Jamon, the food of love?

Spanish ham

We went for a massive meal at La Tasca in Lubrín. It was not meant to be massive at the start, of course, but we were with six-dinner Sandy, who keeps saying things like “just a light lunch” and then serving up an enormous haunch of meat. It turned out to be very good, despite the line of silent old men at the bar, who all turned to stare at the obvious foreigners. There is a restaurant at the back, one wall of which is the wall of the rock behind, decorated with local rustic artefacts. The set menu was 15 Euros though we didn’t eat off it: Lara had a steak the size of her head, for instance, but the mistake was to eat the huge plates of garlic mayonnaise bread, tomato bread, and jamón, before embarking on the main course. Of course, the children have two stomachs, one dedicated to ice cream, so were not even groaning on the way to the car like me, and that was with my jeans undone. At about ten, after Sandy had said the place would be mainly for tourists as it was too expensive for locals to eat out, in came a group of local Spanish: the nice lady from the supermarket, who looks like a friend of Miss Marple, very smart, with a man and another couple. Ten is normal restaurant arrival time here: we are sometimes too hungry to wait though at home we often don’t cook till ten and eat around eleven. The food was excellent, including the wine, Ribera del Duera which is apparently a la mode, more than Rioja, for about 20 Euros, which is more than five times what we normally pay for nice supermarket wine, usually Albariño, from Galicia, which costs £8 upwards at home.

The point of all this about food is to talk about Jamón Jamón, so good you say it twice and with a capital, like the movie. Jamón seems to me to be close to the essence of what is Spanish, particularly when you compare it with Ham. I am not knocking Ham, but Ham is not a good word, for a start. In literature, oafish people have faces like hams, and fat ladies have legs like hams. It is fat and pink, making you think of Henry the Eighth, and large, arrogant noblemen riding through Yorkshire and exercising droit de seigneur on the local kitchen maids. It is a bit uniform: Jamón has streaks of meat in a lot of fat, particularly the best Pata Negra (black foot) jamón. The meat is dry and succulent at the same time – in fact, you are best to leave it out before eating as it often starts a bit dry but then starts to get greasier. I am making it sound revolting, but it is delicious.
In fact, Sandy has always been a Jamón man and in the past, used to smuggle legs to the UK in his suitcase, or sometimes in mine, hidden among the underpants. It caused consternation among people who visited, finding a large leg with a hoof in the larder, particularly when it had been there a while and was not so fresh.

Food has always been uppermost in Sandy’s mind. He was about three stone lighter, I would say, when I first met him, but he was already working on plans to get fatter. When accused of being fat, he sometimes agrees, and says he can get quite a bit fatter in the next few years, and starts pointing out people he views as targets, like the man on the beach whose wife had to roll him over, because he couldn’t do it himself. Other times, he denies it, and points out that his jeans (or his kilt) still fit him. I have pointed out that they are not the same jeans; they may be Levis, but they are not the same ones, and the kilt has an adjustable waist, or place where the waist would be if you had one. But Sandy just smiles complacently and says he is not fat. In fact, I have suggested to him he may have reverse anorexia, where you look in the mirror and think you are thin, even though you actually are very fat. I am sure he is trying to take me down with him: it is not easy when you are constantly made to eat “light” meals, but fortunately age has improved my metabolism and what with all the heaving stones about I am sure I have got thinner again since the “kilos” which Pablo and Juana pointed out I had put on. Either that, or I have got reverse anorexia too and soon I will be out of the jeans and into a housecoat (there is a nice selection in Vera market).

When Sandy and I got married - in Grand Cayman, which sounds romantic but was actually so we could spend the wedding money on three weeks’ diving – not very romantic although it does look it in the photos. Our two divorced diving instructors were witnesses and a bit unsure about the whole thing: Sandy had been deep diving on the day and was a bit high. I had been to the hairdresser, at the insistence of a Texan girl called Leanne staying in the hotel, and been given a plait like a poodle, which I took out under the shower afterwards, plus had had quite a few cocktails. I had also been marched to buy some “lingerie,” having admitted I only had a T shirt with “The bigger the Johnson, the deeper the dive” on it, Johnsons being the fins I used to use. “You got to get you some wedding night lingerie,” she shrieked (Leanne was a great shrieker and could whistle between her teeth: she also told me “if anyone comes on my land, I shoot ‘em). She made me get a kind of baby doll affair, very nylon, which was doomed from the start. The service was conducted by the Reverend Vernon something, who said in a heavy Caribbean accent that “Juliet and Sandy, love is a beautiful ting.” This is the only line I can remember, although Sandy always claims I promised to obey him, which seems unlikely and anyway I haven’t. We had the wedding ceremony at about 4 in a pretty sunset and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening drinking and dancing in hotels: I can’t remember much about this at all for obvious reasons. On the way back from the dancing, Sandy had realised he was hungry and started to moan about chicken. He was staring out of the windows, looking for a rotisserie, but everything was shut, and his moaning got worse and worse. When we got back to the hotel (the lovely, very Caribbean, Spanish Bay Reef (little huts, boardwalks, fans, but no mod cons and certainly no 24 hour food: you ate round one big table with the hosts and other guests), Sandy started pacing about like a tiger and said he had to find some food. He got the phone directory and started looking for a takeaway – ages later he found a pizza delivery place and ordered a huge pizza. Meanwhile, I had retreated to the bathroom and put on my lingerie, feeling rather ridiculous. “Quick,” Sandy said. “We have to go up to the front, in case the delivery man can’t find us.” I put on my rain mac over the top and we went and sat at the front. Sandy pounced on the pizza when it arrived, and soon after fell asleep with the relics on his chest. In between, I had opened my mac and demonstrated the outfit. “Yes, very nice suit, " he said. This set the tone for the future. Food has come between us, I remarked to Sandy, and if he gets fatter, it might in practice. But in fact, I do prefer a man to be quite fat; it is more reassuring and of course they can’t run very fast, though Sandy, with his military past, is deceptive – like those large animals like rhinos and hippos, he appears immobile but can suddenly move quite fast, particularly, of course, if food happens to be passing. The other day I looked at him trundling up the road on Alexander’s quad bike, with his new short haircut – his face has got round like a bear’s or a cat’s so that really he should have some whiskers, and he made me think of that story in the paper about the Russian circus bear who used to ride a bike and then escaped and then knocked a postman off his bike and rode off on it into the woods, never to be seen again. Anyway, the fat face is quite sweet, and actually I prefer it to the lean and hungry one he used to have.

