Apparently Bob Geldof never said "Give us your f***ing money!"

My mum says that the adverts on the telly, the ones where dogs are tied to lamp posts on roundabouts and left to die and suchlike really upset her.

I don't see those sorts of adverts on the main commercial channels here. They may be on but, if they are, they keep them away from prime time. I do see the ads from time to time on the lesser watched channels - the ones that show endless reruns of CSI and Elementary, Mexican soaps or that one which follows a giant road train as it trundles across Australia. I suspect that the TV chains aren't that keen on replacing the glossy bodies of lucrative perfume adverts with others that shows real people in distress or it could be a simple price thing. Either way the charity ads turn up on the channels with less audience.

I have a lot of time for the doctors of Médicos Sin Fronteras going head to head with the Ebola in the Congo, for Open Arms plucking people from toy boats adrift in the Mediterranean and for the Red Cross turning up with blankets and food wherever people are cold and hungry. But there are only so many times I feel able to say yes to the people in the street who want you to sign up with a direct debit to support their charity. So those adverts on the telly allow me an easy way to salve my conscience with the occasional tiny donation - send a text message with the word MÉDICO to 28033 and donate 1.20€ to help provide vaccine in some lost and forsaken hellhole - says the ad - and I think I should.

When I changed my mobile phone package a little while ago the text message for a donation thing stopped working. I talked to my phone provider and they said they would fix it. The next time I tried it it didn't work again. This time the conversation with my provider was a little more tense. It's a premium number, we block it for your safety. How dare you presume to take decisions for me. We'll unblock it. Damn right you will.

I'm not that generous though, or maybe I don't watch the Divinity channel very often. I saw an ad the other day and texted ALIMENTO to the number. Haití, Syria, Philippines, Thailand? - I forget. It bounced back. I went back to the phone provider the next day, in person, in their office. Sorry, SMS is such an old technology that we don't have much control over it here and the people who provide the service won't allow us to unblock 28033 because it's a threat to their security. It may or may not be true but it seems a shame that such a simple way of assuaging my guilt is blocked to me.

Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station, every Friday night

Weeds are my speciality. Other people may major in roses or gladioli or even alpine perennials but I do weeds.

Our garden consists principally of fruit trees, ivy and weeds. In good Mediterranean fashion we have a lot of bare earth but keeping it bare is a year round job. Rather than imagining that I am exterminating Martians as I hoe, (which I don't think has any relation to the word pair of hoeing and twerking), I amuse myself by listening to things on some wonderful, noise reducing, earphones that I bought from Amazon a couple of Black Fridays ago.

My listening fare varies but I often download Documentos, a documentary programme, from the radio. I like the Selector too, a weekly bilingual update on New British Music. There are also a couple of language learning podcasts that I generally listen to each week. I sometimes listen as I cook too but gardening is favourite.

Today I was listening to Notes in Spanish. I've mentioned Ben and Marina's podcast before. I usually enjoy them though, sometimes, when they are clearing the junk from the house to clear space in their minds, talking about mindfulness or about the time tyranny of Spotify I do find myself rather shouting at the recordings. Today though they were talking about how younger people now use their phones all the time. I thought it was verging on paradoxical that I was listening on my own phone but as I don't see the point of Instagram and I guffaw when people post pictures of the food they are just about to eat in restaurants I suspect I am a long way from OPPA - old person phone addiction. The Ben and Marina idea that someone would use their Instagram or Facebook account to photograph the shirts they were considering buying and then ask their Facebook friends or Instagram followers for help seemed like an interesting idea in a sort of Orwellian or Huxleyian way. A real time virtual community.

There were a lot of weeds. I'd listened to B&M a couple of times so I went back to the Documentos programme that I'd downloaded on Saturday about the development of the Plazas Mayores in Spain. If you've been to Valladolid or Madrid or Almagro or Salamanca or Chinchón or Cordoba or Alcaraz or Santiago and countless other places in Spain you'll know what I'm talking about. The plaza mayor is the main public square, usually surrounded by colonnades, right at the heart of so many cities and towns in the Spanish speaking world. Something that made me snigger slightly, a reminder of the fast pace of change in Spain, was that programme told me that the Catholic Monarchs decreed that, where there were no Town Halls, they had to be built in these main squares. That was a royal edict in 1480. The first planned main Square was built in Valladolid in 1562. Maybe I misunderstood some of the detail.

