Life rumbles on for expats in debt-struck Spain But, well, they are quite a resourceful lot, the Spanish. Within living memory they have known relative poverty and how to deal with it. When I first came to live here, in the early 1990s, the unemployment levels were as eye-watering as they are today, and people survived. I often think that the British, for whom real austerity and impoverishment are a very distant, even historical memory, would find it much harder to cope with what the Spanish now have to face. And it's not just the financial crisis. Corruption here is endemic among a certain class of politician, it seems, and so stories of closing hospitals next to the dodgy millions that a local mayor or regional councillor has siphoned off don't go down well. Are people angry? Will that anger turn into something nastier? That's the question. A while ago I might have said there was a possibility of that, yet already the Indignados movement that started just over a year ago is losing some of its fizz: there's talk of splits, a lack of focus. Away from all this, walking the other day along the Valencia beachfront, people were sunbathing, having drinks in bars, chatting, strolling arm in arm - as they always do. Spanish friends talk of little else except La Crisis these days, but this is still, if you've got some kind of income, a great place to live. Will it last? A tornado is blowing, and we watch it from a distance as it dances and skips over the landscape, hoping that it will pass us by, fearful lest it sucks us in. In the meantime, we get on with life. And for now, at least when I remember to switch off the news, I'm enjoying it. Jason Webster's latest Max Cámara crime novel, A Death in Valencia, is published by Chatto & Windus on June 7.