Spanish manners..

Spanish manners

We had a fiesta for Alexander and Lara’s birthday last Saturday. It ended with a bang – a Spanish fiesta must have fireworks - but there was quite a bit of whimpering before.

The end was the best part: Pablo turned up to help set off the fireworks and did all the requisite igniting, then yelling, running and shouting to make the fireworks fun, though he came pretty close to going up in flames as a result. The Spanish are not big on health and safety and in fact I was pretty surprised the children came off OK, given that various little boys were dancing uncontrollably in front of Pablo as he lit the fuses.

Generally, things were not in control. I had the idea of inviting all the children – Spanish, English and German – and putting on a real show. The Spanish contingent arrived in one van, and proceeded to go mental – filling their pockets with sweets, stuffing down food and running off with it, nicking the handheld fireworks and stuffing those up their jumpers, and so on. The Brits, meanwhile, tut-tutted and said “the Spanish” (which is how all the kids refer to the Spanish children at school) had no manners and were not properly brought up. Jack and Becky, managing the barbecue for me, cursed at the worst Spanish girls – a trio of rather tarty witches, Fatima, Marta and Sara – in their fluent Spanish, while the latter whined that they didn’t like any of the food and didn’t I have any “lomo” or chips? When I produced ham, they ran off with it into the field and devoured it like wolves, only coming back to push themselves to the front of the birthday cake line. Meanwhile, the Brits wound them up by yelling “paella!” when there wasn’t any, and getting them all to jump up and run to the kitchen. Sara then practically snatched the cake from my hands, only just holding back while the Brits loudly made everyone sing “Happy Birthday” – drowning out “Cumpleaños Feliz” – but then holding her plate aside until the best piece of cake was about to be doled out, at which point she stuck it under my nose and gave me the evil eye. The boys were marginally better, only jumping over the bonfire and pushing a bike into the swimming pool. At the end, they all disappeared into the van that picked them up, without saying goodbye – there was quite a lot of shouting but none of it sounded like “thank you for having me.”

In the morning, I walked round and picked up hundreds of bits of exploded tinfoil and firework shreds, and rubbed the relics of silly string into the garden. Never again, I said to my neighbour, Consuelo, as we went for an evening walk on Monday. (Up and down the main road: the Spanish don’t walk on footpaths, except farmers going to their crops or with their goats.) She shook her head disapprovingly and said the children were naughty, but that it was true Spanish people don’t say please or thank you, in general. I pointed out that her children would never misbehave like that. This is true: Noella, aged 6 or so, would not say boo to a goose, and Oscar, 2, seems well enough behaved for his age. I cant imagine your children going into rooms in someone’s house and taking stuff? No, she agreed, but you know, we Spanish don’t generally let people into the house “de la calle” – from the street. We don’t do that! You have to keep the house closed up! I pointed out that the children had to go to the bathroom, but she shook her head. I don’t know how they manage it, but certainly in a Spanish house you rarely get beyond the front room – a kind of designated receiving space, which is sometimes the hall, sometimes the outside terrace. After the party, only the father of the little shy German girl, another Sara, came in and was extremely polite, inviting us over and thanking us effusively for the party. I received him with gratitude: another polite northern European, who would understand the concept of thank you, and would invite me into his house in return.

Sylvia has said to me before now that every now and then she needs to go back to France, for a dose of good manners. The English are not as well-mannered at the French, but nor are they as bad as the Spanish, who really can be appallingly rude, by our standards.

More Javier Marías

I continue to read the Javier Marías trilogy, now the third volume. Compelling reading for anyone thinking about what is is to be Spanish - Marías, himself is a Spaniard who was, inter alia, an Oxford professor, works the two cultures together so elaborately and fluently that you are never quite sure where you are.

On the dust cover of my edition of the book there are the usual “this is the best book ever” stuff, and some English journalists have compared Marías to Proust. What does this mean? It could be just a way of saying he is brilliant, or that his sentences are very long (Spanish sentences are much longer anyway, often a page long, joined up by commas). At first, I thought he was not at all like Proust, which, from my memory, shimmers like a Manet – the colour of water recollected in mirrored cupboard doors, sunsets sinking on girls’ faces on the beach – and all that visual jazz. Marías is pretty dry and abstract by comparison – no lingering at all. I wonder if this is quite Spanish: the literature I have read seems rarely to dwell on landscape and by the same token is brisk and unsentimental.

Later, I thought that perhaps the journalist meant that his books are like Proust because the narrative repeats itself, referring back constantly to one or two themes, in variation. Reading it is rather like being enclosed in someone’s brain, or maybe ego and that seemed to me both quite like Proust, but also, in this case, extremely Spanish. Human behaviour, and particularly cruel human behaviour, and how it might lead to death, are never far off: there is a lot of hands-on sadism, and there is the dark shadow of Franco, and the narrator’s father’s experiences at his hands, standing behind everything and not so long ago. It is a hard world: civilisation, empathy or sacrifice might exist, or pointless little cashmere airline blankets that only give the illusion of luxury and then slip off. Manners, therefore, are pretty much a waste of time. In the middle book, the narrator notes that a disabled toilet in a British nightclub is respectfully left empty, whereas in Spain, people would just barge in, either not noticing the sign on the door, or ignoring it.

One of the things that most struck me about the book was the repeated assertion that you should always pursue an observation or a thought long beyond the point where most people would drop it and I have not gone nearly far enough in pursuit of my cultural point; perhaps I have not been here long enough anyway, and it will take a number more runs at it to get it right. In any case, whatever generalisations I have made about Spain, it has writers like this, and journalists on El Pais, who are presumably have dinner parties, read academic books, and whose children never leave a birthday without saying thank you.

Before I gave up on the thought I was chasing, though, I did wonder, if Almeria has a thinner coat of civilisation, manners, whatever, than Kent – how much difference does that make? I am guessing the sadist in Marias would have you believe it doesn’t change anything: cruelty and death are always with us, whether you go to pig stickings, or cocktail parties, have a tumble dryer or a washing line. Is less comfort – or too much comfort a good thing?

Telebasura, y más..

When I came here on holiday, I never noticed how different that made Spain, nor how in many ways it is still a place with a small, very refined upper echelon, and, below that, thousands of people who litter, shout, don’t read, and watch more utter crap on telly than anyone else in Europe, according to an interesting article last week in El País. According to this, more “telebasura” – junk TV – is watched in Spain than anywhere else in Europe and perhaps beyond. The article linked this to the physical rubbishing of the landscape: the booming construction industry, with its harsh, insensitive development of Spain’s coasts. Why Spain, it asked – why are we so much worse than anywhere else?

Recent history, maybe: this is a country with only a small, and recent, middle class and all the things that go with that, like reading, and dinner parties. In living memory, it had Franco and the brutality of the Civil War, times when there was no time for niceties. Not that anywhere else – say Germany - wasn’t brutal, but you have the sense that the polite bourgeoisie went on giving dinner parties and turned a blind eye to what went on under the white dinner tablecloth, while in Spain, the tablecloth, if there ever was one in the first place, was pulled right off: Spaniard against Spaniard and it was out in the open in every village.

But my own sense is that El Pais might have looked beyond junk TV and construction. The Spanish engage with the world around them in a different way from other Europeans, certainly northern Europeans. They are less interested in the environment, countryside, and their surroundings, into which they routinely chuck rubbish – and more interested in human society – but it goes beyond that. You could go further, particularly on a bad day, clearing up the crap from a fiesta in your garden, and say that the indulged children they used to be makes them strong, boisterous and entitled adults, who want to impose themselves on the environment, squeeze fun from life and chuck the rubbish out. The individual man, perhaps even the ego, seems to me to loom huge and dark here, sometimes even menacing. From here, England might seem like the pale figure of a gentleman walking in a pastoral landscape, and Spain like a dark, powerful man staring into the camera like a mirror, while the family and people in the room behind him push to get their faces in the lens. Whatever maketh man, it isn't likely to be manners.

I’m not saying it’s that scary all the time, but sometimes you feel a bit too close to the bullfight.

