Es atrasada, Andalucía? Is Andalucia backward?
In the bar Lopez the other day, the conversation turned to guns. Where would we get a licence, I asked Pepe? The thought was brought on after Sandy bought an air gun for the children: he pretended he was going to use it on the local guerrilla cats, Jack and Mabel. “Maybe I would like a gun,” I suggested. I started to whine: “I never get anything – you all get quads and guns, what do I get? Anyway, I can shoot.” Not true exactly, though I have had a go. “It’s very remote where we live: what if someone tried to attack me?” Sandy was quite amenable and informed me that, in Spain, you are entitled to shoot intruders, and even if you kill them, it’s ok. I don’t know if this is true or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
The subject of guns made us instantly popular in the bar. Pepe is an enthusiast, as the boars’ heads on the wall, testify. He showed us a plaque with several boars’ teeth mounted in gold, and his name underneath. His wife, brother and father in law gathered round the table. The brother offered to take Sandy’s military ID and exchange it for a gun licence – how, was not quite clear. There are lots of wild boar round where we live, he said, he would take Sandy out if he wanted to go. What if I want to shoot? Pepe said I could do a 3 day course in Arboleas. In the old days, he said, you didn’t need any of that, but now they want to make sure you don’t shoot someone by mistake. I can’t imagine anyone checks what you do up where we live. The conversation moved on to laws in Andalucia: there are more than there used to be, but not that many. Yes, it is “atrasada” he said, backward. We had the first wave, which was construction, people coming to live here. Now we need the second wave, infrastructure. Apparently, in two years there will be a fast train to Madrid from Almería, stopping at Vera – things are on the move.
I heard various other opinions on this subject last week, a large part of which was spent trying to get the residency sorted out. The last I had heard of this was early in the month, when Inma had told me to call her back on the 12th, when she would be back in the office. I called.
“No, Inma isn’t here,” the man on the other end said. No surprises there: she is usually out having a coffee when I call. “She’s still on holiday.”
“Oh,” I said. “When will she be back – next week?”
“No, the week after.” Hmm – after my date with the Almería, which she arranged, and for which she and I need to do the paperwork. I got a bit irritable while explaining this.
“She told me to call her on the 12th – I need to do all this paperwork before Friday,” I said.
“Well, what can I do, she’s not here,” her sister said. “She’s on holiday.”
In the end, I called Pedro, the lawyer, who had introduced me to Inma, and got him to call them. A woman called back and said Inma would call me later that day, not to worry. No te preocupes. If I didn’t worry, nothing would happen, would it? What would have happened if I hadn’t called Inma? Would she have called me? I explained to the lady that Inma needed to ring the house number. She usually likes to call the mobile, but it doesn’t work in the house. Fine, fine, no te preocupes.
Inma didn’t ring that afternoon: I knew she wouldn’t. In the morning, Pedro rang and asked if she had called. No. A bit later, Inma finally called and said she had left messages on the house answerphone. I explained that there wasn’t an answerphone; she must have called the mobile. She insisted it was the house, so I agreed there must have been a mistake. Anyway, we got a meeting for Wednesday in Albox, famous for its hundreds of illegal houses, occupied by Brits.
In between, we had the people who sold us the pool heating over: Johannes is German and Marianne Dutch. They have lived here for four years and don’t speak Spanish, so are very much ex-pats. They talked about the things that were wrong with Andalucía – how long it all takes, how the banking system is insecure, how the whole economy is a house built on the shifting sand of the corrupt construction industry, which will fall away before long. How Zapatero isn’t really clamping down on it at all – how Vera is full of the Russian mafia. (True, you do see a lot of women wearing gold and leopard-skin skirts and a lot of bling in the day - apparently Russian). How the train to Almería will never be built in two years, more like ten! During all this I got a bit bored. I mean, it may well be true, but they came and lived here, didn’t they? They like the climate, presumably, they like the way of life. Complaining about it is like marrying a girl because she is beautiful and temperamental and then moaning that she doesn’t keep time and isn’t a good housewife. I suppose that often happens, particularly, I imagine, if the man is German and the woman Spanish – not that I have ever met a couple like that. It is unlikely, like a horse mating with a zebra. Being an ex-pat is a strange way of life – you are neither one thing nor the other. This is always going to be the case, even if you learn the language to a high standard, but I can’t imagine it is comfortable, long-term, if you don’t – like always travelling and never arriving.
Frontier country
I went to Albox on Wednesday – the first time I have driven there since we lived here. It was an interesting drive – the shortcut had road works, so I ended up on a dirt track, as so often happens, then hit more road works in Arboleas, and drove a way in the dry river bed before finding the road again. There are times when you wish you had your husband’s 4x4. This all contributed to the strange, Wild West feeling of going to Albox, which is a bit like a cross between Hurghada, where we used to dive, and the Hove, with a bit of Alabama thrown in. The main street looks to me very like the main street in a cowboy movie, only bigger. It also has that feeling of being on the frontier, of rednecks and pick-up trucks, and dust. There is construction everywhere, and mis-spelt English signs hanging on one chain, saying things like “All your legal needs HERE!” in different colours. There are quite a lot of large people with tattoos walking about, but there is an alternative life too: for instance, a health food shop, run by a nice lady who reminded me, weirdly, of the deluded woman in Catherine Tate who obsessively dates people on death row. I used to think Albox was just an armpit, but now I see there is something about it. The Brits who come here come here because it is cheap and sunny, but you have to have guts to get up and go, and you can feel that in the air. They are rough round the edges, but at least they have edges. More importantly, for the Spanish, they are the mainstay of the local economy. The Mercadona supermarket in Albox is one of the most profitable in Spain - and almost all the shoppers are British - living on the profits of the house they sold in the UK, their pension or savings, the income they can make shuttling back and forth to the UK to work, or, Sandy cynically suggests, to sign on.
I did all the paperwork for the residencia – it took a couple of hours, including waiting for Inma to walk to the bank and get the paper stamped to show I had paid 6 euros for the process. She was very sweet, and I felt bad about getting cross with her, especially as you can hardly be cross with someone who has a jar with about 50 pencils with fluffy things on the end, and a lot of pictures from kids saying “Inma I love you” all over her desk. How long will it take, I asked her. Oh, months, she said, there were hundreds of Romanians and Bulgarians coming in, which was slowing everything down. We would have to wait months for the certificate, which we would have to return to pick up later, once notified. We had a conversation about Andalucía; I asked her what she thought about the corruption. She said it was getting a bit better: before, you could just build a house anywhere – in the middle of a rambla, dry river bed, if you liked. Now, it was a bit stricter.
Afterwards, I bought the children’s stationery for school. The process here is that you get a list of what the children need on the first day, then take it to a shop. The list has odd things on it, like “a cardboard box”. I had started in Lubrín in the local shop, Maria P, who was out of a number of the things required because there were more children in the school year than expected. I asked her if it wouldn’t be easier if the school gave her the list in advance, and she agreed, but said they didn’t do it like that. The Albox shop had everything you could think of, but needed to be paid in cash, as did the health food shop – presumably because you can’t trust a cheque in Albox.
Slow, slow, quick again
More experience of the Andalucian slow, slow then quick rhythm. On Friday, we went to the “Office of Foreigners” in Almeria, to complete the residency process. We turned up, clutching the email confirming our meeting, and the passports, photocopies of passports and forms. The office was modern, surprisingly smart and quite empty, with an electronic queuing system, and a few people sitting waiting for their numbers to come up. However, my heart sank when the man on the desk said that Sandy had an appointment, but not me. I envisaged another few months bureaucracy. Go over there, he said, pointing to another desk. There, the lady briskly consulted the computer, then told me to give her the paperwork. She looked at our forms, and processed them in about five minutes, handing us back our residency certificates. I looked at her in disbelief. Is that it? Yes, she said, these days we don’t bother with sending out cards later. You just get a certificate, and that’s it. Take a copy and don’t lose it. That’s amazing, I said. She said it was quicker, and with all the hundreds of Romanians they had every day, they needed to be quick. What do they do here, I asked. She shrugged and grinned. Some of them work, some don’t. Now they are in the EU, they can live anywhere, whether they have work or not. I wonder if it’s as quick if you are Romanian. I suspect it is – in this way, the Spanish are much less finicky than the English – they didn’t give a damn what animals I brought in when I arrived whereas DEFRA clearly requires you to fill in forms in triplicate for months before you can bring your dog back.
