What about the son who decided to squat in his father’s flat in Granada while the man was staying in his holiday flat in Almuñécar? Is nothing sacred?

The two men had been immersed in lawsuit over it for the last year and a half but finally the judge declared in favour of the father, and ordered the son and his family to move out. At the moment, the recently evicted family is living in a small flat without electricity and water – don’t mess with your old man, is the moral of the story.

It was back in September 2009 when Juan Moisés Vera Padial found himself without work and unable to pay the rent, so he decided to squat in his father’s flat in Calle Navas. When Juan, the father, returned after spending a late-summer holiday down in Almuñécar, it was to find his son firmly ensconced and even refusing to let him in through the door.

Before you could say “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and shall blow the door down,” sort of thing, both men were up to their ears in mutually accusatory law suits.

“We moved in because we didn’t have anywhere else to go. We were only getting minimum social benefit payments and had no other income,” explains the daughter-in-law, adding, “we were desperate!” She also reasoned that one day the flat would be her husband’s anyway, through inheritance. Why wait until the old man’s cold, sort of thing.

The father, it is worth pointing out, is not short of a roof or two because he didn’t live in the said flat, but in another one in the Plaza Campillo, according to the daughter-in-law. This is not the case, according to the father, who says that all of his things are in the occupied flat and the other one is empty. Whichever way, he was not impressed.

“Imagine my surprise,” he reasoned, “when returning from Almuñécar, I couldn’t even get into my own flat!” To top it all off, he went on, “my son shouted through the door that the flat was no longer mine and to go away!”

The old gent of 82 went around to the local police station and made a formal complaint, and the police told him that he was in the right, but unfortunately, his son was on the inside and he was on the outside, and that until a judge made a decision, there was nothing that he could do.

Things between them are not likely to heal either. The father points out that he had not seen hide nor hair of his son in 18 years and that in the meantime he had been hanging out with the wrong crowd, whereas the daughter-in-law points out if the father were to sell one of his suits, their family could live comfortably off the proceeds for a month. In short, the Old Man is not short of a penny.