More about donkeys

Meanwhile, Penelope and Luca, the donkeys, now have a large field and it appears they either don't want to escape, or can't. They are far more different from horses than I imagined and much less cute than the idea of donkeys I had from the English seaside, etc. Like horses, a whim or a scent will take them, and they will decide not to move, or to move at high speed, but they are far less docile than most horses. Luca, in particular, comes up behind you and bites and shoves for no apparent reason - he eats everything, from his own halter to people's hair, and jackets. We take them for a walk most early evenings, along the rambla - Luca plods along at the back most of the time, yawning, and twitching his furry ears - if they go backwards, it is a sign he has suddenly been possessed by a bad mood and will start butting you, biting his rope and dancing about: he charges into the back of Penny, or jumps into the air. Penny, most of the time, walks along placidly, unless she sees tarmac, which seems to be a signal to gallop and try to push you into the side of the road. The walk goes over the rolling low hills, through the olive and almond trees, and we wander where you like as none of the land is fenced in: farmers with goats stop and look at the strange English woman and children leading two disobedient donkeys, then usually shout "La burra!" in an exultatory way - donkeys command some kind of respect, or pleasure - perhaps because there are so few now. I come in tired, with my hands rubbed on the bridle, and at times I think they are quite unsuitable pets - but they look very nice in the field, and it seems to complete the land seeing a couple of grazing animals there. How English, indeed!

God's great plan

A shit birthday

I had one of the worst birthdays I can remember yesterday. Sandy went to Australia the day before (claiming he had no choice but as I told him, we always have a choice, even if we work for the Evil Empire and a nutcase client in Sydney) and the children decided they would help me by taking the day of school – something the local kids all do on any family member birthday, including distant great uncles. It was a big mistake, and I knew it would be for some time in advance: I ended up saying we would go to Murcia, which has the only normal department store in miles, but is about two hours drive. Sandy said it was one, but that is Sandy time: 160 k/hour all the way and not counting the bit between the house and the autovia or the shop and the autovia. Since I get hugely stressed in large shops, I have no idea why I did it, except that I felt this kind of nagging guilt about the children’s party I have to organise for December 1st, also Alexander’s birthday next week. I have no idea where to get the usual trimmings: the Spanish don’t seem to sell balloons, poppers, etc – only piñatas, which are a nice idea, but when you bash them they are just full of things like packs of crisps and those peculiar sweets like foam rubber. Sandy had done his ritual “I don’t know how to buy you anything you like” chant, and ended up leaving me a pair of slippers which were two sizes too small – just as well, since I didn’t like them anyway – and some face cream, which was fine, but I could get it myself and then I would have bought a different one. Well, it’s not his fault, since some people are not good at those things, said Sylvia. I don’t agree: it is his fault. He has lived with me for long enough to know my shoe size and to have picked up any woman’s magazine and learned that slippers are not an acceptable gift. Meanwhile, my mother, when she visited, proclaimed loudly that she was leaving me “a token” present. Why? No explanation why it should be “token” – rather than normal. I told her I would give her a token present on her birthday, then. Only Jasmine and Sylvia managed to get me a card on time. If birthdays are about delivering the message: “You are special!” then this one didn’t hit the spot. Last year, when I had a lot of my girlfriends round and drank a lot of champagne, plus the nanny bought me a chocolate cake, I felt pretty special, and pissed, of course, but now that I live here I do not have any girlfriends handy, nor a husband most of the time. Actually, it is the nanny I miss the most: she might not have been that excellent at housework, but it is nice not to be the one who has to look after you.

Shutting the stable door

The day in Murcia was exhausting and the only good thing that can be said about it is that there is almost no Xmas visibility: presumably by now in the UK they are playing “I wish it could be Christmas every da-aa-ay” on the hour every hour on the radio, but here there was just a small display of baubles on the third floor of the Cort’ Ingles, and of course, some very Catholic looking cribs and a lot of bumper boxes of the rather dry, almond and nougat Spanish biscuits they eat at this time of the year stacked up in the big supermarkets. Apart from this, there are few signs of Christmas, which is a relief, but I expect by mid December I will be missing the great UK bonanza, tacky tinsel and lights everywhere and crap office parties with compilation tapes of Wizard, Slade and Band-Aid going round and round.

Here, Juan Mañas told me that the cultural secretary for the Ayuntiamento (aka Vanessa) wanted to talk to me about my donkeys, which might be needed for the Dia de los Reyes – that is, Epiphany, which is a much bigger deal than Christmas. We went a couple of years back: the donkeys process round town with baskets of sweets for the children, though in fact all the greedy old ladies snatch and pocket them first. When we got back from Murcia, I fed the donkeys, but this morning, when I got up, the stable door was open on the road side, and nothing was in the stable. I spent a frantic half hour tearing around waving carrots, until Cristóbal, the old guy working on the land, rounded them up from behind Pablo’s and brought them back. A great relief: I asked Cristóbal to mend the lock on the door which clearly doesn’t work properly. He has now put a chain on the outside, so that while this was very much a case of shutting the stable door after the donkey had bolted, at least the donkey was found and put back inside. Sometimes you do get a second chance.

Perspective on wrong turns

Moving to another country gives you a new perspective on your old life; when you are close up you can’t see it properly and it is only when you walk far enough away that you get the full picture. Quite often, I wake up at night and think: aha, that’s where I made my mistake! For instance, that I never should have left journalism and gone into PR, to which, after all, I was completely unsuited. If you wrote down the qualities of the ideal PR person on one piece of paper, and mine on another, I expect the only match would be “can write.” Other qualities, like diplomacy, for instance, must be quite near the top of the PR list, but might not appear on mine at all. I wonder now why I didn’t see it at the time: I expect colleagues were saying things like: why on earth did she go into PR, the way I often did about ex journos I knew when they took the PR shilling. Shilling being the key word here: for money, of course. Money can persuade you are well suited to quite a lot of things, jobs, ugly old husbands and so on. At least in my case I turned down two rich men; probably it would have been a step too far to think I could live with an investment banker and organise charity balls, though my day job was not far off that as it turned out.

Another big mistake was going to work for the world’s most old-fashioned engineering company, in the mistaken belief that I would be the leaven in the lump. Actually, I was the grit in the oyster, and quickly got coated in something that would stop me itching. I didn’t need to live through having men with double chins put their hand on my knee in taxis, or say “Just a moment, dear,” in meetings; nobody made me do it and my only excuse is that I thought it was a stepping stone. If so, it was the kind that wobbles when you tread on it and tips you into the river.

The trouble is I have realised my career mistakes too late – at least for that life. In CS Lewis’ The Silver Chair, Aslan, i.e. God - pulls Jill and Eustace into a dangerous other world and gives them a series of signs to follow in order to escape. At one point, they are supposed to be looking for the sign Under Me. They spend a long time despairingly wandering about in stone trenches of a ruined city, until they realise that the trenches are the letters of the words Under Me. This still seems to me a good description of life, except that there is no guarantee you will find the sign at all and not be caught by giants preparing for their traditional Autumn Feast of human flesh.

As Kirsty Alley, the evil Oklahoma beauty pageant organiser in Drop Dead Gorgeous – just after she has topped her daughter’s rival by igniting the combine harvester she is riding – “Sometimes it’s hard for us to understand God’s great plan.” I just have to hope that this time I get a second chance and don’t have to be like Kirsty Alley and resort to murder to make sure my daughter wins the second-time-round pageant on my behalf.

Platonic friendship

I had bad news from the UK. The one nice guy in my old job, Martin, has prostrate cancer that may also be in his bones. I have thought about him a lot and failed to say the right things, though I am still trying. It is hard to be warm without being sloppy, or concerned without being funereal ahead of time. I am a natural optimist about these things, so of course I am saying: “You’ll be fine,” but that’s rather like those people telling you that you’ve passed your exam: how would they know?