Some things come into focus
Things are slowly resolving themselves, and while we are still on the frontiers, the dust of the language is beginning to settle. In Almería, I found I could buy Epson printer ink in the Alcampo supermarket, which is the size of Bluewater, and I found out from Sylvia that the reason you can’t buy answer machines is that Telefonica have an automated service like BT Call Minder. I managed to get this without difficulty – and was pleasantly surprised that I understood the conversation and the instructions of how to set my personal message. Learning a language surprises you that way – just when it seems you are not getting better at all, you suddenly realise the focus has improved, like a fuzzy picture slowly becoming clearer and more detailed. The children, too, are beginning to speak Spanish surprisingly fast – what sounded like a foreign language is now at least partly familiar, with the landmarks of words like “pencil sharpener,” “scissors,” and “cardboard box.”
Sylvia was on the phone from Madrid the other day, and overheard me talking to the electrician who was on his way out. His accent is about as thick as they come. How on earth do you understand them? Sylvia asked, having a French moment and sounding rather disapproving. I expect I’m getting used to the Andaluz accent, I said, soon I’ll be leaving the “s” off the end of words. Sylvia tutted, but I pointed out the people were very nice. “Nice, well yes, I am sure they are nice,” she said, dismissively. But you can’t dismiss it. Long ago, when I worked at Savory Milln, my secretary, Anna, a large lady who would have fitted in quite well in Albox, had a notice on her desk that said “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.” It was aimed at all the bankers she worked for, who were all a lot more important than they were nice, and I don’t miss them a bit.
I dont know how different Andalucía is from Spain, but it probably is "atrasada", at least here in Almeria, the poorest and shabbiest part of the province. You do queue up and wait for ages in shops. People don't necessarily do things when they say they will; their sense of time is more elastic. The legal framework is probably less rigid. There is illegal construction, and corruption in local government and no real evidence that they will capitalise on the money flowing in from British immigrants. What happens when people stop buying in Albox, when the construction stops? According to Johannes, the economic plans put forward by the local districts largely involve plans to double, or triple, the number of residents they have. There is little evidence of sustainable industry beyond agriculture, food processing, and some low-end tourism. In the middle of all this live the British, shopping in the Mercadona but largely using UK plumbers and electricians, and the Russian mafia, laundering money through the developments on the coast. You have to wonder where it will all end. Whether you like it here or not is another matter - down to whether you like it hot, rough and ready, and don't mind the scruffy construction and tattoos, or you prefer it picturesque, professional and elegant in Florence or Provence. There are no sights here, no horse riding, or country walks, except those you find out for yourself. Most people dont like it enough, which is why our Spanish builder can't attract English money to buy his old farmhouses. Could I help him, he asked me, find some English buyers, preferably with money? I'm in two minds as to whether I want to do that. I'd like to help Juan, but the fact is, I like it the way it is, not the kind of place Tony Blair would ever go on holiday.
Sunday 23 September 2007
Tuesday 11 September 2007
Women's work of all kinds
Bad office days
Work is always on my mind. It must be guilt, but it's time it went and I started to feel relaxed and Andalucian. Not yet, though: I keep thinking about it, even when I try not to.
You can't win. When I worked, I used to get annoyed by Daily Telegraph “research shows” articles proving that children of working mothers grow up weird. My mother worked, and I don’t feel that weird. Or if I do, it’s for different reasons. What about if a woman works part-time – are the kids only part weird? Anyway, I had to defend my lifestyle. Therefore, I used to believe in the right to work, and probably even the dignity of work because I worked. Now I don’t, I have to defend not working.
But the fact is, work wasn’t that dignified, and I ended up with the right to too much of it: at least a 12-hour day including the commute - plus the finances, nanny and child management and weekend housework. Secondly, the work itself was not exactly a mission you could be proud of, like being the first woman in space. Or even the first dog.
Worse than that, my recent working life made me so unhappy I used to cry in the toilets at work on a regular basis. I would be inclined to think this was just me being pathetically un-adapted to the workplace, but Teresa in my team, plus my friend the company lawyer, admitted when I left that they thought I had been constantly bullied: for being a woman, younger, and different from the rest of the management team. Well, I can’t prove it, and I wouldn’t try, which is sad. Some poor woman has succeeded me, and if she gets the same shit, I won’t have warned her. If she’s meek and mild, she’ll be fine, but if she tries sitting in the wrong chair in a meeting, woe betide her. “That was a bit assertive, sitting in that chair,” the commercial director told me in my second week. “What do you mean – it was free, and the closest, ” I said. “Opposite the boss – obviously you’re sending a message. You’re a bit aggressive,” he told me. In the end, I think I was the one on the receiving end of the aggression. This commercial director is a man who was known to leave his wife locked in the car on occasions, with the window rolled down an inch, the way you do for a dog. He also used to boast that he travelled third-class on the train, or took the coach. This was supposed to save company money, except that it used to take him so long to get to places that he arrived late for meetings, sometimes so late they had finished.
“Why didn’t you do something about it?” someone asked me, probably a journalist. Well, nobody would believe it, for a start. This was an apparently respectable FTSE company, but in a board meeting about recruiting female engineers, a director said “that’s half the student population we’d like to penetrate, ha-ha! And everyone laughed, or smirked. The same director spread a rumour that I was having an affair with my boss – presumably the only reason I could have done well at work. This was followed by speculation that I was having sex with every male I was friendly with – which in a company that was 90 per cent men meant I was very promiscuous, allegedly.
When I joined, the HR director personally came up with a tape measure to measure the size my office could be. He said there were rules about the maximum size. I protested weakly that I would like a table and chairs for meetings, but gave in when he went bright red and shouted at me that this would mean my office was as big as the Chairman’s! (The Chairman, in fact, never turned up to work, so his office was pretty spacious under the circumstances.)
Later, I realised my office was the smallest management office, bar that of poor old Neil, whom everyone ignored. All this is without the anonymous letter, and so on. Allegedly. I couldn’t prove any of it, because I didn’t tape my time there. I wish I had, except that I couldn’t bear to watch the tapes.
So now, I am doing housework. Broadly defined, that is, since it includes the land, and the admin. There’s more of that than I expected: balancing the huge, dusty house, with the huge, neglected fields, and the endless washing, ironing, with the administration of our Spanish life, with teaching the children Spanish. “You’ll never get any credit for anything you do in the house,” Jasmine told me bitterly. True, but as I’m not being paid, I don’t really want credit. It’s better to be without credit than to be at the mercy of a lot of middle-aged men that bully you, something I never, ever want to go through again. I said before that Jasmine had objected to my stopping work, because she thought I was giving away power. But when I explained the work experiences I’d had to Jasmine, she said: “Oh, I see. You didn’t stop working because you didn’t like the work – you stopped because you were being bullied. Well, I understand that. Men are all bullies, I’ve found that out. It’s why I wanted the boob job – to have more power over them.” The logic is she needs to be able to warn her husband that, if he doesn’t appreciate her work, she can go elsewhere. Sadly, this wouldn’t work in the office: boobs only get held against you, as proof that you are either a) stupid b) available or c) having an affair with the boss. I thought things had moved on, but they haven’t, or at least not in some parts of the working world. The same director used to comment on my clothes, as in “I can’t sit opposite you when you’re wearing that blouse,” even though I was always meticulously prim at work, and never showed an inch of flesh or gave an inch of encouragement. I think that was what galled him: if I’d been a jolly barmaid type, or snogged him at the office party, he’d probably have been my biggest supporter.
People say I’d have had a better experience in a more female environment, like the media. But hey, I worked in the media, and in PR and I still didn’t see women owning any shares, or making any money, except the lucky one or two who were in at the beginning, or made it as someone’s PA. So I guess I’m bitter and bruised. I wonder how to advise my daughter? Be a journalist? A housewife? Start your own business and get rich? Marry a rich man, then kill him? Be an astronaut? Go into space?
