Of course, most of them were property sites and rental sites, cashing in on a temporary boom. If visitors were looking for something definite, they could cope with the most amateurish of sites.

The property boom is over, especially for British expatriates, with the pound approaching parity with the euro. We really need to move on from sites built from templates, and sites built by teenagers in love with Flash.

So why do we have sites as fundamentally dreadful as the site for the “Iceland” shops in expatriate Spain?

The shop is fine
I shop frequently at my local “Iceland”, in Benissa. It is a fine shop, with produce shipped in every day from Britain. It has a fantastic English butcher, a serious range of frozen ready meals, and bottled real ale, like Hobgoblin and Bishops Finger. So I have nothing whatsoever against the company.

The site is shameful
It’s just their Web site which is so awful. If you have ever read a post in this blog, you will know that Web site design begins with thinking about visitors. It is an extension of researched marketing. It is not about the scenery.

Before they take it down, have a look at their page which tells you where their shops are.

What does any visitor want from such a page, at a bare minimum? Opening hours would be good. I can’t find them anywhere on the site. Next, a visitor will want to know where their nearest shop is, and how to get to it. This should be the page to do it. Just take a despairing look.

At the top it says, Below you will find details on Overseas Imports stores located in Tenerife. We are currently expanding our business to mainland Spain, so expect more addresses to be added here shortly. Since there are half a dozen shops in mainland Spain on the page, you would have expected the company (someone paid them to do the design) at least to rewrite this sentence.

The real crime, however, is their map. This is designer-centred design so bad it has to be called ‘teenage design.’ It aims to impress rather than inform—and it doesn’t inform at all. The tiny maps in the circles are of no use. Who could drive anywhere using them? In the case of the Benissa shop, they have a bit of a map which shows an area which is half an hour’s drive from the shop—and the arrow is pointing to a crazy spot on the main map.

If you look at the other pages, you will see graphics-free text pages with lines stretching across the page. And then this page, which uses huge static graphics. Google maps, with a simple enough API for real Web site designers, are free. I use them on almost all my expatriate Spain sites. I just can’t work out where the Web site design company responsible for the “Iceland” site is coming from.

In expatriate Spain, we are having a hard enough time. We deserve better from our Web site designers.

I’m not just talking about the way that, as soon as there’s any sun, they take off their shirts to show us all their beer bellies. I’m talking about unawareness and downright rudeness. German men will barge in front of you, bump into you, cut you off in their cars, you name it. More than once I’ve been waiting at a supermarket lift with my shopping trolley, only to have a German man come up and thrust his trolley into the lift in front of me, as soon as the doors began to open. When about to pay at a petrol station, I’ve had a German man walk in to the shop and try to pay before me.

The German for ‘good manners’ is gutes Manieren. You might not know the expression. Nor, it seems, do some German men on the Costa Blanca.

A friend of mine had to swim out of the ground-floor of his apartment block into his garage, where he found his car submerged in water. It had been a new car; it was now a complete write-off.

For some really revealing photos, have a look at the webshots.com album put together by Chris Young (from which I have borrowed my tiny thumbnail).

And where was I while all this rain was falling? In Manchester. (Yes, the irony is a little oppressive.)

However, I did get the start of it. It had been bucketing down all night when I got up on Friday to go to the airport. Since I was staying for a while, I’d decided to go by coach, and had ordered a taxi. It never came. When I telephoned, the dispatcher said it was impossible for a taxi to get to my urbanisation, because of the water.

So I drove myself. I got soaked from head to foot retrieving my car from where I had meant to leave it. Stepping into the road was stepping into a fast-flowing ankle-deep white-coffee-coloured river. My shoes and socks were no protection at all. My shirt stuck to my back, since water quickly found a way inside my jacket, in spite of my golf umbrella.

And then I drove through what were already substantial floods, praying that my car wouldn’t stop as the water swirled over the tires, and really not expecting to make it to the airport.

But I did. So I escaped the worst of it, just watching the news items on Sky TV’s one Spanish channel, and getting updates from my brother in Madrid. And telephone calls from Australia, where it appeared on their news.

I’ve been back for a week now. The floods have receded—but Calpe has become the Manchester of folklore. It rains every day, and when it’s not raining it’s overcast. There have only been a few hours of the warm sunlight we expatriates normally take for granted.

I’m not at all sure myself that human beings are playing a critical part in global warming. To me, it all smacks of the feeling children are supposed to have when their parents separate—that they themselves are responsible (when they are not). The changes may well be out of our control, the planet going its own way as it did for millions of years before humans arrived.

One thing is sure, however. Twenty-first century weather is going to be very different from twentieth-century weather. There will be droughts where it used to be rainy—and rain where there used to be droughts.

It seems there was very little rain in Calpe in the 1990s—and I know there was a drought all through Spain. I visited Madrid two or three times a year in that decade, and travelled around much of Spain. (Of course I spoke much better Spanish then, before I came to settle among expats.)

Torrential rains came in October 2001, and have been coming back—several times a year—ever since. I’ve heard that the Jet Stream is going to bring warmer weather in September and October, but it’s been raining through much of August this year. We blamed the drought on global warming; no doubt it’s responsible for all the extra rain too. Whatever the reason, the result has been to turn the Costa Blanca green.

Now there is a green hill, and it’s not far away (as in the hymn). It’s just across the valley from me.

A man, of about my own age, needed to pass through a queue. “Excuse me,” he said.

