Marlboro man country

Men and women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Real country

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

Spanish and English radio: death and fun

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

Good housekeeping, offending people

Good Housekeeping

This was the magazine my mother always had and which I occasionally bought for that reason: amazingly, it has not “re-branded” itself despite a) housekeeping being out of fashion and b) the fact that it is only partly about housekeeping and also, like every other woman’s magazine, about diets and shopping. However, you can still imagine a farmer’s wife in what used to be Cumberland and has now been re-branded something like Lakeside, reading this magazine and it still has the Good Housekeeping Institute, which tests consumer goods. It also has quite long worthy articles about ailments and the menopause, and often features the real size16 women that dominate the UK getting makeovers in which they generally look worse than before. I admit to liking the magazine quite a lot: it is partly atavism, if that is the right word, because of its familiarity, but also the fact that it is a bit worthy and stodgy with only a dash of modernity, like M&S individual sponge puddings. Also, I am a secret housewife.

For years I have not liked the word, and as noted before, in Spanish “ama de casa” can mean something a bit like a comedy fishwife. The other day, Gary from Orange Box passed me in the town market and asked me how I liked being a housewife. My immediate reaction (as it so often is) was to bristle and say that I was doing a lot else besides housework, and of course when I was bustling about in a suit and never seeing the morning or evening, I was quite scornful of housewives who read the Next catalogue and pushed a trolley about before having a coffee. Now, however, I am officially one, and I do some of that, though I draw the line at the Next catalogue, (not least because I would be back in the land of junk mail from which I have nearly escaped – last week I got rid of a sheepskin company and, for the third time, the Amnesty shopping catalogue). I suppose there are as many types of housewife as there are career women, or businessmen: the ones whose houses smell overpoweringly of dog, ones who write novels or who lie in bed depressed, and ones who murder their husbands and bury them under the patio.

As I have no radio, when I am cleaning the kitchen floor or cooking, I spend the time thinking about what I will write, or just thinking, which I generally didn’t do at home because the radio was quite good. (Here, the radio is quite crap and also very opaque – I have no idea how the programming works and have never seen anything like the Radio Times though it is just the kind of magazine that ought to exist in Almería. RNE, which is national, seems to have 1, 3 and 5 – none of which appear to represent any particular constituency, though 5 appears to be mainly endless news bulletins about industrial and traffic accidents, of which there are a lot in Spain. On another one of the channels, you get a man philosophising about how Cervantes is like Virgil – then it skips back to some pop music. As for the local channels, Canalsur appears quite interesting when you can hear it, otherwise it is “Fiesta” channel which is a kind of manic teenage party, or the English channel which plays hits from any decade except the present; the presenters sound like they are retired ex-pats who are doing it for a hobby and are a bit slow on the uptake – the other day the man said “Clocks go back this weekend, don’t forget or you’ll be late for work.”)

Today, in a self-referential way, I was thinking about housekeeping and what I knew about the theory. I have identified five sources which make up my knowledge of the subject:
1) My mother. I don’t think she was much of a housekeeper; her mind was on higher things. However, I did follow her about while she did the housework and I do remember her telling me you should dust before you wipe.
2) Good Housekeeping magazine. I can’t actually remember any tips but there must have been some: things like using vinegar on the window, which I would never be bothered to do.
3) Anne of Green Gables. For some reason, I always remember Mrs Rachel Lynde commenting that Anne had turned into a good housekeeper, on the basis that there was nothing that shouldn’t be there in her breadbin or her scrap pail – or something along those lines. I imagine this means she didn’t waste food or keep it when it was mouldy? Wasting is a big issue these days: Jane was very disapproving of Sandy throwing out food we hadn’t eaten, but he said good chefs always do that and look at Raymond Blanc who hand makes ice cream every day and throws it all out the next. I do try to just buy what I need, but this is quite hard with children, who say they want something and then change their mind and also have become so strong-minded you can’t make them eat things they don’t like, as they used to have to eat rice pudding. Interestingly, the Spanish school comedor still has this rule: the children must eat everything on their plate, a rule which applied at my primary school and which meant we had to squash it between the stacked plates to hide it. Also, I do buy the fruit and vegetables at the market on Wednesday and aim to make it last the week, largely in the fridge as advised by my builder. Apart from that, living a way from a shop, you have to use the freezer – freezing bread and taking it out in the morning, something that would have been considered beyond the pale on Prince Edward Island I am sure.
4) The hymn with the words “A man that looks on glass/On it may stay his eye,” which are by Herbert. From memory, it says you can either look at the glass, or beyond the glass to the heavens; it then goes on to say that if we do things with the right purpose they will be bright and clean, or something like that. I can’t help it, I always think of cleaning windows when I hear this, and what work it is making the glass transparent. Vinegar is clearly the solution.
5) Farewell, rewards and fairies. Slut used to be a very useful word for a bad housekeeper, the kind who would sweep the dust under the bed forgetting that the Almighty was watching, or not bother to get out the vinegar. In the past, apparently, fairies used to reward good housekeepers – presumably these were the kind of fairies that want to live in a clean house, like hobgoblins, and not the wild kind. But as Kipling asked, “who of late for cleanliness/Found sixpence in her shoe?” Those days are gone.