Martin and I worked together, which is one of the best ways to be friends with someone, and probably the only way to be friends with a man after you are married. I always spat on girls that said “I get on better with men” – H, for instance, who used to say this regularly when we were younger was actually saying “I’m extremely sexy, so I don’t bother with women.” But the fact is that the best friendships I have had were with men, particularly at work. The film When Harry met Sally claims that platonic friendships don’t exist and I used to think that was true: on the basis that friends have to be people you find attractive and if you find the man attractive, you want to be more than friends. However, this changes when you are old and married, I think: you can acknowledge attraction but contain it, like having a scary big dog on a lead. You maybe want to have a cat, too, and cream sofas, so you don’t let the dog rampage about the house. I would say those friendships are better than most with women, which lack that sense of something pulling on the lead and are too often like the worst marriages: someone banging on about trivia over the garden fence but not actually seeing you as a person, just a listening ear.
So, I thought of Martin, who is nearing fifty with great poise but some little vanity and anxiety about ageing, a subject we talked about quite a bit over a glass of wine at lunch, now being struck with something so much more serious. I am glad I have told him, several times, what a good friend he was, and also, when he was worrying about his wrinkles, that he was still very good looking, knowing perfectly well that he would never put his hand on my knee, and also that, if I asked, he would tell me I still had nice knees, for a woman in her forties. I just hope he gets better, that’s all. There are a lot of shits in that company, and Fate had to wave her scissors at this one. Indeed, sometimes it’s hard to understand God’s great plan.

More proverbs and stereotypes

Juana Panza

It struck me watching her eat dinner the other day that Juana is pretty much a dead ringer for Sancho Panza, though I suppose rightly she ought to be Teresa. Like Sancho, she is a great one for proverbs and has taught me a few good ones, particularly about squeezing the juice out of things. The other day she was pointing out how much I was spending redoing the house and I said Sandy would have to work a bit harder so that we could keep it up. She liked that and went on a bit about me in the house, Sandy out at work, ha ha, then commented that men were like lemons, you had to squeeze all the juice out of them while you could. Another time, when she and Pablo were getting in the van to pick olives, I joked to Consuelo that she wasn’t bothering to go too because Juana and Pablo were there to do it: what are parents for, and Juana came out with a proverb that roughly meant: a patch of land and an old man: squeeze them while you can. I don’t know if this is an Andaluz proverb: I haven’t found it on any of the many websites dedicated to Spanish proverbs. Spanish is a language rich in proverbs, one website begins, and Juana has more or less has one for every occasion. Meanwhile Pablo is keeping his end up. We invited them to dinner the other night and inevitably a large part of the conversation was about food and drink: Pablo explained how wine was better in a leather bottle and it turns out there is a proverb for that: el vino en bota, la mujer en pelotas – wine best in a skin, woman best in her skin (i.e. naked). Subtle they are not – Don Quixote was very scathing about Sancho Panza and his strings of proverbs – his wisdom is clearly a bit too homespun and I wonder if this is still a very basic Spanish way of talking: Pablo and Juana do bring proverbs out in a way I have never heard an English person do. Juana is also quite rotund and, by her own admission, has suffered with donkeys; I can see her riding across the plains towards Madrid, swearing a bit and thinking about her next meal.

We made a big effort with the food, but they seemed somewhat cautious about it: Pablo repeated several times that it was not good to eat too much at night, making the faces of someone suffering indigestion to show what might happen, particularly to Juana who, contrary to appearances, he claimed was delicate. “La Juana, la Juana es delicada, pero el Pablo, no, Pablo no es delicada,” he said. In fact, Juana is as strong as an ox and managed to get all the food down without any difficulty, though none of them really liked the green vegetables: not something I have ever seen them eat – only peppers, and cabbage. They were very taken with the tarte Tatin I had made –Andaluz people have a very sweet tooth – but also rather mystified. Juana asked me what the fruit was and Consuelo asked me if the base was a pancake (crepes, said as if it were Spanish, not French). When I said, no, it was “pasta,” which is pastry, she vaguely recognised the concept. They don’t really bake here – though you can buy French style tarts in some patisseries – and indeed, I realise baking is quite an English thing. When I noted the absence anywhere of any kind of cake tin, or indeed, Tupperware large enough to fit a Christmas cake, the woman in the Vera domestic store explained to me that “you (the English) are much more into baking than we are.”

Pablo, meanwhile, was very interested in the sour cream, and poked it about quite a lot as if it might bite him, asking what it was. I was pushed to explain, since I don’t really know what it is, though I use it quite often and was pleased to find it in the Intermarche. He told Consuelo to try it as it was not at all bad after all. She took a small teaspoon and seemed surprised it was not disgusting. Anyway, they took all the rest of the tart home with them, with great enthusiasm, packing it away quickly as if I might change my mind. It was a good evening with a lot of jokes, and I hope they didn’t have indigestion during the night.


Donkey work

Meanwhile, the donkeys are proving a handful. The other day, Lara insisted on leading them up to Juana’s with me; I could tell from the off that they were in the mood for tricks. As we saying goodbye to Juana, Penny, who could tell Lara didn’t really have a grip of what she was doing, suddenly went loco and careered off into the rambla; Juana briefly caught her but was obliged to let go as Penny was stronger. Penny then did about six fast circuits of the rambla, while Luca strained on the rope I was holding, desperate to make a similar break for freedom. Eventually, she wore herself out, but not before I had to send a hysterical Lara back to the house; not being used to horses she had no idea whether we would ever catch Penny again. Penny looked quite satisfied after her gallop and mildly walked back to her stable. Subsequently, we have had a few energetic walks, with me pitting my weight against Penny’s – apparently a donkey doesn’t wear a bridle with a bit, but you need one with a chain and all I had was a halter – until Pablo produced an ancient donkey bridle which I am trying to restore. Meanwhile, whenever they are out of their paddock, there is always something going on. I came out to check them and found Penny tangled herself up around several trees while Luca ate the orange tree. I can’t leave them like that when I am not there to disentangle them so have persuaded Sandy to allow me to create another field at the side of the land. More work for Juan and his men who might as well have Portacabins on our land since they are here most weeks:
At least the donkeys now have a huge stable, now completely renovated with great enthusiasm by Juan’s men, who have spent a lot of time replacing the roof, re-blocking the walls and putting in new stable doors.

Stuff a mushroom

When I went to post my last blog entry, I saw from the Google home page that a “blog of note” called To Do List has become a book. Exclamation mark! I guess it is like reincarnation: if blogs are good, then one day they can become books and go from being blind, shapeless things to having a hard back and crawling about on the shelves at Waterstones. Hmm – well, I wonder what To Do List is about – I couldn’t be bothered to look but I imagined it was one of those sex and shopping books with the coloured covers, only the ones with no sex or shopping, which are aimed at the older woman and are about how busy women’s lives are, how they spend all their time juggling and then their husband goes off and shags the nanny. There is a formula for UK books these days, if they are going to get into the top ten which is more or less all you can buy in any bookshop and is made up of some of the above, a few autobiographies of abused children and a couple of thrillers that claim to be better than, or as good as, that best seller about the Holy Grail which I couldn’t finish it was so boring.

Here, I can buy books in two main places: the tobacconist in Vera, which has a weird and random selection of things like Cervantes and Virgil mixed in with modern Spanish novels, or the Mojacar El Fuente newsagent, which has scholarly editions, massive academic dictionaries, histories of Almeria and then some regional cookery and romances. At least you never know what you will find lurking behind the newspapers.

As for me, I am doing more cooking. Lots of people told me that when I came to Spain I would have time to do creative things, like write a book about coming to Spain, but every time I try to sit down and read, let alone write, I think of a job I need to do, and cooking is time consuming. You might wonder what is the point when someone is just going to eat it and shit it out the other end, but if you go down that road you would not make the bed either, a thought that has crossed my mind.