Magazines and junk mail
Moving house has been one of the hardest jobs I have ever done. There is an endless daily grind of tasks that never seem to let up; I am still moving house, even though I have been here for nearly 3 months. In particular there is the job of dealing with junk mail which arrives in large batches from the town post office, weighing down the poor Spanish post lady.
I would advise anyone moving house to start thinking about junk mail about a year in advance. There is a lot of it, and if you forward it, you will get car insurance flyers for the rest of your life. It takes about 3 goes (annoying, from Spain) to get the companies to cancel the mail, and even then, they warn you it will take another 3 months before it stops coming. When you call the car insurance people, they often say it wasn’t them that sent you the mailing, but someone else – that is, once you have got through their call centre and listened to their recorded messages about how they record the calls for training (what training?) and how they may pass your details to third parties (yes, right, tell me about it already). I thought I was being efficient setting up a mail forward system for a year, but in retrospect, the best thing is not to forward any mail from the UK – after all, the important people will always find you and this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to escape the clutches of the junk mailers, which I visualise as large vulture like creatures cackling evilly crouched over heaps of Boden and Past Times catalogues.
Home news from abroad
Much nicer to get the Sainsbury magazine, which I never read at home but now seems pleasantly nostalgic, with recipes for things I couldn’t or wouldn’t cook here. I called them to ask them to take my new address: they were happy to keep sending me them magazine and the lady told me that someone in Texas had written in to say how she likes reading the recipes when she feels homesick. I can see myself, before long, writing in letters whining about how I can’t get proper seedless grapes or icing sugar in Spain (you can’t).
I also read a Marie-Claire which one of our visitors left; it has already begun to feel strange, like a foreign magazine so that I feel a bit like an anthropologist reading it. Yet again, this was the “green” issue – and the editor had written something like: “It just isn’t cool to be seen with a plastic shopping bag any more.” Well, maybe not in Soho, or wherever media ladies hang out, but let me tell you, lady, in Almeria, carrier bags are still in. They are used to carry your shopping, and then you use them as a bin liners afterwards. It’s another world, and there wouldn’t be many takers for that not very nice Anya Hindmarch recyclable bag: it isn’t shiny or made of nice colourful plastic, so who wants it?
As an anthropologist manqué, I can view UK environmental hand-wringing dispassionately. Maybe it’s a weird cleansing ritual, because people are guilty about being so rich and wasting so much stuff. But what gets me is it’s so parochial: it’s as if nowhere outside the SE of England exists – as if there aren’t places where people are too poor to worry about whether it’s ok to carry a plastic bag. The word “global” appears all over the place, but maybe that means smiling, cocoa farmers that supply Starbucks, not trailer trash in Alabama or only-recently lower-middle people in Almería.
Holidays
The electrician came round to do the rest of the light fittings in the house. He is like a farm boy, very nice and almost unintelligible, though I am getting better at the Andaluz accent. His mother has almonds, and he spent most of the holiday harvesting and shelling them, he said, rather pitifully. I don’t think people here have holidays, much, although Pablo told me his son and Maria, with a couple of others, have rented a house somewhere not that far away. They don’t go abroad, anyway. Even the rich people in IBM Madrid just seem to go to smart Cadiz, and Sylvia, who is cosmopolitan, goes to chic Agua Amarga, not far from here. Why go away when you have sunshine and beaches on your doorstep? It’s hard being an almond farmer here. But it’s also hard being British: you might be a professional but you live in the rain and if you want to go away, you have to pay up hard-earned cash for two weeks trying to get enough sun to last the rest of the year.
Work is always on my mind. It must be guilt, but it's time it went and I started to feel relaxed and Andalucian. Not yet, though: I keep thinking about it, even when I try not to.
You can't win. When I worked, I used to get annoyed by Daily Telegraph “research shows” articles proving that children of working mothers grow up weird. My mother worked, and I don’t feel that weird. Or if I do, it’s for different reasons. What about if a woman works part-time – are the kids only part weird? Anyway, I had to defend my lifestyle. Therefore, I used to believe in the right to work, and probably even the dignity of work because I worked. Now I don’t, I have to defend not working.
But the fact is, work wasn’t that dignified, and I ended up with the right to too much of it: at least a 12-hour day including the commute - plus the finances, nanny and child management and weekend housework. Secondly, the work itself was not exactly a mission you could be proud of, like being the first woman in space. Or even the first dog.
Worse than that, my recent working life made me so unhappy I used to cry in the toilets at work on a regular basis. I would be inclined to think this was just me being pathetically un-adapted to the workplace, but Teresa in my team, plus my friend the company lawyer, admitted when I left that they thought I had been constantly bullied: for being a woman, younger, and different from the rest of the management team. Well, I can’t prove it, and I wouldn’t try, which is sad. Some poor woman has succeeded me, and if she gets the same shit, I won’t have warned her. If she’s meek and mild, she’ll be fine, but if she tries sitting in the wrong chair in a meeting, woe betide her. “That was a bit assertive, sitting in that chair,” the commercial director told me in my second week. “What do you mean – it was free, and the closest, ” I said. “Opposite the boss – obviously you’re sending a message. You’re a bit aggressive,” he told me. In the end, I think I was the one on the receiving end of the aggression. This commercial director is a man who was known to leave his wife locked in the car on occasions, with the window rolled down an inch, the way you do for a dog. He also used to boast that he travelled third-class on the train, or took the coach. This was supposed to save company money, except that it used to take him so long to get to places that he arrived late for meetings, sometimes so late they had finished.
“Why didn’t you do something about it?” someone asked me, probably a journalist. Well, nobody would believe it, for a start. This was an apparently respectable FTSE company, but in a board meeting about recruiting female engineers, a director said “that’s half the student population we’d like to penetrate, ha-ha! And everyone laughed, or smirked. The same director spread a rumour that I was having an affair with my boss – presumably the only reason I could have done well at work. This was followed by speculation that I was having sex with every male I was friendly with – which in a company that was 90 per cent men meant I was very promiscuous, allegedly.
When I joined, the HR director personally came up with a tape measure to measure the size my office could be. He said there were rules about the maximum size. I protested weakly that I would like a table and chairs for meetings, but gave in when he went bright red and shouted at me that this would mean my office was as big as the Chairman’s! (The Chairman, in fact, never turned up to work, so his office was pretty spacious under the circumstances.)
Later, I realised my office was the smallest management office, bar that of poor old Neil, whom everyone ignored. All this is without the anonymous letter, and so on. Allegedly. I couldn’t prove any of it, because I didn’t tape my time there. I wish I had, except that I couldn’t bear to watch the tapes.
So now, I am doing housework. Broadly defined, that is, since it includes the land, and the admin. There’s more of that than I expected: balancing the huge, dusty house, with the huge, neglected fields, and the endless washing, ironing, with the administration of our Spanish life, with teaching the children Spanish. “You’ll never get any credit for anything you do in the house,” Jasmine told me bitterly. True, but as I’m not being paid, I don’t really want credit. It’s better to be without credit than to be at the mercy of a lot of middle-aged men that bully you, something I never, ever want to go through again. I said before that Jasmine had objected to my stopping work, because she thought I was giving away power. But when I explained the work experiences I’d had to Jasmine, she said: “Oh, I see. You didn’t stop working because you didn’t like the work – you stopped because you were being bullied. Well, I understand that. Men are all bullies, I’ve found that out. It’s why I wanted the boob job – to have more power over them.” The logic is she needs to be able to warn her husband that, if he doesn’t appreciate her work, she can go elsewhere. Sadly, this wouldn’t work in the office: boobs only get held against you, as proof that you are either a) stupid b) available or c) having an affair with the boss. I thought things had moved on, but they haven’t, or at least not in some parts of the working world. The same director used to comment on my clothes, as in “I can’t sit opposite you when you’re wearing that blouse,” even though I was always meticulously prim at work, and never showed an inch of flesh or gave an inch of encouragement. I think that was what galled him: if I’d been a jolly barmaid type, or snogged him at the office party, he’d probably have been my biggest supporter.