Forget farthings, in the old days a good housekeeper was worth her weight in gold. Today, does any man look out for a woman who can cook or clean? Certainly not: they look at other things, and then perhaps if she had a good job. I read in Spanish Cosmopolitan the other day that when surveyed as to what they like in a woman, Spanish men, compared with other Europeans, like her to be passionate about her career. Germans, English and the rest prefer a woman to put them first, and her work second: a surprising result, if it is even partly true. I suppose our evolutionary mating criteria constantly change with society and perhaps there is a reason why a Spanish man will survive better with a career woman than without: certainly, women here, though quite overtly feminine, are not at all shrinking: they are very confident, bold and assertive, rather like Carmen, and there seem to be a lot of them in public life so perhaps the ama de casa will soon be shut in the dusty broom cupboard of the past.

Offending people

I have been thinking more about the Spanish lady telling the shop lady that she was fat, and how the latter didn’t seem remotely offended. Spanish people don’t seem to be offended by personal remarks of this kind – so what does offend them? I would like to know. There was a hint in Alexander saying that his teacher said the UK could not be a post-industrial society, because Spain was not: as I was writing yesterday, they are quite “patriotic,” though I don’t think patriotism is quite the word I am looking for. For instance, I imagine they would take offence at someone criticising Spanish food, where an English person would quite happily say that English food was shite. Noticeably, too, the Spanish here are pretty insular – and although this is Almería, I have a feeling that it is not just them. For instance, they are surrounded by English people, but show no interest at all in their culture, cooking, or anything, really: I haven’t ever heard a Spanish person here ask a question about the UK, except once about Princess Diana, the exception that invariably proves the rule. I am sure they think Spanish food – which while very good, is very unvarying, is the best, and that there is not much need to try anything else. For instance, at the food fiesta, Juan Mañas was waxing quite enthusiastic about showing me how to make migas or the strange goat’s milk dessert they have, but I know would not be remotely interested in learning to make an English dish; he looked quite vague when I said Sandy could do a haggis for the fiesta next year and didn’t ask any questions about what a haggis was. I should think it would be just what they would like here, too, anything out of entrails and blood should go down a treat. In the same way, they don’t really go on holiday outside Spain that much – and this is true of the smart madrilenos that work in Sandy’s office, just as much as the local people here. They go to Cadiz, for instance, or Grenada, in the summer, not on a plane to England or America, or the Caribbean. I suppose they have all they need here. This makes me think that they would be offended by criticisms of Spain or the Spanish way, and also if you refused to work with their uncle, or buy his not very nice olive trees, as I did the other day. You could offend a person by failing to appreciate their community, family or business, I think – whereas criticising their hair or clothes would probably just make them shrug or laugh. Perhaps they are less conscious of themselves as individuals and more as a group; they certainly relate quite differently to their family, village, town, country, than English people, who would dismiss these, at least outwardly, with ease.

Dreams, work, patriotism, this and that

Morning in Los Herreras

It has been a perfect morning; chilly but very bright, with remote, streaky clouds blown about a blue sky. When I opened the side door, a flight of birds rose up twittering and a wagtail was walking about on the surface water. Light scatters from everything and everything blows about in the breeze; the white faces of the little houses of the village reflect the light back and the rambla is full of fluttering grey doves. Though it is late October, it is a very poetic, April morning, such as you are supposed to have in England but never seem to any more.

Dreams about work

I did, however, have one of a series of dreams about work: all bad. In the last one, I was working as a junior administrator in what must have been a dodgy company, with a rather shoe-string stingy atmosphere like Euromoney when I joined it, only without the buzz and sweat of desperate, youthful ambition. In the dream, it was my first day, and I was working for a woman who clearly wasn’t going to let me be promoted and suspected me of being potentially good at my job. I went back home and said to Sandy I didn’t want to go back. He suggested maybe I should stick at it, and I thought desperately of wanting to be in my house instead of the office. Well, all the years of my adult life I have not been able to be in the house and now I can I am perhaps afraid I will be sent back. In the second dream, I was working in a place that appeared to be a newspaper, with a group of bitchy women, including Julia, who actually existed and worked at the FT with me – except not “with me,” since at the time she was too grand and edited the features while I only wrote about dirty industry.