I had not cooked much for about 14 years, or about as long as I have been married, until I came here. Sandy has done it all, but now he is not here much in the week so he has passed the oven glove to me. I didn’t like the idea at first, particularly having to think up what to give the children. All I could think of was my mother’s chicken paprika and perhaps one other recipe, since I am more inclined just to eat raw food myself. More worryingly, Sandy has a lot of cookery books that require you to do things with sheet gelatine, strainers or make sugar baskets. However, now I have discovered Delia Smith, who seemed pretty damn boring when she was on telly: it seems a minor miracle that if you follow the recipe it all works out. I have begun to feel quite smug, making a meal for the children in advance, even though it still takes about an hour out of the day and there is a fair chance they will say they don’t feel like that and would like a pizza. If I didn’t do it, I would have more time to do something more intellectually stimulating, like improving my Spanish, reading, or (ha ha) writing…

Shirley Conran famously said that life was too short to stuff a mushroom: another good housekeeping tip. I guess it depends what else you have to do, perhaps writing books about not wasting time stuffing mushrooms, or a to do list, maybe.

English and Spanish friends

Wednesday, market day, is my day out – all of fifteen minutes drive and I am in the town. I am beginning to enjoy it – you always meet someone and end up having a coffee in the Bar Plaza, which is heaving with old men drinking strange spirits in coffee through the morning. Once I have picked up my huge pile of forwarded junk mail, I tour round the market stalls picking out the fruit and vegetables that look best, and then normally go to the bank – which still has a friendly bank manager. I was pleased today to meet a new person, Lynne, whom I saw from afar and decided to talk to, since she had a nice red jacket and one of those faces that look a bit like a painting – that is, one by a real artist, not a pretty-as-a picture face; she is fifty something, I would say, from Brighton, where she used to have a clothes shop. She is now divorced and living in a country house here: she said it was hard but she had wanted a life where she didn’t spend every evening drinking and socialising and had time to grow vegetables. Now, of course, she feels consumed by Protestant work-ethic guilt, though not enough to make her throw the trowel in and go back to selling rags in a town that increasingly has the same high street as any other and where small individual shopkeepers can’t afford the rent. She said she was finding it hard here, so I asked what was hard and she said: the physical work, lighting wood stoves (agreed – I have just had a lorry load of wood delivered), dealing with water that doesn’t come on (agreed: the other day we had no water – the pump had air because the hose from the well had blocked up) and all the admin (agreed). It is certainly not easy for a woman on her own, but I looked at her and expected that she was something of a steel magnolia, or whatever the English version of that is. There are a number of women of this kind living out here, whether alone or with husband trailing along behind; despite being quiet they are actually hardy, and adopt stray dogs and do the garden and the vegetables until they are 100, like those famous 19th ceEnglish women travellers.

I liked Lynne and realised afterwards that I had missed talking to someone other than Spanish builders: Sandy is in Australia for another 3 weeks now so I am all the more pleased to make friends. I also saw Mercedes, Sylvia’s sister’s best friend: she is an oddly English Spanish woman – by which I mean that she is quiet, reserved and I would say fearful: she brought her husband to our meeting just in case: he is a policeman, too – they met when she was on holiday in Vera and I wonder she was bold enough, but Sylvia says she was very beautiful when young, so perhaps he approached her. She teaches English in Vera school, speaks good English and my Spanish is good enough, but there is still a barrier, which might be personality, or might be language – hard to say. She is from Madrid and went to British school, but is now desperate to live in the north, in Asturias, interestingly – much more sophisticated than down here. I imagine Asturias and Andalucía are as different as chalk and cheese, or perhaps Mercedes and I. However, we had a pleasant talk, and I learned a few things – that there are restaurants that don’t just do meat or fish on the grill, that currants don’t exist in Spain, and that she moderates her Madrid accent or the locals laugh at it for being posh – but at the same time that the Andaluz accent is seen as rather charming by madrilenos – perhaps a bit funny, but charming. Sylvia asked me afterwards how I found her so I said, that we got on, but not like you and me and she laughed and said well, it was unusual to get on as well as we did. And that is true: I never had a Sylvia before, and it is interesting she is half and half French and Spanish, not an English girl, or even an English sheep in Spanish wolf’s clothing, like Mercedes.

There are a lot of stereotypes in what I have written, I expect – not all Spanish women are strong, fat and capable of managing a runaway donkey, nor are all English ones cool but hardy gardeners and bakers. But when you move, you inevitably think in stereotypes, because you spend so much of your time comparing what was, with what is and also, of course, wondering where you stand in it and how you are liable to change.

Spin cycle

Donkey matters

Yesterday was an eventful day: there was no water in the morning and when I went to look the pump was blinking agitatedly. I reset it, to no effect, and then looked in the deposit, to find it almost empty. This meant a call to Gilberto, our plumber, and it turned out that the “pipe” (actually, more or less a garden hose) that brings our water in, had probably had a blockage, and air had got into the pump. All this meant a delay before I went to Ramblizo for donkey halters and a saddle. On the ground floor there are things like live partridges and dogs, and then there is a whole floor of bridles, saddles, halters and horse accessories where I spent a happy half hour choosing stuff. When I got back, I put the donkeys out and went to see what the men were doing rebuilding the stable: they have found me a proper stable door and fixed the fence. After about an hour, I saw Pablo yelling and waving at me from his side of the rambla: the donkeys had got away and ran into the rambla. That is, Luca, who spent most of the morning dancing about and biting, ran off and Penelope got so agitated that she followed him, managing to break the rope with which she was tethered. Fortunately, one of the builders, a South American, was a dab hand with donkeys and cut them off at the pass – actually, they came up quite docile and seemed confused as to why they had done it. They probably smelled Alberto’s mule and donkey, which are usually tethered down there. Meanwhile, Pablo came and did some equine consulting: Luca, being a male, is going to be a nuisance as he gets older, so we need either to castrate him, or sell him. At the same time, he is a nuisance now, because he is not properly weaned, and while he is with his mother, it won’t be easy to get him weaned; this drains her strength and also may interfere later with her pregnancy. And so on. Also, of course, he will try and shag her by the time he is about a year old. Well, he is very sweet too, I said, and Pablo agreed, he was “bonico” (a word they use a lot here, but which must be Andaluz, since it is not in the dictionary. The word for halter, cabezá, is also Andaluz, since the real word is cabestro – which Consuelo said was “más fino,” more refined.) A lot of local people have stopped and said how bonico he is, and stroked him, and when I suggested to Juan that he needed to be castrated at some point, he got very agitated and said it was not a good idea: there are no males round here so he could be very useful in saving people the journey to Murcia if they want to breed from their females. So that’s that, then. I didn’t mention that I was the one who had to manage the biting and the general behaviour that goes with a stallion, if donkeys are anything like horses. Well, he is not a year yet so we can cross each bridge as we reach it, poco a poco, as everyone here says all the time,

Home management consulting

Housework is still on my mind as well as my hands. It seems to fill all the available time, but shapelessly, like a huge, self-replicating amoeba. Various people have told me that “you have to have a routine,” but it is all very well saying that.

Such a routine must have existed, in the days when women taught their daughters how to do housework. In one of my childhood rhyme books, there was a poem that goes something like: They that wash on Monday, have all the week to dry/They that wash on Tuesday, are not so much awry… and so on, until the end of the week: “But they that wash on Saturday, Oh they’re sluts indeed!” Does this mean that if you wash your clothes on Monday, then you have the rest of the week to iron them, and wear them, or do other things? And since washing is cyclical, not secular, as we used to say in the City, does it make any difference if you start on Saturday instead of Monday? It is not like the roast, which you might cook on Sunday and then turn into things of increasing nastiness through the week, like Sandy’s mother apparently used to do, going via rissoles to soup until Friday, when you had fish.

In any case, I have not got the hang of it at all; how are you supposed to know when to stop? It is not as if you can even get a sense that it is 70% complete, like office stuff, or as if you have a Gant chart with columns that show you where you are. It is a shame that some smart management consultants haven’t come up with a plan you could buy in Sainsbury’s. When I worked for Accenture in Windsor, they used to we call a building, but which they called something like a facility, which had the shop of the future in it, so this would be right up their retail opportunity showcase. I expect they could offer to save you 50 per cent of your week and the marketing people would come up with a great name for the concept, something like Reengineering Residential Supply Chain Logistics: Solutions for the 21st century Houseperson. However, it would not work since no houseperson in their right mind could pay their prices.

