15, 15, 15 minutes to Pego

…I wanna be sedated. I was cackling loudly last night at the latest edition of the terribly wonderful Female Focus magazine. Go on, have a look at the website. It gives you nice idea of just how incredibly ugly this magazine is. Following in the tradition of practically all the English press on the Costa Blanca, they have decided to make their publication practically unreadable by filling it with multicoloured ads, the liberal use of tiny italic fonts in their ‘articles’ and the discontinuous columns that have the reader jumping from corner to corner to page in an attempt to make sense of the story. Now, I understand that they generate their revenue from ads, but for heaven’s sake, get a DTP operator who knows anything about design!

So, among the stellar ads in the back of the FF (after having flipped through the 100 pages in about 2 minutes desperatly wondering where the articles were) I found this one: “Toaster, good condition, 5 euros, Els Poblets” WTF? You’re putting an ad in to sell your toaster for a fiver and the editor accepted it?? Continuing on, we come to: “Sandpit, plastic green frog sandpit, with lid, can be used with sand or water, 25 euros, Javea.” Maybe it was my extreme fatigue yesterday evening but I was ROTFL at that one. Can you imagine yourself ringing up? “Er, hello, yeah I wondered if the sandpit was still available?” People! Get with the charity shop or freecycle groove!

So, at last we come to the property ads, all those poor people who’ve invested their life savings in a place in the sun only to see the property market fall down go boom in the past year. Yes, I have sympathy, but with vacancy rates on new properties still running at 10% (and some buildings round here 90% vacant), you do wonder if the buyers had given any thought to their little investment. Going further and further inland, (ie away from what little entertainment and culture there is on the CB, namely the beach and the bars next to it), you struggle with what to write in your small ad. So, here we have “Benitaya, 129,000 Euros…just a 15-minute drive to Pego…” What? You’re trying to sell your property with the attractive tag that’s it’s only a 15-minute drive to Pego? Pego is a butt-ugly backend of a pueblo, super Franco-esque cement ‘architecture’, some lovely paint and agrochemical factories on the way into town, dusty, not in the mountains nor by the sea. Google it and you won’t even find an image of the center or town because there’s no reason to take a photo of this hole, let alone post in on the Interweb. My God! I’m going to ring right now! Only a 15-minute drive to Pego….made me think of the Ramones “15-15-15 minutes to Pego / I wanna be sedated / Nothing to do nowhere to go /I wanna be sedated…”