(Julia looked and sounded like Patsy in Ab Fab, only without the fun: I and my desk mate Deborah hated her. I still remember her coming over with my copy for a feature on oil in her hand, covered in red biro. It said things like: “What exactly is oil? I think we need to know!” Of course, she didn’t know what oil was, because she only knew about soft furnishings and outfits: in fact, she astonishingly managed to become pregnant at a later stage and I recall her saying to Deborah: “I keep looking at my flat and thinking: where will the baby go? Where? Over there, on those cushions?” Much later, I met her at an “ex-FT” party, which of course was full of people pretending to be overjoyed to see each other, and energetically proving how well they had done since leaving. To my disbelief, she came over and was rather gushing and nice to me: presumably because by this point my job was better than hers as she was a promoter for a not very successful luxury goods company and had also, I heard later, had a disastrous romantic history, some of it embarrassing and public. That’s the wheel of fortune for you, and also working on a newspaper, where everyone’s linen became dirty and then got washed in public sooner or later; it was only a matter of time.)

In the dream, the Julia woman told me sharply that we were not actually working on a newspaper, but providing some kind of administrative service to it. I kept trying to point out that I had actually been a journalist, but it was quite irrelevant and she looked at me as if I were wearing badly wrong shoes. So work has not gone away, yet, though it is changing its shape in my mind. I still wonder to myself it if matters having that kind of a purpose. I am sure the vicar would say it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you were good: work gives little opportunity for that as usually you do better by being bad, at least in your life time. Also, does it matter if you have one, and don’t fulfil it? Like Mercedes, and Sylvia, and all the people I know who are secret writers, but might never publish anything. I shouldn’t think being in Smith’s matters much to the Almighty.

No more visitors

One of the problems of moving to “Spine” as the Brits call it, is that people consider it a nice place to go on holiday, where it is always sunny and they can lie out getting enough sun to last the rest of the year. Well, I am fed up with it now, and when it comes to visitors, I have begun to behave like a nasty librarian – you can look but not touch and nobody better try to take a book out. Nobody will want to visit me soon, since I have become so forbidding. But I have washed enough sheets, duvets and towels to last me for some time. I was in town today – market day – and ended up having a coffee with the Brits in Bar Plaza: there was considerable sympathy for my view. One girl said she had banned visitors for a year – then said that if they came, they were on their own, mate. Another said it was a good plan to do building work, then nobody could visit you. – or say you were doing it. It was interesting anyway: I met an Australian lady who has spent years living in a van on a site outside town after her husband had a vision of the location – he has visions regularly. She said they came here because he was ill and it was closer than Australia; now she transports pets back and forth when he has to go back to the doctor. Just the transport: if the people’s pets’ documents aren’t right, they are also on their own, mate. Self-sufficient people here, and they expect others to be so, too.

Rubbish

After the coffee, I went to tell Maria in the Ayuntiamento that I finally got my large rubbish bin (two years after requesting it). The Ayuntiamento had been calling them every week since July, but in the end shouting “es inadmissible,” did the trick again. I am sorry to say that getting cross is the only answer here. The bin turned up the next day even though the rubbish men left a note telling me not to bother them any more about the fact that they collect randomly, so that I don’t know when to take my rubbish down to the road. Last week, instead of coming Monday night, they came early, so I missed them for the week, which means heaving stuff down in the car to the next village. My neighbour, and the Ayuntiamento ladies, said that the bin company ought to come down the drive and collect it from the door, the way they did when Spanish people lived there (three owners ago). Well, said one of them, but this way you get a little walk. True enough, and I could walk down my drive to the road every day and leave the rubbish down there, now I have a large size wheelie bin. If I get into another discussion with the rubbish company, I might confuse them more and after two years of waiting for my big bin, I don’t want to risk it.

I also went into the supermarket, where I overheard a rather Spanish conversation between a customer and the two ladies in the shop.

Lady Customer (to young shop lady) Come here, Pilar. (feeling her round the waist). Oh, my goodness, you’re fat!
Pilar: I’m fat?
Lady Customer: Yes, you’re fat. Were you always this fat?
Pilar: Fat? I don’t know.
Other Shop Lady: She was always like this, I think, weren’t you?Pilar: (looking at self) Well, I don’t know.
Other Shop Lady: Maybe not, maybe she’s got fatter.
Customer: Yes, she’s quite fat, how did that happen?

There is no way this could happen in England: the shop lady would either be silently offended, or deck you. I don’t know if people ever do drop hints in Spain – but it is hard to imagine.

