It's like having a baby

I haven't written for over a month because all I have done is pack and administer the move. I have always wondered about the received wisdom that moving house is the most stressful life event there is. This seems unlikely: surely losing your husband, parent or child is a lot worse than losing your house, especially as you get paid for the house. Maybe other major life events are more tragic, but less stressful, whatever that means. Also, surely having the builders in is at least as bad. However, it does strike me that both these events are rather like having a baby in the following ways:

1)There is a huge long build up which feels like 9 months in which you want it to be over, even if death is the only way out
2) During that period, people keep saying: "So you haven't had it/rented it yet?": When it was a baby, this was pretty annoying and invited the answer "What do you think this is, a growth?" Waiting to rent the house gave me the same feeling of massive irritation. "I see you've still got the sign up - not rented the house yet, then?" "Yes, actually I've rented it, but I thought I'd go on marketing it." Meanwhile I was completely hysterical with anxiety about whether I would manage to rent it before getting on the plane.
3) You get offered lot of the same kind of homespun wisdom on how to deal with wind/how to make your front door inviting. A lot of my time has been taken up ordering and then chasing, large numbers of boxes and rolls of bubble wrap: there are many sites on the web called things like boxesrus that do this. They also offer you tips on moving like: "Make sure you have plenty of packing materials!" Spot the subtle marketing ploy, anyone?
4) You start off trying to do things properly, then become very sloppy because you're tired, leaving the milk by the bed instead of in the fridge, etc. I read the tips about "Label each box clearly!!" and started off with good intentions. At the beginning of the packing, wine was in a box labelled wine (and I even started noting the vintages) but by last week, that had all gone out of the window and the boxes have got scribbly messages that say things like "some stuff from kitchen, Lara's clothes, other stuff." Since I am just going to dump them in a room in Almeria and then rip them open randomly in the hope that there will be something exciting I've forgotten I don't suppose it matters. To make it more interesting, I have bought some new items and distributed them in the boxes - mostly things we dont need bought on the basis that you can't get them in Almeria, like a cake stand in the sale at Laura Ashley. This is what stress does to you: at least divorced people only have half the stuff to deal with whereas our house appears to be a kind of Tardis, about 5 times larger on the inside than it looks outside.

5) You can't think beyond the birth
The other thing people say a lot is "You must feel.." I remember this from the baby business: you must feel excited! Actually, I felt mainly fat and uncomfortable: you can't see beyond getting the damn thing out. This is also true about the move: I just want it to be over. I can't think about living there at all - it's as unreal as my children were when they were just lumping great growths that squashed my bladder.

The other thing people ask me all the time is what I will miss. The short answers to this is "nothing," or "I won't know until I do," implying I may develop a craving for Marmite, only you can get that in the English supermarket: it is a core product line along with HP Sauce.

The truth is that I am not someone that misses things - and I am not sure many people that I know really are. I am not sure missing things exists any more: perhaps we have too many to take their place or perhaps you are never really far enough away to miss them. Do people in the 21st century really sit about reminiscing about things like the English weather, cricket or Radio 4? You can download all this, anyway - it is not like the war when you went seven years without getting your paws on a banana.

There was an article in one of the Sunday magazines about how sad it was that manufacturers stop making your favourite things and of course I can see that. I have had to go round Boots and buy up a lot of Clarins colour rub which is being discontinued and my favourite Gas jewellery is not going to be sold in L'Artisan Parfumeur any more. But this is not nostalgia, is it? It is an irritation, but in the end I am not going to sit about and pine, I will find something else and Move On.

For most of us, it's on to the next thing. There are some people that like to hang onto old stuff: those people that kept their LPs and have a record player, not an iPod, or a Goblin Teasmade, even though they dont work. I think I could spot them in the street; people who buy from the back pages of the Telegraph magazine, have the handy spider catcher and rubber kneeling pads out of the Innovations brochure and spend a lot of time on their festive Christmas lighting display. Most people are not like this, are they?

Then again, maybe they are. The fact is that no quintessentially English pleasure - whatever they are - could in any way compete for my attention when it comes to the monumental excitement of waking up in Spain and speaking Spanish. Shopping, I always used to stare enviously at those English people who clearly actually lived there, instead of just being on holiday. I remember very clearly when we were looking at houses, the estate agent pointing out a family, similar to us, and telling us it was their first day actually living in Spain. I was tremendously jealous; it was incredibly hot and they all looked dazed and thrilled. Now it's me. I keep waking up and thinking about waking up in Las Almendras, with the sun coming up behind the mountain and all the birds twittering outside the window in the grape vine. I have to pinch myself.

When you get to this stage in life, most of the big, exciting things are over: getting married, having children, buying a house, getting a big job. You have realised that none of this stuff is quite what it was cracked up to be, particularly not when you have the flipping builders in. There is a lot of admin and politics. Yes, I know that's everywhere, and I know the line about your problems following you wherever you go. However, I do not buy this: it is frankly bollocks. First of all, it is just unbeatable getting on a plane and not having a ticket back. And secondly, I am sure problems are just as culturally relative as anything else: it is like those books about making sure you don't offend Japanese people by sneezing in business. Something that is a big problem in the UK may well not be somewhere else.