It is not, however, more capital R Romantic, something that fooled me when I was young and stupid, or stupid-er, I should say. But all that is water under the bridge and it is quite a relief in most ways. What worries me is that it makes writing this quite boring; diaries are supposed to be about love. My last surviving diary (age 11 to 15) had plenty, even if large parts related to whining about having to play hockey in an aertex shirt, and I know my university diaries did: however I threw them out some time ago because they were too embarrassing. What is more, I couldn’t even remember some of the incidents, down to the names of the men or the events. On my nineteenth birthday, I got so drunk that I had to be carried home and I actually remember lying face down in a gutter. It was down to pina colada cocktail, which I have never drunk since. Now, I am lucky if I have two thirds of one bottle of wine, and then I have to lie down with my zip undone to recover, and I have Sandy, who will drink the two thirds anyway and leave me with a third, or perhaps a quarter.

But I can’t see that writing can be that interesting without any romance in it. It is that bright unpredictable thread running through the everyday fabric of life even though, it is all bound to end in tragedy. Passion only goes one of two ways: middle age or violent death: you either get poisoned and stabbed like Romeo and Juliet, or you end up sitting the dances out, like Mrs Bennett, and trying to marry off your daughters. I was worrying about this, as clearly I am still alive so must be Mrs Bennett (thankfully,
I have only one daughter and before we left for Spain, Sandy had already told the school we would not bother about secondary school but just apprentice her straight to Stringfellows, given Lara’s propensity to take the stage in skimpy costumes.) Rather depressing, sitting on the sidelines, with romance vanishing down the corridor like the last guest at a fancy dress ball.

Having said that, it strikes me that while I was not looking, I had been with Sandy for nearly 15 years, and something had happened that I had not noticed, which was not exactly either death by poison or being a wallflower in the dance of life. I hesitate to describe this: it seems rather like the tiger in the fridge – it vanishes when you open the door. The tiger in the fridge was often evoked by my father, who convinced me there was one in there when I was young and it seems appropriate for Sandy, who is certainly a tiger just outside the fridge. The tiger is part of the family, but always at the edge of your vision. It gets larger every year, from eating all that food in the fridge, and yet because the door is closed, you often forget about it. It’s a kind of passion, but I suspect you don’t notice it is gone, until it isn’t there.

Meanwhile, back to Jamón, as I am supposed to be writing about Spain. At one point in the film, Penelope Cruz (so famous here that she is just called Penelope in magazines), is marching down the road in the nightie-like outfit she seems to wear in most of the film, trying to shake off the man who is pursuing her, I think on a motorbike. The man works in a jamón business, and at various point, tries to seduce her by offering her ham – you know it is an aphrodisiac, he says, though Penelope brushes him off and is clearly in no need of ham to get her started.

Is it? Maybe. In any case, in the land of Jamón, I think there is probably more passion than there is romance, more death by poison than sitting out the dance. I am not sure Spanish women ever sit the dance out but carry on seducing younger men and doing what they feel, like the older woman in Jamon, Jamon. Only in a Spanish film would the climax be a fight to the death conducted with legs of ham, which is somehow not funny but dreadful, though too melodramatic and not real enough to be exactly gruelling.

We used to go to a beach near here at a place called Rodalquilar, where there is a weird pink hotel in the middle of the desert landscape. The other day, Sylvia told me that the story on which Bodas de Sangre, Blood Wedding, is based actually happened there, here in Almeria.: a dance in which fate and tragedy bring individuals to an inevitably, bloody consummation; people almost seem to long to die. Sylvia also suggested we go and see a bullfight in Madrid. I pointed out it might be rather cruel (poor bull) and she agreed, sort of though I am not sure she got the “poor bull” bit - but said in a matter of fact way that it was also very beautiful. There is only really art where there is blood: you just can’t imagine a Spanish Four Weddings and A Funeral: there would have to be at least a bit of violence and some explicit sex. Light and ironic though it may be, the wonderful Volver has a body in the deep freeze before long, and off goes Penelope, with that switching, get-away walk she does.

Meanwhile, locally in Almeria, there is plenty of drama. In Rambla Alhib e, there is the always sulky Vanessa in the bar, who looks as if she might end up battered to death by a leg of ham at the side of the road: in fact, the whole family are straight from Almodovar: Pepe with his, alleged, fancy woman in Mojacar and Virginia, angrily squeezed into her denim skirt, appearing breezy but harbouring a bitter grudge. If they don’t provide some entertainment, I shall have to look further afield or use my imagination, such as remains to me sitting here tapping my fan at the edge of the ballroom.