People say I’d have had a better experience in a more female environment, like the media. But hey, I worked in the media, and in PR and I still didn’t see women owning any shares, or making any money, except the lucky one or two who were in at the beginning, or made it as someone’s PA. So I guess I’m bitter and bruised. I wonder how to advise my daughter? Be a journalist? A housewife? Start your own business and get rich? Marry a rich man, then kill him? Be an astronaut? Go into space?
Magazines and junk mail
Moving house has been one of the hardest jobs I have ever done. There is an endless daily grind of tasks that never seem to let up; I am still moving house, even though I have been here for nearly 3 months. In particular there is the job of dealing with junk mail which arrives in large batches from the town post office, weighing down the poor Spanish post lady.
I would advise anyone moving house to start thinking about junk mail about a year in advance. There is a lot of it, and if you forward it, you will get car insurance flyers for the rest of your life. It takes about 3 goes (annoying, from Spain) to get the companies to cancel the mail, and even then, they warn you it will take another 3 months before it stops coming. When you call the car insurance people, they often say it wasn’t them that sent you the mailing, but someone else – that is, once you have got through their call centre and listened to their recorded messages about how they record the calls for training (what training?) and how they may pass your details to third parties (yes, right, tell me about it already). I thought I was being efficient setting up a mail forward system for a year, but in retrospect, the best thing is not to forward any mail from the UK – after all, the important people will always find you and this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to escape the clutches of the junk mailers, which I visualise as large vulture like creatures cackling evilly crouched over heaps of Boden and Past Times catalogues.
Home news from abroad
Much nicer to get the Sainsbury magazine, which I never read at home but now seems pleasantly nostalgic, with recipes for things I couldn’t or wouldn’t cook here. I called them to ask them to take my new address: they were happy to keep sending me them magazine and the lady told me that someone in Texas had written in to say how she likes reading the recipes when she feels homesick. I can see myself, before long, writing in letters whining about how I can’t get proper seedless grapes or icing sugar in Spain (you can’t).
I also read a Marie-Claire which one of our visitors left; it has already begun to feel strange, like a foreign magazine so that I feel a bit like an anthropologist reading it. Yet again, this was the “green” issue – and the editor had written something like: “It just isn’t cool to be seen with a plastic shopping bag any more.” Well, maybe not in Soho, or wherever media ladies hang out, but let me tell you, lady, in Almeria, carrier bags are still in. They are used to carry your shopping, and then you use them as a bin liners afterwards. It’s another world, and there wouldn’t be many takers for that not very nice Anya Hindmarch recyclable bag: it isn’t shiny or made of nice colourful plastic, so who wants it?
As an anthropologist manqué, I can view UK environmental hand-wringing dispassionately. Maybe it’s a weird cleansing ritual, because people are guilty about being so rich and wasting so much stuff. But what gets me is it’s so parochial: it’s as if nowhere outside the SE of England exists – as if there aren’t places where people are too poor to worry about whether it’s ok to carry a plastic bag. The word “global” appears all over the place, but maybe that means smiling, cocoa farmers that supply Starbucks, not trailer trash in Alabama or only-recently lower-middle people in Almería.
Holidays
The electrician came round to do the rest of the light fittings in the house. He is like a farm boy, very nice and almost unintelligible, though I am getting better at the Andaluz accent. His mother has almonds, and he spent most of the holiday harvesting and shelling them, he said, rather pitifully. I don’t think people here have holidays, much, although Pablo told me his son and Maria, with a couple of others, have rented a house somewhere not that far away. They don’t go abroad, anyway. Even the rich people in IBM Madrid just seem to go to smart Cadiz, and Sylvia, who is cosmopolitan, goes to chic Agua Amarga, not far from here. Why go away when you have sunshine and beaches on your doorstep? It’s hard being an almond farmer here. But it’s also hard being British: you might be a professional but you live in the rain and if you want to go away, you have to pay up hard-earned cash for two weeks trying to get enough sun to last the rest of the year.
Signs and symbols
Setbacks… and recovery
We have been here for the best part of two months. In some ways, it feels as if the hardest part is over: the cardboard boxes have gone, we have cars, and a Spanish calendar on the wall shows the various feast days as well as school start date – September 17 running right through to December 21 as there is no half term. Sandy has found a way of living with the travel and while we don’t – and apparently can’t – have broadband, we are managing with the dial-up connection. In other ways, though, I know the hard part – making proper friends, fitting in to the community – not the English one, but the Spanish - is yet to come. We are in limbo: we have left the UK but not yet arrived in Spain. I have tried to explain this to the children, when they had their homesick moments: you know what you have left, but you don't yet know what you are going to find.
Autumn on its way
The weather has begun to change for autumn, although it is only September. The over-40 degree-days have gone – days when the air coming in through the windows was like a hairdryer on full power. I can leave the shutters open most of the day; the air is cooler in the morning and evening, and we have had a night storm, with tremendous thunder and lightning. It only ever seems to rain here at night, and then in the morning the scent of the jasmine is more powerful, and a different, fresh air hangs over the courtyard – just until the sun burns it away an hour or so later. The back of the house is cooler: this is the "levante" side of the house, while the front is the "poinente," side, where the sun sets and the wind is stronger. Sitting out on the terrace every evening, we observe the sky for clues about the morning, but it seems unpredictable. Mysteriously, cloudless, starry nights turn into cloudy, heavy days and cloudy nights into completely blue mornings. Probably Antonio, who drives his hundred-odd goats back and forth every day and night, could decode the signs but I can't. We have already acclimatized to the heat enough to feel cold in the morning, even though it is probably still warmer than noon on an English summer day. I have bought various books on the trees, plants and birds here, but am still not sure what most things are: I know the agroroba, the carob tree, which sheds long, sweet-tasting brown pods all over the slope at the back of the house, but can’t name the desert trees Lara likes, like bare monkey puzzles or giant, half-naked cow parsley stalks. Swallows and martins fly low over the pool and live in the garage, having been exiled from the roof, and there are doves, or something like doves, all over the village. Having looked up its call, I was ecstatic to see, at last, a dramatically coloured and crested hoopoe at the side of the road, walking about casually the way the book says it does. It seemed quite miraculous, seeing the bird from the book, just where it should have been, after many days getting out of bed and peering out of the window to try and spot the owner of the distinctive cry.
Thoughts of Marcel Pagnol
Meanwhile, we have tried to get to grips with the land. Juana has helpfully instructed me in the right times to pick higas chumbos - prickly pears (in the morning, when the spines are softer) and figs for bottling (when the white streaks appear) She told me about the prickly pears after Sandy had already been seized with enthusiasm for harvesting the produce and had, despite gloves, covered his whole body with prickles. Sensibly, he was not wearing a T shirt, but sweating away on the hot track that runs past the house, using a stick and a ladder. Afterwards, Lara sat beside him and pulled all the prickles out, patiently, like a devoted servant. Meanwhile, I was toiling away, moving stones for about half a kilometre of path down the side of the land, dragging out the coarse and very persistent grass and weeds and cutting back the trees that haven’t been pruned for a couple of years. It took about a week, much longer than I expected, to do one side of the path, heaving stuff down into the rambla and coercing the children to help move stones on Alexander’s quad. They entered into the spirit of it when offered a percentage of the going hourly rate for the work and managed to lift quite enormous stones, arguing constantly about who should do what and buzzing around the field int their little helmets like wasps. By the end of the first part of the work, I had no nails to speak of, and my arms were grazed all the way from wrist to shoulder. Then Alexander and Sandy took on the almond tree nearest the house. It took them two days of bashing it with a cane pole to get most of the almonds (four large bags) down and out of the green outer shell. It was quite funny seeing them sitting there under the tree like a couple of peasants, only less efficient. Alexander had his usual financial fantasies about selling them almonds at a vast profit to the Zurgena factory. Later on, Pablo came over and remarked that he had noticed it had taken them two days to do one tree, and did I want him to do the rest? I asked him to leave Alexander a few, as we thought it was good for him to get the idea of working on the land into his head. At least it’s a change from the computer screen. Pablo turned up with the local hired machine, an amazing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang type tractor which backs up to the tree, opens a circular wing all round the tree and then bashes the tree till all the nuts fall off before unloading a huge pile into the trailer. Pablo and I had a beer while watching the man do the field: he told me he gets 15,000 kilos of almonds from his trees. Some years the price is higher, if there are less nuts, but one way or the other the price to the farmer is always low, and the profit is made somewhere down the chain, when Tesco or whoever flogs the little plastic envelopes of ground almonds for making cakes. Pablo appeared to have no real interest in where the almonds go: I told him how much the packets cost and he just shrugged: nothing is likely to change how much he gets paid for the rather gruelling task of cultivating and harvesting the nuts.