Thanks but no thanks

One reason I get excited about moving is that I am enough of a language anorak to be really interested in what's different about the way people speak and think.

My neighbour, Juana, regularly gives me food presents, mainly large carrier bags of a small orange fruit which I had never seen before and which is called nipeta - interestingly, I have since noticed we have a tree in our UK garden. It has large, leathery dark green leaves which I always liked for their exotic look, but no flowers or fruit here in the cold. I was being typically English and thanking her effusively and she was just looking at me impatiently. She interrupted me and said something like: "¡Deja tu vergüenza a la puerta!" - "Leave your embarrasment at the door." I could see what she meant: I felt I was sounding incredibly English and embarrassed. Although it is the only word most of the English know in Spanish, Spanish people don't actually say "gracias" very much - certainly not all the time, like the English. When we bring Juana our regular offering of a bottle of whisky from Duty Free she kind of whisks it into the kitchen without really doing much other than nodding and perhaps saying something like "Good." However, I was still a bit unsure so I asked her what Spanish people said when they were given a present such as the nipeta and she thought briefly before saying (in what seemed very ungrammatical Spanish) "Cuando como estos, volveré." ' "When I eat these, I come back for more."

Interestingly, I have already begun to feel uncomfortable with the English thankyou. Is it really about thanking someone, or is it actually, as Juana saw it, about being embarrassed to receive something? Spanish is a much more direct language which may be why I like it; I am constantly putting my foot in it in the UK.

English people would never, ever, come out with the kind of things my neighbours say. Once, I went to get some oranges from Isabel, the old lady who is Juana's aunt, I think, and who looked at me very sadly like a dying dog when I asked her how she was. She told me a lot about her various troubles and showed me where her husband had fallen off the wall and died, and how. At the end, I said I hoped I would see her again, but she shook her head and said possibly not, she might not be here. I asked where she would be, and she jerked her head upwards a few times. When I didnt get it, she spelled it out: "With the angels," she explained. She always makes the same very sad face, but somehow she strikes me as the creaking gate that doesnt fall down. I sat down and apologised for the children, who were yelling their heads off on the other side of the rambla. Isabel's neighbour, a friendly fat lady, shook her head vigorously and waved away the apology saying that children were the happiness of a place. "We don't hear enough noise up here," they said. "Children are the heart of the house."

Catch my neighbours in the UK saying something like that. Not only would they not agree with the sentiment - their children might be the heart of their house but they definitely don't want to hear your heart beating. The old man in his wheelchair who pushed himself all the way to our house to welcome us on our first visit told me that if you opened your heart to the village, the village would open its heart to you. I think in Shoreham the translation would be something like: "Perhaps we'll see you for a drink one of these days, once you've settled in," (or more likely, "If you can drop in your subscription for the allotments society when you're passing.")

You could argue the difference is just one of style, not substance. But I think the philosophers say style is substance - if you can't say it, you can't think it.

Then, there is the business of animals. Up where we live, there are a lot of animals; you can here them pottering about at night. Something certainly polishes off anything that's left out - and there are jabalí, wild boar. I asked Pablo what kind of animals they were and he shrugged. "Los animales," he said - the animals. It didnt matter how I tried; I couldn't get any more specific inormation. "Zorros - foxes?" I asked. No, not zorros, or maybe, yes, zorros, but other things. When I asked Luis, he thought it was funny. "You English people are so interested in all your animals. What is all this about hedgehogs on the radio? They're just animals, animales.."

I heard a Spanish radio podcast that bemoaned the fact that the Spanish were so vague about the classification of plants and animals. The speaker said this was leading to the names of things being forgotten - because people were sloppy and just said: "that stuff" instead of being precise. Is this a particularly Spanish trend? There are far fewer words and the same ones do more work. But it is also an attitude - "el campo" is not "the countryside". It is where you grow crops, not where you go badger-watching, because you don't do that stuff. How long will it take before I think this way? At some point will I, or will my children, go back to England, having forgotten what that prickly thing that curls up is - and not caring either, unless you can eat it?

My final thought on this subject is that changing a place can allow you to be yourself. It gives you a different vocabulary. Look at Neville and Jamie, the only gays in the village. Neville told me he couldn't be gay in South Africa, only when he came here, when, by the way, he was married to Moira. Luis is the same - he is clearly not mainstream Spanish. He is artistic, maybe a bit effete, and has odd hands - and London clearly suits him totally. When he goes home, his aunties prod his clothes and say, "¡Que inglés!" How English you are!" I can see how he might find London forgiving; its irony welcome after the directness of Spanish. So the only question is what exactly is going to come out of the bag when I get there? Apart from forgetting what to call hedgehogs, and not saying thankyou, exactly how am I going to change?