Patriotism

I spent a good few hours or so helping Alexander do his homework: researching sources of energy in Andalucia and then revising his “sociales” – geography and demographics. Apparently, the done thing is to find things in which Andalucia comes top – this goes down very well. By the same token, it is not OK for the UK to come out ahead: according to Alexander’s teacher, the UK cannot be a post-industrial society, because Spain is not. Viva España, etc. Well, we don’t have that patriotic feeling, I explained to Alexander: there is, as says the wonderful Javier Marias, whom I am reading, no word like “patria,” in English. It is what my parents taught me was the enormous virtue of England, for them as European post-war immigrants: it could never have been swayed by a Hitler or a Mussolini. Are the Spanish subject to patriotic enthusiasm? I am not sure: I don’t know enough history yet to know how swayed the Spanish actually were by Franco – but it seems they didn’t really get the choice to be swayed, having been subject to one unpleasant dictator after another for hundreds of years. It seems to have made them sick to death of anything that might cut across personal freedom–so far I have not met a person under 50 who has a good word to say about any aspect of the establishment: religion, politics, or the royal family and I have never heard anyone philosophise, except about life, fate, birth, death and such eternal truths. In that way, they can be a bit British in their scepticism, but in fact it’s a blunter instrument. Listening to the radio today, I heard a Spanish presenter relate his experience at a German wedding and how he had quarrelled with a German friend who disapproved of his getting embarrassingly drunk. Hey, he said, I thought weddings were all about going over the top – and also, I’m Spanish: I take every opportunity I can to enjoy myself. There is a kind of anger just below the surface of the enjoyment, though. I suppose Franco stopped that for a long time: you get the sense they somehow allowed him to do that to them – they feel fooled or dishonoured, like a taciturn peasant whose clever foreign wife cheated on him – and they are saying to themselves that they will never let anyone do that to them again.

Beyond the brand

Marketing no hay

When I graduated and deconstruction was still perched on the edge of being past it, it was well known that advertising stank. It made you buy stuff you didn’t want or need, and was a tool of capitalism and/or the establishment along with the media and, in fact, a lot of books, such as FR Leavis. In the intervening years, I had forgotten this eternal truth, but I have been struck by it since living in Almeria. The fact is, there is almost no advertising here. There are no posters, no bus stop hoardings (no bus shelters at all) and there are no ads on the sides of buses or taxis. Even in magazines, most advertising seems much less in-your-face, though of course Spanish Vogue has the same 25 pages of designer ads – but that’s another country altogether, that place where the internationally rich live. You could say this is because Almería is poor, and therefore nobody is worth tempting, but from memory, I don’t think Madrid is that much worse than Almería. Of course, the Lake District is not full of advertising hoardings either, but it’s a small place, and you can go miles and miles here without seeing a caption. It is a huge relief: having got into the habit of thinking advertising was clever, since so many graduates work in it, I now think that actually things like “It’s utterly butterly” are not that brilliant but more annoying or at the very least a huge misdirection of talent. I don’t except myself from this, since I wasted plenty of my life thinking up stupid brand slogans for a bunch of engineers or lawyers.

(Since everyone that did English was advised to go into advertising, a few people I knew did go into it and were quite embarrassed about taking the capitalist shilling - but they got over that pretty quickly as they got paid well and had cars. I nearly took a first job with Young and Rubicam and it has to be said that their canapés were very dinky. However, I didn’t; I did a doctorate instead, which was a fat lot of good and also quite dreadfully boring most of the time, though I quite like the fact that if someone says “is there a doctor in the room!” I could say yes, plus it was for years a good put down for anyone who called me “Miss,” and for men that patronised me in general. If I had done it, I don’t suppose things would have turned out any differently, since despite my initial aim of avoiding anything to do with marketing, I ended up working in it more or less, perhaps because all roads lead there. )

When I was still doing that stuff, I read some articles in El País about the brand of Spain, written by the brand guru Wally Olins, whom I was about to meet and who is a vague relation by marriage. Country brands, apparently, are the latest thing, and the articles were all about how Spain as a brand was undervalued – hence why all the olive oil here has to be repackaged as “Italian,” to sell to northern Europeans who think Italy is more upmarket than Spain. A few days ago I met a wine and food salesman in the Intermarché supermarket in Vera, who told me that the same is true of anchovies: people think the San Antonio ones are better although they are all swimming about in the same sea. Such is the power of marketing, but I sincerely hope the Spanish don’t get some agency to re-brand themselves – not that I really imagine that would ever happen. So far, this is not a slick, packaged country, but a rough-edged one, and trying to position it like Italy would be akin to trying to turn Clint Eastwood into Brad Pitt. Heaven forbid. The fact that you can’t find a landscape without a crane, an overflowing litter bin and no water might be a drawback, but by the same token it keeps out all the people who want a nice unspoilt green picnic spot with a view of a lake.