Scratching away at the hard surface of the land, or somehow capture the over-abundant fruit that spills off the trees daily, I have had very vivid memory of the beginning of Jean de Florette, when the naïve city hunchback toils up to the old family house, laden with furniture and Marie-Antoinette optimism about country life, only to fail consistently in all his attempts to breed rabbits or grow cabbages. I can only hope my neighbours are nicer than Ugelin and aren’t going to block up my well- or, more likely, inflate the price of water. We have already had one attempt to sell us an hour’s extra water at 9,000 Euros when the real price should be 1,500 max- but in this case my neighbours act as the good guys, warning us about the opportunist who owns the water rights and needs to make some money to offset the losses he has made on his own finca. However, there have been some successes: I have made several bottles of figs in rum from the many black fig trees, using Nigella Lawson’s recipe. The trouble is that there are so many. It’s sad to think how much they would cost on a plate in London, when I can’t even manage to pick up the windfalls.
Under the bonnet
The Landrover is ready, after three tries at the paperwork. The very charming young man from the concession in Almeria kept meeting us for coffee, but then slapping his head and saying he hadn’t got the right papers, or needed something else. The last attempt was the most tortuous: he turned up at the bar in Lubrin, as arranged, to take Sandy to Almeria to pick the car up – apparently now ready and registered. When he turned up, miraculously only half an hour late, he admitted that the tracker, which insurance requires, had not been fitted. I pointed out that we couldn’t drive it without the tracker, as I had explained to him on the phone, because the insurance was not valid. He made a “really? You don’t say?” face, although we had had a long conversation about it, and suggested he call the insurance company. We could take the car now and have the tracker fitted later, maybe? No, I explained, BECAUSE THE INSURANCE IS NOT VALID WITHOUT IT. You don’t say! Think of that! In the end, when I got to what I think of as the “¡es inadmissible!” moment, he started to take it seriously and call round to locate the tracker, which he had previously told me had arrived and was being fitted. It turned out it hadn’t even been delivered, but miraculously, when I started the process of hitting the roof, he found it and organized the fitting – after lunch at 3pm as the mechanics couldn’t work before then, of course. This is one of the lessons I am learning: it is necessary to be extremely assertive if you want anything done. Saying it in a normal voice or in passing will mean you are ignored. Unfortunately, this means engaging in constant bollockings – but weirdly, nobody seems to hold it against you. On the contrary, they seem to expect it, and to behave a lot better after you’ve shouted than before. The same thing happened with my Ford. After 6 weeks, I still don’t have a second key. On various occasions, I turned up at the garage, asking vaguely and politely for it. The son, a languid, gangling twenty-something, would wave a hand at me from behind the desk. “Hola, Julieta!” No, no key! Why not? Well, these things take time. And by the way, he said, could I drop him some more paperwork? He asked, for the third time, for Sandy’s NIE number and the padronimiento, the certificate that shows we live here. I pointed out I had already given it to his father, and he shrugged, saying his father forgot stuff all the time.
Eventually, I went down and asked for the father, or alternatively, the boss. Suddenly, father plus another, bigger boss, were there, and with every sign of energy and enthusiasm, were talking on the phone to the key people .It turned out the key hadn’t actually been ordered at all, but now they would order me two, and register them with the police, a process they were supposed to have completed anyway. Father wrote me his mobile on a card and said if I brought the car in he would also check it over for me, no worries. I played my pathetic woman card, and said I was worried about being up in the country with only one key, if something went wrong. Don’t you worry, mujer, they said, if anything goes wrong you call us and we’ll come and get you in a car. Don’t worry, it will all be sorted out this week! Well, we’ll see. I just know I’ll have to call them on Friday, and they’ll have forgotten about it. Then I’ll have to go and give them another rocket, and finally they’ll order the key.
Bad car week
All in all, we had an unbelievably bad car week. We went to Vera beach with the Adkins, who were staying, and, about 50 yards away, the same, one-key Ford car got broken into – apparently by passing hippies/gypsies who forced the lock and nicked the navigator. Vera was invaded with them, apparently – a change from the usual retired English people and pleasant Spanish hairdressers and supermarket workers. A few days later, when we went to Almeria to pick up the Landrover, tracker and all, the Ford started to smell weirdly of burning rubber. Lara, ever the drama queen, stalked out and said she couldn’t stand to sit in that smell. We ended up under its bonnet at 9pm in a garage by the roadside, having left the closing Ford/Landrover concession some half an hour earlier. It was dark, and we had to try to read the Spanish manual, then rush into the massive supermarket which fortunately sells everything, including brake fluid, and buy something (in the end, a kind of kitchen funnel with a hose, the actual purpose of which remained opaque) that would work to decant water into the radiator, which is stuck in an inaccessible position. The manual said nothing about how to reach it.
The same day, earlier on, Sandy had brought the new quad back, and it had broken down in the middle of the campo, leaving him and Alexander to walk back. Profusely apologetic, the very nice family at the quad shop came and shook their heads in disbelief, took it apart, and said it must be a “tonteria” (something stupid) like dirt in the fuel. At 9pm yesterday, they came up and took it away, shaking their heads again, and said it would be sorted out by the end of the week. In this case, I believe them: how complicated can a quad engine be? Also, they really are buena gente: a father, son and daughter who spent ages teaching Alexander to ride his small quad and gave him a free helmet into the bargain.
At home, meanwhile, the fancy new coffee machine broke down. I took it back to the Electrodomesticos in Vera – which involved driving round the narrow one-way streets on a Saturday, leaping out and dropping it off while trying to avoid more damage to the car. The girl in the shop and her colleagues spent some time poring over the manual and attempting to make coffee in the shop. Then she said she would replace it with another on Monday, which she duly did. I pulled up in the one-way system, leapt out and took it home. The next day, it broke down again, in a different way. Of course, I had to shout a bit on the phone. She said to bring it in and they would solve the problem. Another one-hour round trip to Vera, in which a van nicked my parking space and I ended up parked in a dusty alleyway on a pile of stones which was the only place I could find. The girl said that actually, this Taurus wasn’t a very good machine and perhaps I could change it for another, better quality one? A la tercera vez, va la vencida, third time lucky, she said, and laughed. I have to hope so. I have brought it back and so far, it works, but I am looking at it out of the corner of my eye, wondering how long it will last.
It is not that nothing broke down at home – on the contrary, things always did. However, here, I am not working, so I am not just going to go and buy a new one, which was my usual easy way out of things. Also, I had a Mercedes at home, and there was no point looking under the bonnet, because there was a big sign that told you not to touch it, but to take it back to the dealer. I haven’t looked under the bonnet of a car for a long time in fact, probably not since before I had my Toyota Carina, which was the best car I ever had – cheap, and never went wrong. Life is less automated here, and there is a good and a bad side to that. You don’t need a dryer: the washing is dry within five minutes of pegging it out. But there are times when you don’t want to learn to fix it yourself.
Children's worries
We had another terrible day, too, the day after the Adkins family left. The children had two weeks of fun with their friends, and then felt grim and desolate. They were both in tears: Lara because she will miss her best friend Natasha (“I will NEVER have another best friend like Natasha, why did you split us up?”) and Alexander for more complex, nearly-13 reasons. He spent a day looking miserable, then finally erupted in tears and protests of “you don’t understand.” It emerged he was worried about a number of things:
1) He wouldn’t make any friends here, it was too remote and there were no people. Yes, there are English people, but they aren’t my type, they don’t think like me. This is true: most of the Brits here are, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bit basic. Alexander, his social sense already finely honed by his massively snobby UK school, has picked up on the fact that he is now among the sons and daughters of failed plumbers and pool engineers, not bankers and lawyers. Hmm.