I now recall Accenture with something approaching nostalgia: in many ways, it was the perfect workplace but for a long time I couldn’t really understand a word anyone said, and by the time I spoke the language it was time to go in case I went native. I missed things like going to lunch and gossiping. I was there for nearly 4 years, a record for me, but only because I was pregnant twice during the time so could not run fast. However, they were very logical people and the system always appeared to take precedence over the individual which in many ways is a lot better than companies that are the other way round; there appeared to be no sex or violence of any kind and hardly any windows. It had its drawbacks working for a place where everyone respected the law – like Switzerland, it was a bit boring - but it was better than being shouted at by the kind of boss who ought to be running Haiti.
Meanwhile, there is more washing to do and then at 3pm I go to make blood sausages with Juana. It is a busy life, and there is not much time for theory, except the sausage making kind. Things go round and round, like the washing in the machine, and you are back where you started. This is a very different way of looking at life than the kind you have in the city, where you see it more as a straight line, perhaps going diagonally upwards, or, if you are pessimistic, describing a J curve. I have a feeling from my faint memories of Immanuel Kant, that this is a teleological view of life, not a synchronous one – one that assumes that it has a purpose and an end towards which you progress, as fast as possible. After all, what is the word “career” if not something that a donkey does when you let it go? However, this is sense of direction is clearly an illusion: in my life in PR I must have met any number of sixty-something year old CEOs who have just been let down with a bump into retirement and go wandering around marginal drinks parties in London looking like burst balloons. Careers come to a halt and the people who were once important hit the dust, like Ozymandias, but somehow it’s one of those things you can’t take on board until it happens, like death. On this basis, however, housework is a much more sensible way to spend your time, since it clearly has no purpose other than to make you comfortable while you wait to die.

Proverbs

A woman’s work is never done

Alexander's Spanish homework for some reason involved Solomon and I remembered the little rhyme: King David and King Solomon led merry merry lives/With many, many lady friends and many, many wives/But when old age crept up on them, with all its fears and qualms/King Solomon wrote the Proverbs and King David wrote the Psalms. It was a bit lost on Alexander who didnt see the contradiction in having lady friends and writing.

Proverbs have been arriving unbidden in my mind over the last few days: I rarely thought about a proverb in the office as there didnt seem to be that many suitable ones for being a PR director - but now that I am in the house, they turn up everywhere, particularly the one about a woman's work never being done.

The second day of the matanza was sausage day: having washed the intestines and bladders and turned them inside out, they were filled with meat: fatty meat for the blanquilla sausages, which are cooked, and leaner meat for the chorizos, which are not. Like the day before, a large number of people were involved: Juana and Pablo, their daughter Consuelo and “Moncha,” her Galician husband Ramon, Antonio, Juana’s son and his novia Maria, their other son and his novia, Juana’s cousin Carmen and her husband, daughter and her novio, plus Juana’s other cousin, whose name I forget, from Albox, Isa, the neighbour who needs a husband but owns the thousand year old olive tree, Maruja, the neighbour from Barcelona whose niece is married to Zidan Zidane, and a few stragglers. Sandy turned the mincer, into which we pushed dozens of dried red peppers, soaked overnight in water and then squeezed (my job, with one of the novias). Maruja, who grew up her, was impressively deft with the “tripas,” the intenstines – turning them inside out over the mincer and then massaging the meat along to the right density. They were then tied with double knots and tossed into a tub for later. In the background, someone was shooting partridges – the endless pursuit of food. I asked Maruja if she ever did the matanza in Barcelona: no, she said, I go to the supermarket, which is a lot easier. Certainly, there is a lot of work in butchering a pig and making sausages; you have to wonder why people thought it was worth it to have to wash out bladders and turn them inside out and stuff them, rather than just eat vegetables. But as Consuelo said, the point of cooking is that it takes time; you could see she was in her element up to her elbows in fat – she suddenly seemed the competent farmer rather than just the nice country girl she usually is. Clearly a large part of the point was that they need meat to eat for the rest of the year, but there is also clearly a pleasure in the ritual and the process as well as the sociable side of the matanza - at least a dozen people in the house cracking jokes and eating.

We ate paella at lunch, with various unidentified bits of pig in it, with a sweet cabbage, rather like lettuce, and the green olives I saw Juana, Isa and Maruja picking a few weeks back. I got a lesson in these too: I never realised till now that the green olives came were unripe black ones: you bash them and leave them a fortnight in salt water with a bit of the plant that looks like broom, and the leaves of the carob tree and lo and behold they are edible, instead of taking the roof of your mouth as they do if you try and eat them from the tree. You wonder who ever realised in the first place that you could eat the things.

Meanwhile, I have my own list of jobs to do, many relating to the new donkeys – it is already clear I have made a rod for my own back. Alexander and I took them for a walk; Penelope was quite docile and Luca generally followed, though occasionally he went off and did his own thing and danced about in the road then there was absolutely no way you could get him to change his mind. When I pushed him, he just bit me or pushed back, and as he is not yet wearing a halter he is hard to fight. Penelope is also impossible to push; if she decides she is not going in, that is it. Hence the expression: stubborn as a mule. They both rolled in the gravel at one point, which was pretty funny, but then Luca went mad and started biting me, Penelope and Alexander in turn, so we were quite glad to shut him up. I am worrying about him: he needs to learn to wear the halter, and I haven’t found one, though I have been told there is a place nearby that sells all that, plus also pheasants, apparently – whether live or dead is not clear. It sounds like an interesting shop. This is a job for tomorrow, along with arranging for the children’s quad bike to be repaired – they have now destroyed both lights and as I have no trailer yet I can’t get it down to the garage.

Hanging over me, too, is all the admin I haven’t done. It’s easy to forget when you are worrying about where to get a bridle, but I have to post various overdue admin letters to England in the apparently more reliable Vera post office. It is quite impossible to keep track of money – I have no idea what is in the Spanish bank accounts since the statements they send are always out of date and, to me, unintelligible, on lots of tiny little slips of paper, in no clear order. I haven’t worked out how to see the Cajamar account online – while the BBVA one appears to need a different password each time, plus after that you have to use a little plastic card to enter a code from a particular square; hardly worth the effort as when you get on there the information is equally impenetrable. (BBVA still hasn’t managed to provide me with a debit card that works: I have now had three, and every time I go into the bank they just issue me another non-working one.) HSBC, meanwhile, says it is not possible to set up any kind of standing order to a non-UK account, so I have to call them in person and go through a lot of palaver and pay a charge if I want to move money to Spain. It might be a lot easier if we were paid here, only IBM doesn’t want to do that, and no doubt it would have other admin consequences. It still isn’t clear how we get health cover, since we are resident here but don’t pay tax we are in some kind of black hole between the UK and Spain; let’s hope we don’t get sick.

There are times when I feel pretty tired though. After all the sausage stuffing, walking the donkey and then chasing Luca, plus doing Alexander’s Spanish maths homework, I had a pile of ironing left. Then Pablo came up with the tractor and we had to unload a lot of alfafa for the horses while I worried about when and how I would get Luca castrated, as he will have to be at some point, I am told, or he will become unmanageably aggressive. This means a trip to the local vet, who I am told, quite inexplicably, works in the Lubrin slaughterhouse. But the work involved in living here is a rod for my own back - which means I am not going to complain. You choose your rod – whether it is stuffing intestines or having to feed and walk a donkey. But you can see why old people decide it’s easier to live in a bungalow with a couple of armchairs and a budgie. It was a lot easier leaving the house, getting on a train to work and bossing other people about to no real effect: I had an hour alone on the way in and way out, a lot of time exchanging idle gossip in restaurants, and the right to an hour of yoga several times a week. Having said that, it was about 20 degrees today and wearing shorts in the middle of November still counts for a lot. And at least the devil will not have a chance to put me to work, since there is a fat chance of my hands being idle.

Blood lust and wish fulfilment

Like many women of my age and background I dreamed about horses for a long time; they say it is a sex thing but I don’t think so; horses are better than that and I had a recurring dream about escaping on one. Fate, however, didn’t deal me the right hand; living in Purley there was no room for a horse, even the kind that appears in the bedroom after dark. I came of age and gave up riding around 21, except for the odd gallop on a holiday beach, and by the time I met Jasmine and her eight horses. I no longer wanted to ride but liked to turn them out in a field, lead them about, or bring them back in. I was never afraid of a horse, even one that had gone loco and kicked her in the arm.