New words

Today I went to join the local farm cooperative, about five miles out of town on the empty road to Uleila de Campo. Here, you can buy various useful commodities such as slightly cheaper petrol, animal feed and hay. It sits next to the place where they make President cheese from local goat milk – which, by the way, is branded French and not Spanish. My neighbour’s husband works there, so I know. They used the phrase “darse de alta” for “joining” the coop – I had been using “apuntarse,” which does mean something like “to put your name down for,” but this was apparently not the best choice in this context. “Darse de alta” is also used on websites, when you join or subscribe: an alta is a medical certificate, I think. This is one of the things about learning a language that you can only pick up by doing stuff – and which makes most days interesting in some way. Before I came to Spain, and when I thought I might work in Madrid doing a proper job, I spent a lot of time learning words like “rueda de prensa” (press conference) although Spanish is very short on marketing words and says things like “el marketing” as a result. Now, most of my new words vocabulary is now words like animal feed, pickaxe and shovel, and, because of Alexander’s homework, things like “hang glider.” We had to spend one and a half hours last night classifying a list of vehicles into the means by which they move, which was educational, and the day before that we did tools.

Meanwhile, it has rained almost non-stop for two days, and the whole week has been Scottish. Now that one batch of visitors has gone, we are expecting Jasmine and family – she is bound to be disappointed in the weather and to look plaintively at the sky talking about “call this Spanish sunshine!” as if I were personally responsible. Having said that, I am really looking forward to seeing her – she may wear stilettos by the pool, but she also has the heart of gold to go with. Meanwhile, I am taking advantage of one day of freedom.

The hostess with the leastest

A guest and a fish

“A guest is like a fish: they both begin to stink after four days.” This is apparently a Polish proverb, or so my father told me. Whatever, I find it’s true, though I daresay a hostess also starts to stink. I suspect, in any case, that I stink as a hostess, which is a shame, since I have this big house and keep asking people to stay. The fact is, I am like a librarian – I like the library but I don’t really want anyone to take any books out, and if they do, they had better not write in them or turn the corners over.

We have just had a family staying for seven nights, which obviously means they have outstayed their welcome by nearly double time. It is, as my husband pointed out, entirely my fault: we met them skiing, their children and ours hit it off, and we liked them, so I casually said they should come to visit us in Spain. This was last Easter, but it seemed like five minutes later that Louise had emailed me to say they could come in October half term, was that OK? It seemed OK at the time. The second email said they had booked for seven nights, hope that was OK, by which time obviously it was too late for it not to be OK. By then, too, Sandy had found out he had to be in Australia for over 2 weeks, one of which was the week of their visit, plus her husband was working, so it would just be Louise, me, and the children. Distinct aroma of kipper by the time the third email came. “Am really looking forward to some sun.” Oh, are you? I thought to myself. Well, maybe it won’t be sunny. After all, this is not a holiday resort, particularly as I am not on holiday. In fact, it poured with rain most of the time they were there. I felt quite bad for them, but at the same time, I admit I was thinking, hah! This is not Torremolinos, you know. Also, although the kids were actually really sweet and most of the time I indulged them, I found myself getting a bit impatient when they refused to go outside because of wasps, pointed out that there were flies in the house (as did Louise) and said they were travel sick on the bendy roads (as did Louise, who made me stop several times and said “Oh my God!” every time we passed another car). I said briskly things like “Well, this is the country you know!” and “This isn’t England, you know!” and generally felt a mixture of guilt and irritation.

Louise is very nice, probably a lot nicer than me, and certainly more laid back about house tidiness. Her children are nice, too, and probably better-behaved than mine. However, someone else’s mess is worse than yours, especially if they don’t shop, cook, or pay. I mean, she did buy one meal, but I did about three big loads of shopping, and what’s more, she wandered off to read a book while I unloaded the lot out of the car. I am sure she meant to help; in fact, she kept saying “Can I help at all?” but somehow that doesn’t work: someone just has to get on and do it, the way Sylvia would. When she went, she didn’t empty the waste paper basket in her room, but just left me a big bag of rubbish. I think she’s just an untidy person, but as I am borderline obsessive compulsive, (but without the skill set) it was a bit stressful. Plus, the children were at school, with homework, and trying to keep their noses to the grindstone while other children ambled about with Playstations, was not that easy: as usual, I was the bad guy. Perhaps I really am the bad guy. Occasionally, I looked at Louise and wondered what she was thinking. This hostess really stinks, perhaps, or, “Let me see, why did I come here? The other thing was, that she wanted to sit and talk quite a bit, or maybe she didn’t actually want to, but felt she had to. The fact is, I don’t really like talking to people much – I would rather read or write. Correction: I don’t mind having a laugh with my neighbours, or talking about the weather, but I don’t want to sit about and talk about my relationship with my sister or how to bring up children: it seems like a waste of time. I kept thinking: who cares what you think, or I think – why do we have to sit about and exchange uninformed views on stuff? Louise would be talking away about her mother being OCD (probably hinting to me that I should unbend a bit) and I was thinking about how I wanted to go out and weed the path. What was really weird was she kept saying that she was “not a people person,” whatever that means, to which I was thinking, well, what are you doing here talking then? Also, she didn’t wear any make up, and made a point of saying that she didn’t, and that she didn’t wear high heels ever. Well, fine, and after all I have moaned about Jasmine and how she wears stilettos round the pool, but the fact is that Jasmine is decorative, and Louise is not, and if you are in someone’s house for a week, you should be pretty some of the time, or they will get fed up looking at you. As my father said to my mother when she used the excuse: “Well, they’re only for the house, nobody’s going to see me,” for wearing her M&S slacks that had seen better days: well, we can see you.

