Dealing with wasps

A 700 year old olive tree

We went to Hortiflor, the Vera nursery, to look for some more trees for the land, which still looks rather bare. The main field is mostly almond trees, but a lot of them have a bug, which turns them black; they bleed a kind of gum, which attracts wasps, so it’s double trouble. I have had to cut a couple down (not personally, you understand, but by asking my neighbour to come round with the mechanical saw). A large part of the nursery has rows of large trees, including olive trees, some of which are enormous; these are the most expensive trees they have, at around 1,000 Euros. They grow very slowly, I am told, so it can take hundreds of years for them to mature and develop the thick, twisted trunk that looks so picturesque. One of the trees, not for sale, is 700 years old, the nurseryman tells me, from the Middle Ages, really. It has a certificate of its history and used to live in a monastery. Strange to think what it has seen. We chose a smaller and more modestly-priced one, to plant by the house for the future. I suppose it will outlive the children and grandchildren. I had similar thoughts when I hung the painting of my great-aunt and grandmother on the wall the other day: I collected it from Frankfurt when my great-aunt died; it has also lived in Switzerland, America, and the UK and I imagine will continue to travel long after the descendents of the people in the picture are dead. I am not sure if it’s reassuring or not, but it calls to mind one of the few lessons I remember from school, when our English teacher told us we would always remember the poem she was about to read. This was, inevitably, a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the poem was The Poplar Field and I still remember it almost in its entirety: the first verse is the one that was supposed to stay in our head: The poplars are felled; farewell to the shade/And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade: The winds play no more and sing in the leaves, Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives. The last verse was the one the olive brought to mind: “’Tis a sight to engage me if anything can/To muse on the perishing pleasures of man/Though his life is a dream, his enjoyments I see/Have a being less durable even than he.” How true, except that in the case of the olive it is the other way around. Nobody cuts the trees down here, or nobody did: now they are being put into pots for people like me to plant elsewhere, at a price, but at least, unlike women, their value rises as they age. I can’t remember the teacher’s name though I can picture here: but she achieved what she intended, which is more than most.

Meanwhile the almonds are ripe, and Juana suggested to me I pick them. They are worth about 7 Euros a tree, so no, I thought. I suggested to her that she could have them to add to hers, which were lying out drying on big sheets, and she accepted. We wondered what happened to the kilos and kilos of almonds that grow here: they sometimes cook with a kind of almond flour, but what else? Then Johannes, a German gentleman who moved out here to start a jojoba plantation, turned up. He said there was a European shortage of almonds, which are needed to make marzipan, and for decorating cakes. This is because the Spanish, for instance, don’t grow them properly, he said, the way they do in California. They have all these little fields, like ours, with the farmers harvesting them with a cane and some nets: it’s just not efficient. In California, there are rows upon rows, proper, commercial orchards. He sighed. I don’t know if his jojoba plantation is efficient yet: he used to work on the marketing side in Germany and came out here to give it a try. We sat and chatted with him and his wife, Marianne, who is Dutch: He commented on how things here don’t work, or sometimes work and then sometimes don’t and on how different it was in Germany. We could agree with that; then there was a bit of a silence. We discussed marzipan –which, having central European parents, was part of my upbringing, and particularly the making of marzipan mushrooms, and potatoes, for Christmas. My father always made mushrooms; they made potatoes (much easier, I have to say, since a potato is yellow and has no features whatsoever, whereas the mushrooms have to have brown caps, coloured with cocoa.) We talked a bit about the Tirol, and he said when he went back to southern Germany, he wondered why he didn’t live there any more: it was so beautiful. And clean, of course, people don’t chuck their rubbish on the side of the road the way they do in Spain when they find a beauty spot. More sighs and silence. The thing is, he said then, is I can’t live anywhere else but here now. It’s the climate you know – I don’t like anything else any more. Yes, well. Spain isn’t efficient or clean a lot of the time, but there you go. It has something you don’t get in Southern Germany, cuckoo clock pretty though it is. But they do make good marzipan in Germany: it is too sweet here, when you can get it, though Johannes let us know that at Christmas you can buy proper German marzipan in the Lider supermarket in Vera which is of course, a little piece of Germany in Spain.