The programme talked about the development of these squares for markets, for jousts, declarations of faith related to the Inquisition and bullfights - basically as open public spaces for lots and lots of things. I well remember years ago arranging to meet Maggie under the clock in the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca and finding myself in company of tens of people who'd arranged something similiar with their family, friends, lovers or partners. I wondered then how many people had done the same thing on the same spot for centuries.

Well maybe they don't any more. Maybe now young people only talk on WhatsApp rather than over a drink at one of the cafes in the square. But then it struck me what they actually do. They do meet under the clock, though with lots of changes of plan announced via WhatsApp rather than just arriving at the agreed time. They then sit in the cafes but they don't actually talk. They write to the friends at the table, and to their wider network of friends via their phones until the battery goes phut and that's when they have to decide to go home or to go to another bar with lots of charging points!

Keeping schtum

Everyone knows that Brits in Spain wear socks with sandals, go bright red in the sun and swill beer. One of those conversational topics, designed generally to use comparatives in English, with students is about countries. We always agree that one difference is on the Tube. In London everyone keeps to themselves, reading or simply looking grim faced. In Madrid on the other hand the babble between passengers is drowned out only by the occasional impromptu musical jam session.

I was in Madrid the last couple of days and I'm sad to report that everyone on the metro is now glued to their mobile phones. For business suits and skaters alike their thumbs are dancing across screens catching or killing things. Earphones are everywhere to block out the surrounding world. Mobile phones, the great leveller.

Madrid looked very green too. Trees all over the place and that's without going anywhere near the Retiro. Busy of course but then, if you lived in Culebrón, most places would seem busy to you too. And expensive; it's not that paying 2.20€ or 2.50€ for a bottle of beer or 4€ for a tapa is too bad really but we generally pay about half of that so the final bill can be a bit of a surprise. And exciting - flash motors on the street, odd and stylish characters in equal measure, galleries, museums and events everywhere. And, best of all in the recently renamed Aeropuerto Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Maggie popped out of one of the doors with a cartload of luggage which means she gets to eat pork and drink wine and I get my playmate back.

Exponential

Maggie needed a new mobile phone. She lost her old number as a product of the house move back to Culebrón from Cartagena. We cobbled together a solution but when her HTC phone, which she has never taken to, started to have software problems she decided it was time to get a shiny new phone and  a brand new number.

The range of offers was bewildering. Contract or pay as you go. Real or virtual networks. Household names like Vodafone and Orange or newcomers like Pepephone? Eventually the choice was made about which phone and which set up.

There was a last minute scramble when the device they used in the Yoigo shop to scan identity documents wouldn't take a British passport. The passport was much thicker than the Spanish ID cards the scanner had been designed to cope with. Maggie's Spanish ID was no good as it didn't have a photo. They managed in the end though.

The thing that surprised me was the number. Spanish mobile numbers are nine figures long and begin with 6 whilst Spanish landlines are also nine numbers long and begin with a 9. Well, that's the general wisdom.

The mobile number assigned to Maggie begins with a 7. A new series. In Cartagena our landline number began with an 8. Spaniards often thought I was having a language problem when I gave them the number. "No, fixed lines begin with a 9," they said. One chap went so far as have me phone his mobile to confirm the number. He was very apologetic.

I seem to remember that the number of combinations in a series of numbers is worked out by simple multiplication. So for a nine number sequence it would be 9 times 9 times 9 times 9 times 9 times 9 times 9 times 9 times 9 or 387,420,489 variations. The initial 6 cuts this down to 43,046,721 choices. That's a lot of numbers. On the other hand there are around 47 million people in Spain and everyone  from the eldest granny to the smallest child has a mobile so, when I think about it, I'm surprised the 6 numbers lasted so long!