When it comes down to it, there is something intensely disruptive about people from “home” coming here. However much you like them, and would not mind them wearing no lipstick if you were in a hotel with them, it’s like having someone keep trying to dress you in an outfit you are trying to take off. Life here is so hugely different – far more than I anticipated – that we need to concentrate hard, get down into it, and shed our old skins. This is particularly true of the children, who need to think Spanish to survive in school. For instance, the school here thinks handwriting and setting things out neatly is very important: they have to use a green biro for bullet points, a red biro for underlining, and so on. Handwriting is very much more decorative, and you have to learn it. Alexander is crap at handwriting, and what is more, very slow at writing in general, being more a number boy: while the guests were here, the headmistress gave him 22 pages of copying – rows of maths problems - to do over five days. Pretty boring stuff, but I suppose the idea is to get him into the habit and make him realise it matters. Plus, as he had a mate here, he didn’t remotely want to work, so got very tearful, at which my guest said she thought it was ridiculous and his teacher must be a bully. Well, whatever. It isn’t helpful, though – we live here, and we have to play by the rules. You don’t get to pick the nice weather and the outdoor life and the music of David Bisbal live in Almería ( I would definitely run off with him) and leave the old-fashioned school rules, the Junta de Andalucía curriculum and the fact there is a shed-load of pointless bureaucracy involved in doing anything official. Swings and roundabouts, what you lose here, you gain there: lo que pierde aquí, se gaña alla.

The end of Mimi

Anyway, apart from that, Spotty-Mimi, the premature goat, died. I had said to Lara that it was her goat, and she damn well had to look after it if she kept it, although looking at it, I suspected it wouldn’t last long. She swore she would, but the second night she woke me up at 1 a.m. shouting that she needed to shut that bloody goat up, what did you have to do to stop it bleating? I said she would make a great mother one day, and put her back into bed, while removing the goat box from her room where she had insisted on keeping it. The goat did not look at all clever, and when I tried to give it some milk from its bottle it just lay there with its head flopping about. You are not long for this world, I thought, so much for Louise’s forecasts that I would end up looking after it, and her wondering how I would manage. In the morning, it was stiff, and I took it up to Pablo’s once Lara had gone to school. On the way up, I passed Maria, Juana’s mother, and showed her the goat. “Muerto,” I said. “What are you bringing it up here for?” she asked. “Just put it in the rubbish bin.” I said I felt maybe I shouldn’t do that. “A ti que te importa?” she said, or something like that, something very Spanish like – “Why bother – put it in the bin, and when you’ve put it in the bin, you shut it and you forget it, it’s not your affair any more! She added that the goat had been born too early and didn’t have the strength to live. I left it with Juana, who ticked her mother off for the idea of putting it in the rubbish bin, and said she would give Lara another one, but bigger and one that could eat properly. Well, ok, but no hurry, I said, since I think Lara’s experience of being foster mother to a goat may have dampened her enthusiasm. This is, after all, the child known as the Evil Empress, who, aged about five and before showing any interest in where babies came from, asked me “how do you stop yourself having a baby, Mummy?”) on the basis that babies cry and are a nuisance. I can see her point, but it’s too late for that.

Self sufficiency

It has been over a month since I wrote anything. Before, when I had a job, I used to wonder what Liz (the nanny) did, and was often heard to say that I believed she was watching Oprah and/or shagging the local DIY man, Tony. I take it all back. Now that I am a housewife… (Housewife: this is no longer a word any woman believes applies to her, and it has lost all uses that are not ironic. In Spain there is a comedy accent that is “ama de casa”, a housewife accent, which my old tutor demonstrated for me: it was amusing as he was a very English, very camp Spaniard.) Anyway, now that I am a housewife, I quite see there is no time for shagging, watching daytime telly etc. I even regret taking the piss out of Vanessa, 4x4 mother, for claiming her day was so exhausting she could hardly face her tennis lesson.