2) He would fall behind with school work. The school is not a proper big secondary, it’s like a primary, there isn’t anything to do. Yes again. It is a rural school: there will not be a massive IT facility and a music studio. The school work will be different: primary is behind the UK, though it all evens out in the end.
3) There is no big town here, he is cut off, there isn’t even broadband. True again.
After he’d said all this, I felt terrible and assailed by doubts. I wondered if I had been really selfish bringing him here, and depriving him of the benefits of a more sophisticated, expensive school. Would he become a village idiot, zooming around on a quad and forgetting how to do quadratic equations? At the same time, I knew perfectly well that a lot of the doubts had been put in his mind by the friend who had just left, who is still at the snobby school, and doesn’t have the quad, either. He probably wanted to even the ground out, by telling Alexander it was all very well having a quad and riding around the rambla, but he wouldn’t get a good job later, and would have to have a squat local barmaid as a girlfriend, instead of a glossy Sevenoaks model.
Night doubts
It was a bad night, though. My doubts extended themselves to myself: will I be cut off? Have I done the right thing stopping work? What was the point of all those years invested in my good career and earning potential, now I have thrown them away? And, more subtly, isn’t it naïve to think of escape to the country when the people here spend all their time trying to improve their lot, and their children’s, so that they can aspire to being lawyers and bankers and escape the tyranny of bashing almonds off trees for a few euros? I felt as if I had a succubus sitting on me all night, and woke up exhausted, not least because of the hours toiling away with the rake.
Books, signs and symbols
But the morning is always different from the night before. I took my coffee out to the back, where you look over the threshing circle to the mountains and see the sun rise. Since I have been watering the garden every day, all the flowers have begun to bloom: the jasmine, the mimosa tree, and a pale purple tree something like a bougainvillea, but with trumpet-shaped, paler flowers. The tree next to the garage has orange, trumpet like blooms; the roses are coming out in the flowerbeds near the house. A small amount of water has an astonishing effect. Alexander, engaged on the almond tree, appeared to have forgotten the day before. Later, we went down to the school, and confided Alexander’s concerns to Doña Isabel. Yes, she said, a lot of the English children were “fatal.” They had no support at home, and they struggled. But the Spanish children were good students, and plenty go to university. The state system here is standardized, so what they learn is a required curriculum: the children just need to work on their Spanish. We took away books: I promised them I will make sure they know the content in English, while they catch up with the Spanish. But by this time, Alexander had already lost interest in his future and education, and was lost in fantasises of a safe he wants to buy from Amazon to keep his earnings in. He spent most of the day bargaining with me: how many Euros if I move those stones? How many Euros if I get the figs? Well, maybe he will be successful in business, in which case, he won’t need education at all. As I have often reminded him, many of the most successful entrepreneurs were thrown out of school, anyway – (it was a mistake telling him this though, as of course he went and repeated it to his teachers, along with the fact, also imparted by his mother, that Einstein’s school report allegedly said “this boy will never amount to anything”.)
That night, we continued reading My Family and Other Animals, a routine that stopped when we had visitors. I pointed out that Gerry in the book, who turned out to be a top naturalist, had no real “formal” education, and apparently only mixed with local peasants and his family on Corfu. The children were not convinced the book was actually “true” – and wanted to know why the other children in it didn’t appear to either go to school/university, or work. I had no answer for that, but in any case, I found it reassuring, even if they didn’t. Books are a great comfort, serving this useful purpose of shoring up my decisions. There is always a book that makes your own mad, irrational choices seem likely to turn out well, so all I need to do is read plenty of books about people who have left riches for rags and turned out fine. Kind of the opposite of Cinderella, I suppose.
While waiting for these to turn up, I have continued my way through Don Quixote, but have added some other titles to my list. Sitting in the Bar Plaza, I was approached by an old man who looked rather like a sailor, or at least, wearing a cap. I was reading a day-old newspaper: they are kept on the freezer in the bar, and he cracked a joke about how they were not actually fresh, despite living there. He noticed Lara, reading a Puffin book of jokes (very easy, and she had read it about six times) and said she should be reading Don Quixote. I said maybe it was a bit hard, but I was reading it: he said, she should have the children’s edition, which I could get in Almeria. He then instructed me to note down various other things I should read, including specific poems by Lorca, which I duly did. I must read them in Spanish, he insisted. He had been married to a Frenchwoman he said, and things were not the same in other languages. Of course: I look forward to seeing him again; he is one of those characters that haunt the Bar Plaza, so no doubt I shall.
Meanwhile, the conversation with Doña Isabel was reassuring, and, what is more, the books she lent us belonged to someone I have not yet met, called Julieta, perhaps a teacher in the school. I thought maybe this was a sign: I have always been inclined to feel warmly to other Juliets, as there are so few. I am bound to make a few friends, but in any case, it doesn’t bother me that much, as I am really quite happy on my own. The trouble with so many people, as the children found, is that they can easily make you doubt your own mind. Books, on the other hand, make you surer of it.
As does religion: well, I have to think I am being guided, or I wouldn’t have done this in the first place. When I had my conversion experience, about twelve years ago now, Martin Waller told me over lunch in that French restaurant in Charterhouse Square that he likes, that my synapses were misfiring, probably. I recall it clearly: he is an atheist, of course, and we talked about Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which we had both just read. The synapses might have misfired; I wouldn’t be surprised, but then love might just be a chemical reaction. Or, it could be both a chemical reaction, and a transforming experience. I’m not with Martin. Materialism doesn’t tally with my experience and it’s too depressing. The fact is, the conversion experience, all of five minutes, has lasted with me for the twelve years since, and being religious, I see symbolism in everything. If I pick up a book, it often has a message, and this helps to stop me doubting the path I’ve chosen. And living out here, surrounded by mountains, and plants that burst into life after a few days’ water, the post may not come for days, and the broadband may not work, ever, but you are never going to run short of messages
We have been here for the best part of two months. In some ways, it feels as if the hardest part is over: the cardboard boxes have gone, we have cars, and a Spanish calendar on the wall shows the various feast days as well as school start date – September 17 running right through to December 21 as there is no half term. Sandy has found a way of living with the travel and while we don’t – and apparently can’t – have broadband, we are managing with the dial-up connection. In other ways, though, I know the hard part – making proper friends, fitting in to the community – not the English one, but the Spanish - is yet to come. We are in limbo: we have left the UK but not yet arrived in Spain. I have tried to explain this to the children, when they had their homesick moments: you know what you have left, but you don't yet know what you are going to find.
Autumn on its way
The weather has begun to change for autumn, although it is only September. The over-40 degree-days have gone – days when the air coming in through the windows was like a hairdryer on full power. I can leave the shutters open most of the day; the air is cooler in the morning and evening, and we have had a night storm, with tremendous thunder and lightning. It only ever seems to rain here at night, and then in the morning the scent of the jasmine is more powerful, and a different, fresh air hangs over the courtyard – just until the sun burns it away an hour or so later. The back of the house is cooler: this is the "levante" side of the house, while the front is the "poinente," side, where the sun sets and the wind is stronger. Sitting out on the terrace every evening, we observe the sky for clues about the morning, but it seems unpredictable. Mysteriously, cloudless, starry nights turn into cloudy, heavy days and cloudy nights into completely blue mornings. Probably Antonio, who drives his hundred-odd goats back and forth every day and night, could decode the signs but I can't. We have already acclimatized to the heat enough to feel cold in the morning, even though it is probably still warmer than noon on an English summer day. I have bought various books on the trees, plants and birds here, but am still not sure what most things are: I know the agroroba, the carob tree, which sheds long, sweet-tasting brown pods all over the slope at the back of the house, but can’t name the desert trees Lara likes, like bare monkey puzzles or giant, half-naked cow parsley stalks. Swallows and martins fly low over the pool and live in the garage, having been exiled from the roof, and there are doves, or something like doves, all over the village. Having looked up its call, I was ecstatic to see, at last, a dramatically coloured and crested hoopoe at the side of the road, walking about casually the way the book says it does. It seemed quite miraculous, seeing the bird from the book, just where it should have been, after many days getting out of bed and peering out of the window to try and spot the owner of the distinctive cry.