Now, however, I live in the middle of nowhere. For the first time in my life, I could have a horse and of course I had been thinking about it for some time when 1 November came, and it was the Albox horse fair. I went, saying I was going to look and I looked and came back with....

Well, what could be more English than this? What do English women do in Spain: they complain about how Spanish people don't love animals and then they open a donkey sanctuary. Or maybe they go and buy a donkey. A donkey: less glamorous than a horse, but much more practical, which is the way a lot of my life’s wishes have turned out, including, one might say, my husband.

I say “a donkey,” though actually it is one and a half, or one and two halves, as it is pregnant and has a five-month old male foal, which will grow up to be a stallion and kick and bite. It could have been worse: I was looking longingly at a small fat pony too, only at the last minute I did wonder what Sandy would say when he got back from his travels.
Juan Mañas, who, for reasons of his own, apparently urgently wanted me to buy a donkey, egged me on in all this. It clearly wasn’t just to get the work repairing the stable, because he is already out of pocket on the amount of time we have spent dealing with the huge bureaucracy involved in buying an animal here; it appears to be partly an appetite for striking the deal and partly the farmer in him – as he has said before, he would really rather be farming than building. I had mentioned in passing that I would, maybe, like a donkey. The idea lodged in Juan’s head, and he periodically mentioned donkeys he knew of or had seen, to which I made theoretical noises of interest, until the day of the Albox feria, or animal fair, which of course I agreed to visit.

The feria was good stuff: a motley collection of gipsies, onlookers, old farmers and stragglers collected in the dry river bed under the bridge, wagons of animals, including very decorated horses for the afternoon’s horse show, and a number of donkeys. I met Juan under the bridge; he was with his nephew David, who, going against the stereotype, has a small donkey sanctuary: strictly not for business, he said, but to breed and preserve Andalucian donkeys which are dying out in the area.. Of course, the English tourist perception of the Spanish as “cruel to donkeys,” likely has far less to do with being Spanish than being poor farmers, being nice to animals coming somewhere lower down the hierarchy of needs than feeding yourself and your family. Now that Spain is richer and more developed, I would guess that is changing, though I suspect there will always be more pride, and less sentiment, towards animals.

There were three types of donkey at the fair, I learned: the Andalucian donkey, larger and grey, with a smoother coat; the Romanian donkeys, smaller and a different colour, and the small Moroccan ones, quite furry and reddish. Meanwhile, the owner of the two donkeys we had our eye on was circling, Juan having primed him before hand. He was an ancient, tortoise like individual with a couple of teeth, accompanied by a burly son: they were dead keen to close the deal and after a bit of chat, surrounded by a circle of interested onlookers, mainly old, toothless men, we went off to the office of Agriculture and Fisheries, which is where you do these things. Inevitably, this meant waiting about and eventually the vet being called, and saying, after a bit of discussion, that I needed to get a “guia,” - a stud book (or something of that kind), which I couldn’t do in Albox but must do in Tabernas.

I went to Tabernas with Juan a few days later, and spent some time with the nice man in the Agriculture department in Tabernas. He explained in detail why I needed a book, and spent some time understanding my name and address and copying them out. He and Juan discussed who they knew in Lubrín, the vendors, and eventually the fact that he needed a certificate from the Ayuntiamento, town hall, in Lubrin, to check there was no objection to my having a donkey. What a nuisance, he said, but then lo and behold, Juan knew Domingo in the Ayuntiamentio, because his wife Maribel works in Juan’s office. Juan got Domingo on the phone and asked him if he minded Julia la Inglesa having a donkey and he didn’t, so that was good. Good, said the Tabernas man, then what you do next is you go to Lubrin and get it in writing and fax it over. He was very agreeable and kept saying nothing was a problem, said that was fine, and eventually gave me a certificate with an animal registration number I could use for any animals I bought. We then got instructions about how the lorry transporting the donkey needed to be disinfected, and how I needed a certificate of disinfection, and how I would be wise to take out insurance for cadaver removal, should my donkey die, as this was very expensive, more than the value of the donkey, if you didn’t pay the insurance of only 5 euro a year. I said I would have the cadaver insurance, and we discussed where this would be done, and what numbers I needed to put on the form. Then we went back to Lubrin and went to the cooperative about the cadaver insurance, and they also took copies of the forms and said they would see about it. Then we went to see Domingo, who said again he had no issue with me having a donkey and got a girl to type that up on a bit of paper and stamp it and fax it.

The next day, we set off for an hour’s drive to Ulula del Rio, where the old toothless man lived with the donkeys, and, it turns out, a lot of horses and other animals he trades, the plan being to go with him to Albox and do the deal. It was a beautiful day, again, and I felt pretty excited, even though it was only a donkey: I didn’t sleep that much the night before.

On the way, I noted to Juan that I assumed there was no actual Rio in Ulula, since there are no rivers anywhere here. No. Was there ever? Of course, he said, for instance, he knew it was there in 1937 because he had seen a picture. Also, he added, when his father went off to the Civil War, in the late 30s, he had to take a train from Zurgena, and they crossed the river there, where there is now a road bridge, but was not in those days. They crossed on a donkey, of course, and Juan’s father said the water was up to his waist. So the climate must have changed dramatically here: there are now only dry river beds everywhere, but sixty, seventy years ago, they ran with rivers.

Meanwhile, Juan was very stressed: he was supposed to be in three other places, and when we got there – as usual, we were meeting at a petrol station - the old man was not there. Eventually, his son turned up in a beat up truck and said the old man couldn’t come as he was elsewhere with the horses. This meant we couldn’t do the deal, and would have to meet them in Albox tomorrow instead, he said, sorry, but there you go, ok. It wasn’t at all ok: we had driven for an hour or more, and now couldn’t collect the donkeys that evening, having got the chico with the disinfected lorry on standby. This put Juan and me in sour moods in different ways; me because I wasn’t getting my donkeys that day, and Juan because he felt it reflected badly on him – and no doubt Andalucia and Spain - if the deal didn’t go as planned: we drove off sulking. After a while, and after venting my feelings about people who get you to drive an hour to meet them and then have other arrangements, I asked him if he had done business with the vendor before. Juan got excited and said absolutely not, and if he had known they were gipsies, he wouldn’t have bought a donkey from them. Oh, they were gipsies? Yes, it turned, out, and so “no tienen palabra,” he said, they don’t keep their word, or more exactly in Spanish, they don’t have a word to keep, or the concept of keeping their word.

I told him that my sister had married a gipsy, but it had turned out badly; he had turned out badly. Yes, Juan said, they are very clever and when they are young, they have something – but…. You can’t trust them, and they don’t like to work, which is why they trade horses. We drove on, thinking our thoughts.

After a few minutes, Juan suddenly spoke. Vamos a hacer una cosa – here’s what we are going to do …We would not go to Albox and try to get the vet to do the paperwork without the vendors. He doesn’t like it when things don’t work out and like many Spanish people I have dealt with, he is liable to try to find a solution to a problem rather than give up.

To my astonishment, this worked. It seems to be often the way here - you are presented with a huge and seemingly impenetrable pile of bureaucratic paper for every simple transaction, but in the end people seem inclined to disregard it and with one stroke someone, usually the official in charge of it, cuts through it with one snip.

We spent about half an hour with the vet, stamping bits of paper, and apparently issuing me with the papers I needed to do the deal. Like the Tabernas man, he seemed absolutely committed to helping us get through the bureaucracy he was obliged to impose on us. Towards the end of a lot of computer forms and rubber stamps, he realised we were missing a bit of paper, and did a lot of quite theatrical “oh no – what are we going to do?” It turned out that we didn’t have a disinfection certificate for the donkey. Yes, he said, what can I do? You need this as well as for the vehicle! We haven’t got it! What are we going to do? How are we going to resolve this? Let me see…In the end, he and Juan between them worked out that it would be possible either for Juan to arrange for a vet from Lubrin to do this, or for Juan to pick this up from the vendor, or from the vendor’s vet, when he collected the donkey, and then drop it in to him afterwards. Problem solved, and relief all round. All in all, we had about ten different bits of paper at the end, and Juan was twitching like mad. We drove like the wind back to where we had left his van, and he went off to arrange for straw to be delivered. Before he went he insisted I print out the photos I had taken of the donkeys at the fair, and give him copies, so that he could make sure the gipsies didn’t swap the ones they were selling for different animals.