Blonde flamenco dancers – a future generation

The children started school in mid September. The term runs through to 21 December, no half term, though there are a scattering of local and national holidays and, even better, “días de puente,” or bridge days – the day between a holiday that falls on a Thursday, and the weekend, is also a day off. Friday was a national holiday, the Día de España, and Monday was a holiday in the local town. This particular holiday was a food fiesta: all the local ladies prepare their special dish and then stand at stalls in the town square so that everyone can try. Of course, it is a scrum as everybody has to push to get there before it all goes, and the old ladies are the best pushers. As always, there are free hats, and the little girls from the school do a flamenco demonstration. In the line up, there were 3 little blondes, visibly English, wearing the very Spanish leotards, flower hairpieces, and flamenco skirts and speaking, of course, perfect Spanish. On the sidelines, the blonde parents look on proudly, not speaking more than the odd “gracias” themselves.

There are eight children in Alexander’s class, three Spanish children, the rest are different nationalities. There are quite a few German families here – you can tell, because they sell fondue cheese and sunflower seed bread in some of the supermarkets, and one child is Dutch. Lara’s class is all Spanish, a gaggle of rather wicked looking girls, whom I first saw wearing bright red lipstick and little high heels in the main street: there is no school uniform here.

As I have found out, going in and out of school, up to the football pitch on the hill, in and out of the local shops - this a strange place – stranger than it seemed at first sight. To all intents and purposes it is a little, whitewashed Spanish town, with the traditional housewives, the local bakery, market and so on. It isn’t quite that- it won the lottery a while back so there is money and there are also a lot of Brits –some that drink, some builders, some eccentrics – and the young parents, after a better lifestyle for their kids. They mixed somewhat uneasily at the village food fiesta: there is some backslapping between the races, though mostly the groups divide neatly, and there is, interestingly, an English lady selling her scones alongside the paella. They go down well – I notice one Spanish old lady with six on her plate, laden with jam and cream. But there is also bad feeling: in the British bar, they moan about the Spanish and have a go. There isn’t enough work for some of this lot – mainly builders, plumbers, etc- and they spend the time drinking and bitching. When I see Juan in the square, he greets me with great friendliness and gets me some food to try, but clearly doesn’t like one of the other women, the rather rough and ready mother of Lara’s friend, whom he later tells me drinks too much. “There are some good English, like you, senores, y senoras, but there are some mala gente, bad people,” he says.

But what will it be like in a generation, when those little English, Spanish flamenco girls, and their dark, rather small, stocky Spanish classmates, presumably, intermarry? How will this town be transformed, from a town divided between the dark, sturdy, conservative, traditionally dirt-poor Spanish tradespeople, and the fair, red and bony adventuring Brits who came here in search of the sun and sangria? What kind of mixture of brown-haired, bilingual, small-town children with a streak of adventure is going to result? My neighbour, Consuelo, commented to me that she personally didn’t go into Lubrín because she didn’t like the people – and she meant the Spanish. She said they looked down on her for being a country person, and they never said hello but walked past with their noses in the air. “Y tu también vas al mierdo, coño,” were her words, or something like that. She is a country person, in the best way: in the supermarket today she had no handbag, only a purse, and explained she was not used to carry a handbag and felt she looked ridiculous. I suggested to her that the “Britanicos malos” would breed with the “españoles malos” that she doesn’t like, and produce a really unpleasant generation, but she said that in Spanish there was a saying that “loco” parents produced sensible children. The world is certainly an interesting place.

Crooked line accounting

Nothing is simple here. Presented with a long list of things each child needed – including odd items such as a cardboard box, I was instructed to go to Maria Perez, one of the local shopkeepers, in town and buy them. A queue of other people was doing the same thing, but she had run out of various critical items, such as recorders and boxes. Each time, Maria contemplated the list for a particular class with care, before saying she would have to order the stickers, or the notebook, or the dictionary. You would think, given that the school makes the list, they could just give it to you in advance, I suggested, when it was my turn. She thought for a bit, then shrugged. Yes, she agreed, but they like the parents to use the local shop. Well, they still could, but it would be better if the school ordered them in advance? Yes, but they don’t.

Later, I realised I could have got the whole lot cheaper in the big supermarket, but the point is to support the local shop. It certainly can’t support itself: most of the businesses here are woefully old-fashioned, but people prop them up, and they don’t close. Even the café in Vera, where the South American ladies who run the place cannot take an order, ask you to write things down for them, always break the coffee machine and run out of ice cream, seems to survive, simply because of its pretty location.

The school bus comes at about 8.15, goes past the house and picks up the final child on the road, then comes back to collect ours and the couple in the next village before returning to town. The children take a “merenda” – the 11.00 snack and can eat lunch at 3.00 in the school dining room, before getting the bus back and arriving about 4pm. There is, therefore, no school run. Thank you, the Junta de Andalucía. I was supposed to fill out a complicated form for the benefit of the dining room and the bus, including bank account details and family income. I told the teacher I didn’t want to, really, and she agreed and pointed out that I could just make it up, as nobody would know anyway. I drew the line at making something up, so I just left it blank.