If I’d been in Basingstoke or Hull, nothing could have been more normal. But I wasn’t. I was here on the Costa Blanca. This was a Spanish supermarket, and the queue was made up of the usual motley group of Spaniards and expatriates. The man had absolutely no reason for supposing that any of them were English.

I’ve also heard expatriates—German and French as well as English—reply in their own language when the long-suffering girl on the till spoke to them in Spanish. I don’t know what makes these monolinguists tick. From the looks on their faces, it’s as though they can’t really believe that there really are foreign languages. Their own language is so natural to them, they can’t face the fact that it’s just one among many. Surely, their faces seem to say, everyone must understand the only language I speak.

I’m not talking about casual holiday-makers. I’m talking about the expatriate population.

Ah well, let’s end on a positive note. If you want to know the politest way to say “Excuse me” in Spanish, it’s “¿Con permiso?” It’s a question, and you say it the same way you’d say “May I?” in English. So you wait for an answer. A polite Spaniard will immediately say, “Si”, and move aside for you.

Of course, if you say it to another monolingual expat… Sigh.

The Internet has redefined “the countryside”. It is no longer a place where farmers grow crops, or the unspeakable pretend to be hunting the uneatable.

In the early twenty-first century, wherever you live on the planet, you live in the countryside if you live too far from a relay station to get broadband.

A couple of days ago I found myself on the main page of a famous search engine (not Google). It was all in Spanish. I know enough to recognise the word Preferencias, so I clicked on it, expecting it would allow me to switch to English. No such luck. I could set all sorts of preferences, but not change the language. My computer was in Spain (they could tell from its Internet Protocol address) so I must want to talk to it in Spanish.

I talk to Spaniards in Spanish, and I am very happy to do so. But my computer is not a person (or a horse). I prefer to talk to it in English.

Google of course allows you to switch to a fantastic array of languages. I haven’t looked recently, but it used to include Klingon. I always fancied surfing the Web in Klingon—but do I know enough Klingon to change Google back to English afterwards? That has always deterred me.

To come back to my serious point: it may be a kindness to offer languages based on the IP address of the given computer. It is also essential, in 2007, to offer alternatives.

Of course, as any English speaker will spot immediately, there’s a mistake. ‘Trouble’, at least in this context, is not a countable noun, like ‘eye’ or ‘mistake’. It’s what linguists call a “mass”, or uncountable noun. (Think of ‘love’, which is not countable, and ‘kisses’—which are.) You can’t have ‘a’ trouble focusing.

I mentioned a few days ago that there are close on a million native English-speakers here in Spain. So why didn’t the bank—or the copywriters—run the text past one of them? Any English-speaker would spot the mistake instantly, without any special linguistic knowledge. They would just know that it “wasn’t right.”

I’m sure this sort of thing happens all over the world, wherever a native institution displays something in what, for it, is a foreign language. But you wouldn’t expect it on the Web page of a major institution here in Spain, when you could wander out into the street and find someone who spoke the relevant language.

Extraño, ¿no?

I myself think that if you settle in a country, the least you can do is learn the language. It’s just normal good manners. It’s fun. And for a hard-headed bottom line: if I were involved in a road accident, how would I explain to the police what had happened if my Spanish wasn’t up to it?

No, what we were both objecting to was the high-handedness (you could call it “paternalism”) of huge multi-national companies based in an English-speaking country. The attitude seems to be, ‘If you’re stuck in this place, you must want to speak the place’s language. We’re certainly not going to ask you if you’d prefer to speak English, like us.’

At least PayPal offer the option of “US English” on their Spanish site. (Odd that, in itself. I myself know only a couple of Americans who have settled here.) Microsoft just invaded my computer without asking—and I still don’t know how to get the original English version back.

However, the company can behave in a totally high-handed way. What has got my goat right now is what they’ve done to my copy of Internet Explorer 7.

I downloaded version 7 as soon as it was available. The only version on offer was in English, which suited me down to the ground. All my newer computers have Spanish operating systems, since I prefer to buy them here and support the local economy. But I prefer all my software to be in English.

Many expatriates will have exactly the same preferences. It’s not that I don’t know any Spanish, or that it’s that difficult to guess that elementos emergentes are pop-ups. I just feel more comfortable working in my own first language.

So what do Microsoft do? When I download a “security update”, the next time I open up IE7, it’s all in Spanish! Just as Bush sent in troops unasked to Iraq, so whoever is the current President of Microsoft has had the Spanish language take over my copy of IE 7. (I use the analogy because they both seem to me to be typical examples of American high-handedness.) How difficult would it have been for them to ask me, “Now that a Spanish version is available, would you like to update your copy of Internet Explorer?” They could even have asked me in Spanish and I would have understood.

Instead, they know better. (The analogy with Bush springs to mind again.) Because I have a Spanish version of Windows I must want a Spanish version of IE.

So now I have to remember to Abrir en una nueva pestaña when I want to open a link in a new tab. And so, presumably, do thousands of us English-speaking expatriates. Microsoft doesn’t know or care that there are a million of us in Spain. (More of us than in any other country in the world, except Australia.) No doubt Spanish speakers in the southern and western states of the USA have to use an English version of IE, if they have an English version of Windows.

What can we do?

I expect there’s something I can do. No doubt I could roll back the update—but then I’d be exposed to security threats. I could isolate the key DLLs, and swap them for English versions. But this would take a great deal of patient twiddling, and I could end up not being able to use IE at all. What I did do was spend hours on Google trying to find a simple answer—and came up with nothing.

If any reader of this blog knows an answer, please post a comment! You might be helping an entire community.