Thoughts of Marcel Pagnol
Meanwhile, we have tried to get to grips with the land. Juana has helpfully instructed me in the right times to pick higas chumbos - prickly pears (in the morning, when the spines are softer) and figs for bottling (when the white streaks appear) She told me about the prickly pears after Sandy had already been seized with enthusiasm for harvesting the produce and had, despite gloves, covered his whole body with prickles. Sensibly, he was not wearing a T shirt, but sweating away on the hot track that runs past the house, using a stick and a ladder. Afterwards, Lara sat beside him and pulled all the prickles out, patiently, like a devoted servant. Meanwhile, I was toiling away, moving stones for about half a kilometre of path down the side of the land, dragging out the coarse and very persistent grass and weeds and cutting back the trees that haven’t been pruned for a couple of years. It took about a week, much longer than I expected, to do one side of the path, heaving stuff down into the rambla and coercing the children to help move stones on Alexander’s quad. They entered into the spirit of it when offered a percentage of the going hourly rate for the work and managed to lift quite enormous stones, arguing constantly about who should do what and buzzing around the field int their little helmets like wasps. By the end of the first part of the work, I had no nails to speak of, and my arms were grazed all the way from wrist to shoulder. Then Alexander and Sandy took on the almond tree nearest the house. It took them two days of bashing it with a cane pole to get most of the almonds (four large bags) down and out of the green outer shell. It was quite funny seeing them sitting there under the tree like a couple of peasants, only less efficient. Alexander had his usual financial fantasies about selling them almonds at a vast profit to the Zurgena factory. Later on, Pablo came over and remarked that he had noticed it had taken them two days to do one tree, and did I want him to do the rest? I asked him to leave Alexander a few, as we thought it was good for him to get the idea of working on the land into his head. At least it’s a change from the computer screen. Pablo turned up with the local hired machine, an amazing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang type tractor which backs up to the tree, opens a circular wing all round the tree and then bashes the tree till all the nuts fall off before unloading a huge pile into the trailer. Pablo and I had a beer while watching the man do the field: he told me he gets 15,000 kilos of almonds from his trees. Some years the price is higher, if there are less nuts, but one way or the other the price to the farmer is always low, and the profit is made somewhere down the chain, when Tesco or whoever flogs the little plastic envelopes of ground almonds for making cakes. Pablo appeared to have no real interest in where the almonds go: I told him how much the packets cost and he just shrugged: nothing is likely to change how much he gets paid for the rather gruelling task of cultivating and harvesting the nuts.
Scratching away at the hard surface of the land, or somehow capture the over-abundant fruit that spills off the trees daily, I have had very vivid memory of the beginning of Jean de Florette, when the naïve city hunchback toils up to the old family house, laden with furniture and Marie-Antoinette optimism about country life, only to fail consistently in all his attempts to breed rabbits or grow cabbages. I can only hope my neighbours are nicer than Ugelin and aren’t going to block up my well- or, more likely, inflate the price of water. We have already had one attempt to sell us an hour’s extra water at 9,000 Euros when the real price should be 1,500 max- but in this case my neighbours act as the good guys, warning us about the opportunist who owns the water rights and needs to make some money to offset the losses he has made on his own finca. However, there have been some successes: I have made several bottles of figs in rum from the many black fig trees, using Nigella Lawson’s recipe. The trouble is that there are so many. It’s sad to think how much they would cost on a plate in London, when I can’t even manage to pick up the windfalls.
Under the bonnet
The Landrover is ready, after three tries at the paperwork. The very charming young man from the concession in Almeria kept meeting us for coffee, but then slapping his head and saying he hadn’t got the right papers, or needed something else. The last attempt was the most tortuous: he turned up at the bar in Lubrin, as arranged, to take Sandy to Almeria to pick the car up – apparently now ready and registered. When he turned up, miraculously only half an hour late, he admitted that the tracker, which insurance requires, had not been fitted. I pointed out that we couldn’t drive it without the tracker, as I had explained to him on the phone, because the insurance was not valid. He made a “really? You don’t say?” face, although we had had a long conversation about it, and suggested he call the insurance company. We could take the car now and have the tracker fitted later, maybe? No, I explained, BECAUSE THE INSURANCE IS NOT VALID WITHOUT IT. You don’t say! Think of that! In the end, when I got to what I think of as the “¡es inadmissible!” moment, he started to take it seriously and call round to locate the tracker, which he had previously told me had arrived and was being fitted. It turned out it hadn’t even been delivered, but miraculously, when I started the process of hitting the roof, he found it and organized the fitting – after lunch at 3pm as the mechanics couldn’t work before then, of course. This is one of the lessons I am learning: it is necessary to be extremely assertive if you want anything done. Saying it in a normal voice or in passing will mean you are ignored. Unfortunately, this means engaging in constant bollockings – but weirdly, nobody seems to hold it against you. On the contrary, they seem to expect it, and to behave a lot better after you’ve shouted than before. The same thing happened with my Ford. After 6 weeks, I still don’t have a second key. On various occasions, I turned up at the garage, asking vaguely and politely for it. The son, a languid, gangling twenty-something, would wave a hand at me from behind the desk. “Hola, Julieta!” No, no key! Why not? Well, these things take time. And by the way, he said, could I drop him some more paperwork? He asked, for the third time, for Sandy’s NIE number and the padronimiento, the certificate that shows we live here. I pointed out I had already given it to his father, and he shrugged, saying his father forgot stuff all the time.
Eventually, I went down and asked for the father, or alternatively, the boss. Suddenly, father plus another, bigger boss, were there, and with every sign of energy and enthusiasm, were talking on the phone to the key people .It turned out the key hadn’t actually been ordered at all, but now they would order me two, and register them with the police, a process they were supposed to have completed anyway. Father wrote me his mobile on a card and said if I brought the car in he would also check it over for me, no worries. I played my pathetic woman card, and said I was worried about being up in the country with only one key, if something went wrong. Don’t you worry, mujer, they said, if anything goes wrong you call us and we’ll come and get you in a car. Don’t worry, it will all be sorted out this week! Well, we’ll see. I just know I’ll have to call them on Friday, and they’ll have forgotten about it. Then I’ll have to go and give them another rocket, and finally they’ll order the key.
Bad car week
All in all, we had an unbelievably bad car week. We went to Vera beach with the Adkins, who were staying, and, about 50 yards away, the same, one-key Ford car got broken into – apparently by passing hippies/gypsies who forced the lock and nicked the navigator. Vera was invaded with them, apparently – a change from the usual retired English people and pleasant Spanish hairdressers and supermarket workers. A few days later, when we went to Almeria to pick up the Landrover, tracker and all, the Ford started to smell weirdly of burning rubber. Lara, ever the drama queen, stalked out and said she couldn’t stand to sit in that smell. We ended up under its bonnet at 9pm in a garage by the roadside, having left the closing Ford/Landrover concession some half an hour earlier. It was dark, and we had to try to read the Spanish manual, then rush into the massive supermarket which fortunately sells everything, including brake fluid, and buy something (in the end, a kind of kitchen funnel with a hose, the actual purpose of which remained opaque) that would work to decant water into the radiator, which is stuck in an inaccessible position. The manual said nothing about how to reach it.
The same day, earlier on, Sandy had brought the new quad back, and it had broken down in the middle of the campo, leaving him and Alexander to walk back. Profusely apologetic, the very nice family at the quad shop came and shook their heads in disbelief, took it apart, and said it must be a “tonteria” (something stupid) like dirt in the fuel. At 9pm yesterday, they came up and took it away, shaking their heads again, and said it would be sorted out by the end of the week. In this case, I believe them: how complicated can a quad engine be? Also, they really are buena gente: a father, son and daughter who spent ages teaching Alexander to ride his small quad and gave him a free helmet into the bargain.
