no we are not, I started a charity called Nightcap which housed homeless young people in Bolton, Lancashire, and Stuart worked at the hostel as a volunteer for three pounds a week, food and accommodation provided.
Nobody got rich from the work!
I have been intrigued by some of the recent news from the UK.
Not the least by the resignation of the so called Families Czar and the reports about the company she founded, a4e.
In my last job I worked for a charity which sought Government support for its work with families and young people.
Often our bids were unsuccessful because as a charity we were perceived as being asset rich.
I spent long hours negotiating with Civil Servants, trying to sell our services and ensure that the costings reflected the actual costs of delivering the service.
Eventually the charity had to withdraw from running public programmes and move back to its original founding principles as a voluntary society.
As a social enterprise however it was the case that staff were paid wages which were not overly generous and that when surpluses were occasionally generated, they were ploughed back into the charity, often to cross subside other activity.
What is clear that nobody benefited personally from the activity of the charity.
In some of our programmes we were highly successful in helping young people plan for and find work and we continued to support them in the first months of employment.
Reading the newspaper reports of a4e of whose activities I was not especially aware when I was working it seems that significant profits were generated from the contracts with Government Departments and that those profits were seen as being available to both invest in the development of the company and as profits which could be shared by the companies owners.
The company was successful in getting people into work, but not necessarily more successful than the many charities engaged in this work, the difference seems to be that Civil Servants, who often do not understand the charitable world and how it operates appear to be quite relaxed about the profit motive.
A charity like Community Service Volunteers, with years of experience encouraging young and old in volunteering, in preparation for work and in undertaking social service activity in hospitals, the caring professions, working with the homeless and with families, undertakes this work not for profit but as a social good.
That is not too difficult to understand is it?
As our visitors left we promised that we would keep in touch and that in four or five years time we would swap our virtual world for the real world and visit with each other once again.
The restaurants were all competing with each other offering great value Menu del Dia's but the supermarkets and most of the stores were closed.
In most of Continental Europe and America, public holidays are taken on the day they fall which can mean that depending on the actual day people may take an extra day to make a long weekend, which of course explains why most people seemed to be out and about yesterday.
Our American visitors have left via Flamenco in Madrid and are now en route to minus temperatures and snow flurries in Vermont.
This is the fourth time that we have exchanged virtual reality for the real thing, we met in Bolton in 1974, Cambridge, Mass in 1985, In Cumbria in 2005 and now in Spain in 2012.
Stuart came over to the UK in 1974 as a volunteer with Community Service Volunteers, thirty eight years ago with our long hair and beard's we were asked were we brothers? This Sunday in Alhaurin with our shaved heads and goatees we were asked the same question.
But no we are not, I started a charity called Nightcap which housed homeless young people in Bolton, Lancashire, and Stuart worked at the hostel as a volunteer for three pounds a week, food and accommodation provided.
Nobody got rich from the work!
I have been intrigued by some of the recent news from the UK.
Not the least by the resignation of the so called Families Czar and the reports about the company she founded, a4e.
In my last job I worked for a charity which sought Government support for its work with families and young people.
Often our bids were unsuccessful because as a charity we were perceived as being asset rich.
I spent long hours negotiating with Civil Servants, trying to sell our services and ensure that the costings reflected the actual costs of delivering the service.
Eventually the charity had to withdraw from running public programmes and move back to its original founding principles as a voluntary society.
As a social enterprise however it was the case that staff were paid wages which were not overly generous and that when surpluses were occasionally generated, they were ploughed back into the charity, often to cross subside other activity.
What is clear that nobody benefited personally from the activity of the charity.
In some of our programmes we were highly successful in helping young people plan for and find work and we continued to support them in the first months of employment.
Reading the newspaper reports of a4e of whose activities I was not especially aware when I was working it seems that significant profits were generated from the contracts with Government Departments and that those profits were seen as being available to both invest in the development of the company and as profits which could be shared by the companies owners.
The company was successful in getting people into work, but not necessarily more successful than the many charities engaged in this work, the difference seems to be that Civil Servants, who often do not understand the charitable world and how it operates appear to be quite relaxed about the profit motive.
A charity like Community Service Volunteers, with years of experience encouraging young and old in volunteering, in preparation for work and in undertaking social service activity in hospitals, the caring professions, working with the homeless and with families, undertakes this work not for profit but as a social good.
That is not too difficult to understand is it?
As our visitors left we promised that we would keep in touch and that in four or five years time we would swap our virtual world for the real world and visit with each other once again.
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