I am expecting the donkeys around 10.30 tonight, and old Cristobal and young Juan are down at the stable digging and blocking up holes.

Meanwhile, at last, the visitors have all gone. Just as well: I had turned into a cross between Basil and Sybil Fawlty, with the worse qualities of both, as far as guests were concerned. The weather is still beautiful: a blue sky every day, cool mornings and evenings but T- shirt weather in the day. Perfect for riding a donkey, if you have one.


La matanza

The donkeys arrived as planned, late at night, anxious from their drive. Penelope Cruz (as we have christened the mother) was sweating and very much did not want to go into the stable; it took three men to shove her from behind in the end. Luca, the baby, followed her in reasonably agreeably, though he did give someone a bite. By morning, they were considerably better, and placated with bread and apples: they need feeding up and Penelope clearly thinks little of straw. We turned them out into the little sloping field by the stable and the next day I took them out for a walk – that is, they took me. Luca rolled in the dust and galloped about uncontrollably while I tried to lead Penelope with a makeshift halter – we still don’t have a proper one. She was fine when going in the direction she wanted, but when I suggested she go back in the field it was hands on pushing and pulling as she dug all her hooves in and lent backwards. They ate a formidable amount again: I was wondering how to get alfafa and dry feed as I still have no trailer and the cooperative doesn’t deliver, when Pablo told me he would organise a delivery from the man who does his goat feed – big relief, as it looks as if Penelope will eat many times more than Juan said she would. His approach is pretty Spanish “a donkey is fine on just a bit of straw, not much water, nothing else…” – and my explanation that I liked to spoil my pets was met with a bit of a blank look. Pablo, however, is much more of my mind: he likes animals in good condition and said that certainly a donkey needed dry food and alfafa, which I should not worry about, he would get it for me and ya esta, there you are.

After all that animal excitement, came more. Today, it was the pig matanza – a big red-letter day in the calendar here. La matanza is when they “sacrificar,” - kill the pig, and make sausages, black pudding, hams, and so on for the rest of the year. Even people who don’t raise pigs buy one and keep it for the matanza, which is a kind of fiesta. We were invited, along with about 20 neighbours, to Pablo and Juana’s, when they were due to kill two of their five huge pigs – something, Pablo confessed, that he did not like doing but which fell to him – his son in law and various other people doing the butchering, a specialist job which requires experience.

I have to say a large part of me wanted to go and see the actual pig slaughtering, which is a bit disgusting, I expect. I did wonder why – the best I could say is that it is one of the few chances you get to confront death in a bloody form – something you hardly see and perhaps shouldn’t want to. Clearly, however, a lot of people do – Spanish people at least - the matanza is all about blood. I am not sure it is blood lust, though of course we are hunting animals and those instincts don’t exactly die easy – after all, our cats carry on catching mice even though we feed them Whiskas. It is more the formidability of death: you would like to just get a bit close to the man with the sickle, to smell his breath, and see what it might be like. It is the real thing. Besides which, you ought to know where your mince and sausages come from, if you eat them, and nobody in Spain is vegetarian.

As it turned out, we got up late, and I heard the pigs squeals as they were stuck echoing from across the rambla, rather than witnessing them in the flesh. It was not long – presumably the knives are sharp and Pablo knew what he was doing. One went around eight, the other later, and we turned up mid-morning, by which time they were both hanging upside down on a wall, and being expertly carved up; blood and organs in washing up bowls and buckets, and the women outside at a table with a hose, turning intestines inside out for sausages. I had a go at this: it is not easy, rather like putting on Durex only infinitely longer. Two fingers inside, the hose, and then the whole thing goes inside out. A smelly business, but in the end, a pile of what looked like pink stockings filled a large bowl and by the end of the afternoon we had black pudding – chorizo comes tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the matanza lunch was being prepared: pig meat, of course, and a huge cast iron pan of migas, the traditional dish made from flour and fat and not much else, eaten with peppers and tomatoes. The dish came off the open fire and twenty of us sat round Juana’s front room – a concrete floor and the open fire and not much else – with the big pan in the middle on its iron legs. Everyone has a spoon and eats from the pan, then the bottle of wine goes round and the men aimed it at their throats from afar – Sandy causing great amusement in the process of perfecting his technique.

Outside, Penelope and Luca, whom I led down from their stable, were grazing below on Pablo’s grass, Penelope wearing an ancient but serviceable halter Pablo provided and Luca running about and rolling in the dust. The men teased me about making them into sausages, but there was general approval of the concept. “Que valiente,” Juana’s mother said, though like everyone she warned me I would need to castrate the male or he would bite. What do you want the male for, anyway? The male animals are generally seen as for meat, and that’s all – whereas a female, with her nice temperament, can be ridden and give you more foals – or in the case of goats, cheese. Juana argued that Luca should be called Javier, which is the name of Penelope Cruz’s novio, boyfriend. I pointed out that he was her son, not her novio, but her son, but she said that in a few months he would be her novio too, given the way male donkeys are, ha ha. There were a few jokes about donkeys after that, much of which I didn’t understand and she said it was better not to, as there were some things it was better not to hear. Meanwhile, the eighty year old neighbour asked where my husband was. Juana pointed him out and he said, oh, well, he was disappointed as when he saw me he wondered if I was single. Consuelo said he was harmless, and you could tie him to the bedpost; he was eighty, so he liked to look, but what could he do? There followed a story about how he had looked down the girls’ cleavages at the fiesta: the young men didn’t bother, he said, but he was going to look if he had a chance. In my time, he said to me, when I was in my prime, the girls used to do this: and he mimed holding your collar together at your neck. More general laughter and jokes about the donkey, and so on, until we went back late, and led Penelope and Luca into the stable, where they seemed quite ready to do and didn’t even eat much, full from grass and exhausted, like children after a birthday party.

Marlboro man country

Men and women

While Jasmine was here, she got on my nerves in various ways that I concealed from myself till after she was gone: while she was here, I pretended I was having a good time and didn’t mind that she insisted on wearing 6 inch heels and a tight wool dress to walk round Mojacar, which is basically squashed onto a tiny steep hill and then complained she was hot and had to buy a change of outfit. I did try to enjoy myself: I sunbathed with her (even though I no longer want to lie in the sun) and talked about face cream, plastic surgery and outfits – though I felt I was not really contributing, not having made any investments of this kind in recent months.

(Some home gossip was worth it: excellent news that Caroline, the plain-talking surgeon mother, has told JM, the clinically obese mother, that she had Munchhausen’s by proxy, something I have always said, and that there was nothing wrong with her kids; she went mental, of course, having spent their whole lives trying to get one statemented as autistic and the other as having ME aged ten (“ten is the new 13,” as she said to me. I told her that Sally, the daughter, seemed fine, given that she was playing rounders, and she said darkly that she would pay for it tomorrow.) It seems a long way from school here: the most medical excitement is when the children have nits, which happened last week and I should think plastic surgery, at least for cosmetic purposes, is unheard of – though given the level of road accidents here I expect there is plenty of reconstruction work to do.)

Girl talk is OK for a short time, but I had a good book and I was itching to read it. We took Jasmine and Steve to a very overpriced restaurant on the beach, which I knew she would consider really nice, despite the bad food, and after about 3 shots of them as a loving couple, I got one superb photo of her and Steve: she is staring at the camera like a slightly bad-tempered diva, and he is looking away, bored. The real problem with Jasmine, though, was the fact that she really wants me to be someone else, particularly someone who did not go to Spain. She is not the only one: it turns out a decision is like a stone: turn it over and there are a lot of wriggling reactions you didn’t expect. Other people might not like change, or you changing might cast doubt on their decision not to do so, or unearth their wish that they had. Sometimes they take it out on you and I think Jasmine was. I would say, unconsciously of course, but the fact is that unconscious things are not that unconscious with her: like Katie Price she is so unreconstructed that you think maybe she is post-ironic. After all, she did admit that she had bigger boobs done so that she could have power over men.