At home, meanwhile, the fancy new coffee machine broke down. I took it back to the Electrodomesticos in Vera – which involved driving round the narrow one-way streets on a Saturday, leaping out and dropping it off while trying to avoid more damage to the car. The girl in the shop and her colleagues spent some time poring over the manual and attempting to make coffee in the shop. Then she said she would replace it with another on Monday, which she duly did. I pulled up in the one-way system, leapt out and took it home. The next day, it broke down again, in a different way. Of course, I had to shout a bit on the phone. She said to bring it in and they would solve the problem. Another one-hour round trip to Vera, in which a van nicked my parking space and I ended up parked in a dusty alleyway on a pile of stones which was the only place I could find. The girl said that actually, this Taurus wasn’t a very good machine and perhaps I could change it for another, better quality one? A la tercera vez, va la vencida, third time lucky, she said, and laughed. I have to hope so. I have brought it back and so far, it works, but I am looking at it out of the corner of my eye, wondering how long it will last.
It is not that nothing broke down at home – on the contrary, things always did. However, here, I am not working, so I am not just going to go and buy a new one, which was my usual easy way out of things. Also, I had a Mercedes at home, and there was no point looking under the bonnet, because there was a big sign that told you not to touch it, but to take it back to the dealer. I haven’t looked under the bonnet of a car for a long time in fact, probably not since before I had my Toyota Carina, which was the best car I ever had – cheap, and never went wrong. Life is less automated here, and there is a good and a bad side to that. You don’t need a dryer: the washing is dry within five minutes of pegging it out. But there are times when you don’t want to learn to fix it yourself.
Children's worries
We had another terrible day, too, the day after the Adkins family left. The children had two weeks of fun with their friends, and then felt grim and desolate. They were both in tears: Lara because she will miss her best friend Natasha (“I will NEVER have another best friend like Natasha, why did you split us up?”) and Alexander for more complex, nearly-13 reasons. He spent a day looking miserable, then finally erupted in tears and protests of “you don’t understand.” It emerged he was worried about a number of things:
1) He wouldn’t make any friends here, it was too remote and there were no people. Yes, there are English people, but they aren’t my type, they don’t think like me. This is true: most of the Brits here are, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bit basic. Alexander, his social sense already finely honed by his massively snobby UK school, has picked up on the fact that he is now among the sons and daughters of failed plumbers and pool engineers, not bankers and lawyers. Hmm.
2) He would fall behind with school work. The school is not a proper big secondary, it’s like a primary, there isn’t anything to do. Yes again. It is a rural school: there will not be a massive IT facility and a music studio. The school work will be different: primary is behind the UK, though it all evens out in the end.
3) There is no big town here, he is cut off, there isn’t even broadband. True again.
After he’d said all this, I felt terrible and assailed by doubts. I wondered if I had been really selfish bringing him here, and depriving him of the benefits of a more sophisticated, expensive school. Would he become a village idiot, zooming around on a quad and forgetting how to do quadratic equations? At the same time, I knew perfectly well that a lot of the doubts had been put in his mind by the friend who had just left, who is still at the snobby school, and doesn’t have the quad, either. He probably wanted to even the ground out, by telling Alexander it was all very well having a quad and riding around the rambla, but he wouldn’t get a good job later, and would have to have a squat local barmaid as a girlfriend, instead of a glossy Sevenoaks model.
Night doubts
It was a bad night, though. My doubts extended themselves to myself: will I be cut off? Have I done the right thing stopping work? What was the point of all those years invested in my good career and earning potential, now I have thrown them away? And, more subtly, isn’t it naïve to think of escape to the country when the people here spend all their time trying to improve their lot, and their children’s, so that they can aspire to being lawyers and bankers and escape the tyranny of bashing almonds off trees for a few euros? I felt as if I had a succubus sitting on me all night, and woke up exhausted, not least because of the hours toiling away with the rake.
Books, signs and symbols
But the morning is always different from the night before. I took my coffee out to the back, where you look over the threshing circle to the mountains and see the sun rise. Since I have been watering the garden every day, all the flowers have begun to bloom: the jasmine, the mimosa tree, and a pale purple tree something like a bougainvillea, but with trumpet-shaped, paler flowers. The tree next to the garage has orange, trumpet like blooms; the roses are coming out in the flowerbeds near the house. A small amount of water has an astonishing effect. Alexander, engaged on the almond tree, appeared to have forgotten the day before. Later, we went down to the school, and confided Alexander’s concerns to Doña Isabel. Yes, she said, a lot of the English children were “fatal.” They had no support at home, and they struggled. But the Spanish children were good students, and plenty go to university. The state system here is standardized, so what they learn is a required curriculum: the children just need to work on their Spanish. We took away books: I promised them I will make sure they know the content in English, while they catch up with the Spanish. But by this time, Alexander had already lost interest in his future and education, and was lost in fantasises of a safe he wants to buy from Amazon to keep his earnings in. He spent most of the day bargaining with me: how many Euros if I move those stones? How many Euros if I get the figs? Well, maybe he will be successful in business, in which case, he won’t need education at all. As I have often reminded him, many of the most successful entrepreneurs were thrown out of school, anyway – (it was a mistake telling him this though, as of course he went and repeated it to his teachers, along with the fact, also imparted by his mother, that Einstein’s school report allegedly said “this boy will never amount to anything”.)
That night, we continued reading My Family and Other Animals, a routine that stopped when we had visitors. I pointed out that Gerry in the book, who turned out to be a top naturalist, had no real “formal” education, and apparently only mixed with local peasants and his family on Corfu. The children were not convinced the book was actually “true” – and wanted to know why the other children in it didn’t appear to either go to school/university, or work. I had no answer for that, but in any case, I found it reassuring, even if they didn’t. Books are a great comfort, serving this useful purpose of shoring up my decisions. There is always a book that makes your own mad, irrational choices seem likely to turn out well, so all I need to do is read plenty of books about people who have left riches for rags and turned out fine. Kind of the opposite of Cinderella, I suppose.
While waiting for these to turn up, I have continued my way through Don Quixote, but have added some other titles to my list. Sitting in the Bar Plaza, I was approached by an old man who looked rather like a sailor, or at least, wearing a cap. I was reading a day-old newspaper: they are kept on the freezer in the bar, and he cracked a joke about how they were not actually fresh, despite living there. He noticed Lara, reading a Puffin book of jokes (very easy, and she had read it about six times) and said she should be reading Don Quixote. I said maybe it was a bit hard, but I was reading it: he said, she should have the children’s edition, which I could get in Almeria. He then instructed me to note down various other things I should read, including specific poems by Lorca, which I duly did. I must read them in Spanish, he insisted. He had been married to a Frenchwoman he said, and things were not the same in other languages. Of course: I look forward to seeing him again; he is one of those characters that haunt the Bar Plaza, so no doubt I shall.
Meanwhile, the conversation with Doña Isabel was reassuring, and, what is more, the books she lent us belonged to someone I have not yet met, called Julieta, perhaps a teacher in the school. I thought maybe this was a sign: I have always been inclined to feel warmly to other Juliets, as there are so few. I am bound to make a few friends, but in any case, it doesn’t bother me that much, as I am really quite happy on my own. The trouble with so many people, as the children found, is that they can easily make you doubt your own mind. Books, on the other hand, make you surer of it.
As does religion: well, I have to think I am being guided, or I wouldn’t have done this in the first place. When I had my conversion experience, about twelve years ago now, Martin Waller told me over lunch in that French restaurant in Charterhouse Square that he likes, that my synapses were misfiring, probably. I recall it clearly: he is an atheist, of course, and we talked about Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which we had both just read. The synapses might have misfired; I wouldn’t be surprised, but then love might just be a chemical reaction. Or, it could be both a chemical reaction, and a transforming experience. I’m not with Martin. Materialism doesn’t tally with my experience and it’s too depressing. The fact is, the conversion experience, all of five minutes, has lasted with me for the twelve years since, and being religious, I see symbolism in everything. If I pick up a book, it often has a message, and this helps to stop me doubting the path I’ve chosen. And living out here, surrounded by mountains, and plants that burst into life after a few days’ water, the post may not come for days, and the broadband may not work, ever, but you are never going to run short of messages
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