A moral issue: Michelle, and the wasps

Michelle, the other Inglesa in Los Herreras (well, she is Welsh, and as I noted before, also originally something else, I would guess, West Indian), came over half way through the day. She said she needed a favour: could I drive her to Vera. I haven’t met her before but once – but the boy, Guy, constantly pitches up looking for the kids. He is nice, but a bit slow. Very slow, in fact – shouldn’t matter, since he is clearly kind, but I do get bored. Michelle said she needed to go to Vera to pay her Endesa bill as she has no electricity in the house: it has been cut off. I didn’t at all want to go to Vera; it is an hour plus round trip, without the time you spend there, minimum, and it was roasting hot. I asked if they were open in the afternoon – a lot of offices aren’t in August. She didn’t know. Could she phone? No, she had no phone, because no electricity. She also has no car (broken down) and no moped (broken down). Basically, she has no money, whence all her troubles, and also not much common sense – the two things being related. She came out here from Cardiff, never having been to Spain (“I always liked the idea of it, see”) and thought she could rent out teepees in her back garden to holiday makers. There aren’t any holiday makers up here, though, and if there were, you couldn’t charge the much: Oliver and Helen, who used to run this house as a Casa Rural, went bust, as far as we can make out. You couldn’t realistically charge anyone more than a handful of Euros to stay up here – and that’s if anyone wanted to come up here, where there isn’t anything except a bit of rough walking and bird watching (hoopoes, eagle owls and so on). The teepees have disappeared, but Michelle still has six dogs (disapproved of by neighbours) and a satellite dish. She just stood there while I tried to hint I didn’t really have any plans to go to Vera today, feeling guilty, but really not liking the idea of sitting in the car with her for two hours. Sandy could drop her off the next morning (he had just left for Vera about an hour before she arrived). She said she yes, but the taxi back up would be very expensive, she didn’t know what she would do really. She doesn’t speak any Spanish, so that makes it worse for her; she has no real friends here. Part of me thought I ought to give her a lift – the idea of being without car or electricity up here is pretty appalling – but part of me was really pissed off with her, a) for being so useless in the first place –and b) for expecting me to sort her problem when we don’t even know each other. It’s not like borrowing a cup of sugar, going into Vera. In the end, I said I’d let her know if I was going in later on and she wandered off. Afterwards, I felt continuing irritation and guilt. If she had been Juana, whom I very much like, I wouldn’t have thought anything of taking her into Vera; in fact, I’d have enjoyed it. But it’s Michelle, who sits about in the same Vera market kaftan, looking like a lump. This is completely unchristian, since I well know the vicar would say that I get no Brownie points for being nice to Juana whom I like, only for being nice to Michelle, who gets on my wick. I thought about this, and thought the right thing to do would be to take Michelle to Vera. But then I asked Sandy and he pointed out that if I did that, she would keep coming back and expecting me to give her lifts. I told myself this was a good point, though it clearly didn’t make me any more in the right, morally speaking.

Later on, I killed about 20 wasps in the kitchen. It is late summer, and apparently they fly lower and are more intrusive just before they die off. Anyway, they keep coming in and stinging me: one was in my bikini bottom when I put it on in the morning and I got a huge and painful bite on the bum, much to the amusement of Sandy and the Adkins, who are visiting. I felt pretty vengeful to the wasps afterwards – and killed a lot in the way Sandy had demonstrated – wait till they settle on the one window that is not shuttered, then squash them with a wineglass. The amount I killed is nothing: when Edouard was here, he went on a mission to kill all the wasps in sight with the pool net (breaking it into the bargain). He laid them out in rows by the pool and we asked him if he was going to make them into a pie. I pointed out he could not kill all the wasps in Almeria, and he said in a mad voice that he intended to do so. Wasps get you like that. However, while I was massacring them and they were collapsing in heaps all over each other and crawling about in dying throes, I felt as if I were a Nazi in a concentration camp. It didn’t make me stop, but I did feel pretty appalled. I don’t really like killing things: I normally rescue spiders, beetles, etc, but I draw the line at wasps. No doubt this is bad, but what is more, I had this weird feeling that the rest of the wasps round the pool knew what I’d done: a few got very aggressive and swarmed round me in the afternoon, perhaps in revenge. I thought about Michelle, too, who was having a large bonfire out by her house in the dark, and wondered if she would have revenge of some kind. Maybe in the next life, all these things will come back to haunt me. I have to hope not. But the fact is, even though I thought all this through, it didn’t change anything. Christianity just does not account for the fact that some people are deadly dull; if you are just put on this earth to be good to everyone it is like the point of going to a party being just to behave well while you were there. In which case, you wouldn’t got at all, particularly not if there were wasps, and people like poor Michelle.

Learned Helplessness
I am driving faster and faster down the twisty road to Rambla Alhibe and am generally developing a new skill set: fixing things that break in the kitchen (previously done by the nanny), and so on. This is a good thing: while snorkelling at the Villaricos beach yesterday, I was thinking about how I had learned to dive despite being scared every time I went down. Even snorkelling is potentially scary, though you couldn’t keep me out of the water and I will stay in for hours: sometimes there is something spooky down there that makes you head for shore. But if you didn’t do these things, you would end up like Mrs Mercer, whose daughter Penny was at school with me. Rodney, her husband, did everything, including the driving: when she drove the car, she leaned forward and clutched the steering wheel, stopping if anything came on the other side of the road. Actually, my mother did drive rather the same way, holding on with a grim face and set teeth 1as if the car was a bucking bronco. It would be quite easy to get like this if you didn’t drive often and let your husband do it: in fact, before we lived here, Sandy always drove the car in Spain, mainly because he likes driving and I don’t. The first few times I did it, I thought it was hard; now it is easy. So you have to keep doing new things to avoid forgetting how: a lot of the women we know, in particular, have said they couldn’t come here on their own because it would be too hard to drive the car. No doubt men think things like that, but they are not allowed to say them, they have to get on and drive that car. I think about this whenever I feel wimpy about being out here; it sometimes feels strange, and I get a nameless anxiety that I will end up like Michelle, a fish out of water. Will I ever get the hang of all the things I am supposed to know how to do on the finca - like picking the prickly pears, which we did all wrong. We should have gone out in the morning, when the prickles are not so sharp; instead, Sandy got them all over himself and had to make Lara pick them out while he sat there like a large hedgehog. I had a long lecture from Juana on when to pick the figs: at one point for drying, another for bottling. The stem must twist right off easily if they are mature, they must be really mature to bottle, but can be "a punto" for drying. I expect I will learn this stuff by next year. Will I, more importantly, find a purpose other than picking fruit? Maybe, but in the meantime, least I won’t end up forgetting how to drive, swim, or ride a bike.