One thing she did quite a bit was to make admissions about small things that might be OK about Spain, like perhaps the quality of the steak, on the basis that these were being weighed in the balance against Spain being foreign, underdeveloped, dirty and so on. One of the things she said a number of times was that she could see Spanish men might be quite nice – I think before she came she thought they were all like Manuel from Fawlty Towers. On our own, she said that perhaps I would have a Spanish boyfriend since Sandy was away so much, ha ha. Like a lot of Jasmine sayings, this was projection as in, perhaps I Jasmine might like to have a Spanish boyfriend. She projects a lot, which is why she didn’t like my leaving – it seemed to mean to her in some way that she was being made to leave, or that perhaps I was introducing the unwanted concept of leaving England into her life. I said, had she not noticed the locals? E.g. my builder? My farmer neighbour? She said there must be others and also that she thought one of the builder’s men was quite nice. Flirting is all she means, of course: but flirting is a big part of her life in Westerham and also her inner life.

Well, flirting is something Spanish men do; not the builder or the farmer, but the one in the bank, who seemed about 18 and got on my nerves asking me if I was ever bored when I just wanted a duplicate plastic card after 3 months of my card not working in shops. Or the commercial wine merchant who constantly follows me round the Intermarché. I thought he was going to sell me some bargain Marques de Caceres, which was quite interesting, and it turned out later I had the wrong end of the stick. I got the wrong end partly because he was quite plain and a bit camp and partly because I feel more and more like an uptight English lady of a certain age, but more than both of these because as I get older when I walk round the supermarket I am thinking about food and drink and not about sex.

Being “d’un certain age” appears to be no deterrent to the Spanish man, as I have noted before; quite the contrary, they almost appear to relish the challenge, like a bullfighter taking on a bull that has done time in the ring and finished off a few good men. Well, that is a good thing in theory, as you are on the shelf at 30 in the UK and men of your own age like constantly to remind you of the fact; perhaps it makes them feel it is one bean on their side of the scale. As I drove home from the bank thinking about the clerk, who very unprofessionally looked me up and down the whole time he was failing to fill in the form about my credit card, I thought, well, it’s not for me, but it’s one up to me all the same, and one down to men like the men I worked with for years, and one down in particular to that shit Neal and his cocktail party remark.

Neal was an MD in my last company, so dull we had a bet a few times to see if we could get him to talk about something other than engineering. “Do you like cats, Neville?” “Yes, they’re OK. So, the steel pipes on the downstream platform need to resist the counter-force, so we…” “Have you got a cat, Neville?” “Yes, I have a cat. So, we told Shell they needed to replace the steel pipes.”

He was not good at a cocktail party and as he was also overweight, from Aberdeen and ugly, with a kind of growth on one ear, it was really a miracle he ever pulled a woman, though apparently he did at an away day in a hotel in Scotland. I therefore tried to help me out at a corporate event in London by standing near him holding a glass and pretending to be interested in what he was saying to the group of men visitors, though I couldn’t follow the technical stuff and his accent was quite soporific. I was sort of tuning out when I heard him say that he fancied the waitress, who was about 21. The other man who was standing there said something about her being young, and Neville said yes, he couldn’t recall at what point in his life he had stopped fancying older women and started going for the younger ones. I am sure it was because I said that he must know young women didn’t really fancy older men like him that he knifed me at work for no apparent reason.

The point is that I have listened to this kind of crap all my working life and mainly smiled through it, including when that plonker Andrew who is now running a PR company said that Clare on reception was quite sexy till she put on “all that weight”. Clare was the size of a twiglet and the only woman present in the conversation, me, was the size of at least three twiglets. As Andrew had badly receding hair I did think of finding a time to say in front of him something like “So and so was quite sexy till he lost all that hair,” but I was too polite. A big mistake: all the things I wish I had said to sexists, anti-Semites and just general shits at work are still milling around inside me, like heavy stones in a sack.

I say all this because the gentle flirtation of those Spanish men that do flirt is like feathers gently falling into the other side of the scales of all those stones. They don’t mean anything and fall very lightly, but it is good to know that for every chauvinist pig of a receding British investment banker, there is some young Spaniard who thinks older women are hot – and there is, of course, Lolita, and Ana Obregon, and all those older women in Hola, who are still going strong. They are not pretending to be young, either, but being their age, and still sexy.

Mind you, I can see all this passing me by pretty fast, particularly as I have so much time to cook. I see that being a housewife you could get obsessed by food; in fact, I could be in danger of becoming a foodwife rather than a housewife. I remember my father saying that food had replaced sex in my great aunt’s life at about 80, and she certainly went to the larder pretty often, just for a forage and I expect was like that with men: she was quite a goer by all accounts and good looking. At the time I thought it was sad but now in fact I see the point: there are no other people involved and it is a pure relationship, like the one I have with the cat.


Real country

Not that my mind is not on higher things: it is, and it is not difficult. My astonishment at how beautiful it is here does not wear off: every time I return home it is the same. It is another clear blue day with a high wind, and a lot of birds, leaves and clouds blowing about up here. Lara and I went for a walk on Sunday: you walk for miles and see only a goatherd who calls out “buenas.” The ramblas, dry river beds cross the country everywhere, and we walked along a deep ravine, full of oleanders, rising into crags full of caves. There are groups of silent trees, everything hung with moss, as there must be underground water, and Alexander informed me a man told him he shouldn’t go in the caves because that’s where the jabali, wild boar, live. This is right on my doorstep, whereas before I had a few fields and thought it was the country: every time I walked in it, there would be a dozen people with Labradors. Whenever you talk to people who didn’t want you to come here, they say, “oh, well, we’re really so close to the country in Glasgow,” and things like that. What they mean is half an hour’s drive, or more, which, I am sorry, is not the same at all. This is real country, Marlboro man could ride into the sunset here, and probably has done: many of Clint Eastwood's movies were filmed near here, at Tabernas. My children, age 10 and 12, disappear for half a day on the quad bike, taking some food, and turning up in the local town where they wander about and talk to the builder, or the teachers, or their school friends. I discovered they know all sorts of places, and have explored various deserted buildings, caves and houses that I didn’t even know were there. We lived in a village in Kent at home but the only place they could go alone was the “recreation ground,” – there was too much traffic, even on the country roads, for bikes to be safe. Among other interesting things, we found a huge luxury villa perched on a hill in the middle of a ravine, a Wild West, untended dry ravine with prickly pears and cactuses and an unpaved track that leads through ramshackle deserted old houses and eventually to our road. Surrounded by a wire fence and with iron lamposts lined up outside, it was the kind of place you expect a drug dealer to live and I half-expected to see sharpshooters lurking at strategic points, but later on I learned from town gossip that it was a) going to be a hotel, b) going to be rented to English people, c) going to belong to Zidane, the footballer, whose wife comes from our local town and d) illegal. Who knows?

Spanish and English radio: death and fun

I have been trying to make more sense of Spanish radio and am coming to the conclusion that 75 per cent of it falls into the categories of death and fun. In the former category are road accidents, industrial accidents, immigrants that died on the way to Spain, and generally the large part of the news. There is also a general feeling of death – or at least – “life is short” which pervades quite a lot of the programming, I can’t say why. By the same token, you need to have a lot of fun, so the other large category is fun – fiestas, music, eating, and weddings. I would say between them these two categories you have most of what you hear on the radio covered – it is very black and white. English radio, by contrast, is in many subtle shades of grey, with almost everything falling somewhere in between fun and death, neither of which are really ever mentioned and in fact could be said to be studiously avoided. Of course, English people do stare at fatal accidents, too, but I think maybe the quality of the stare is different: it is “Can it really be true?” whereas the Spanish is, “Aha! Yet again!”