.. and administration…

Later, I had to do emails to Inma, etc, re various bits of admin, like health cards. This is a big mystery. Having inquired at the Ayuntiamento, I pitched up at the local surgery on the right Friday, to apuntarme, register, sign on. The place was full of fat ladies and old men who helpfully directed me to the doctor (wrong) and eventually to the social security lady (right). I spent fifteen minutes in the queue, then half an hour with her, explaining that Sandy and I have Spanish NIE numbers now, but the children don’t, and trying to find out how to get a health card. She said I needed a social security number, but in the meantime she would register the children if I went back to the Ayuntiamento and photocopied their passports and EU health cards. I spent a nice twenty minutes with Maria and the copier, and then returned. This time, the lady gave me some forms for the children and an address in Huercal Overa, near the bus station for me. Later, I called them up, but there was no answer. Inma said the lady was wrong, you can’t have a social security number if you don’t work in Spain, you have to phone Nocastello. This turned out to be Newcastle. I have no idea who I have to phone or why, but perhaps this will become clear. Meanwhile, if one of us needs emergency treatment, I daresay we will be able to cut through the red tape: a doctor comes to a mystery location somewhere near us every Thursday. I asked Inma if she could set up a meeting for the kids to get a NIE number. For the fourth time, she asked me to send me their, and our, passport numbers, which I duly did. When I’m not doing this, I pick up the post in town (we have given up getting it delivered as it is quicker to collect it), and go and negotiate with various tradespeople about the problems in the house such as non-working satellite disc.

Later it’s time to wind down the hill for my weekly argument with BBVA about my bank card, which doesn’t work. It is my third such card. In the bank, there is no window or glass – you stand at a desk and everyone listens and watches. The BBVA man doesn’t apologise because my card – apparently the latest thing in cards - doesn’t work for the third time. He asks me which shops in Vera it didn’t work in, and suggests it may be because they are trying to put it through as a credit, not a debit card, perhaps. He says his own card works fine, and shows it to me. But mine doesn’t, which is damn annoying when you want a vegetable rack. I say Ill have to transfer money into my Cajamar account. He’s fine with that, and points out it will cost 30 Euros, so better if he gives it to me in cash. He gets it out, 10,000 Euros, in an envelope, and I walk off to pay it into Cajamar.

I prepare to go home, via a couple of shops. I buy a present for Phoebe in Lara’s class – fail to find acceptable, non-Disney wrapping paper, and wander about, looking for an exciting retail experience. I never buy anything in Vera, though. It’s just not that big a thrill looking at expandable washing lines and plastic stacking baskets. I arrive home, do about an hour of housework – hovering up beetles and spiders - which makes no impression on the house - and deal with junk mail, ringing Laithwaites for the xth time to say we do not want any more special offers on claret from their Horsham shop.

Spanish long division
When the children return, I do about two hours of homework with Alexander (like pulling teeth), trying to translate laws of physics or ratios for measuring population growth from Spanish, then explain how to answer in Spanish, copying diagrams, etc. As we work, we regularly have sorrowful conversations about how hard it all is. He has to do quite difficult work in a language he doesn’t speak, he points out, tearfully. He is anxious about falling behind, how he will not get a job. He puts his head down on the desk and I feel overwhelmed with guilt. Most of the English children have to repeat a year. Yes, but in Spain this is not really a big deal – does it matter if he goes to university a year later if he speaks Spanish? I say this, but can see he is still unhappy: he wants to keep up with his old class and life, he likes maths and science but has to work on a language. These moments are diminishing, but still happen, as he is still betwixt and between – he still carries anxiety about the future on his shoulder. Meanwhile, I have to spent a lot of my evening doing homework: translating forwards and back, which tests my love of language and of translation, particularly when the subject is population control methods.


Some things are backwards, al reves, here. Later, I lie in bed, thinking about Spanish long division, which Lara – by the way, as happy as a sandboy in Spain – is learning. Why does it have to be backwards- how can 3956 go into 22? Not possible: even after Ramón, my neighbour’s husband, came round to explain it to me. I feel exhausted from housework: the ironing was finished about half past midnight. No Spanish housewife with a cortijo could ever have time to have a shag, or only if she were a slut in the original sense of the word, I imagine. (I mean, as in “and now foul sluts in dairies/Do fare as well as they.”)


Donkeys and other animals

Driving over the hill to Mojacar the other day, I passed 3 cars in 30 minutes, and one of them was a donkey. Also, two South American looking women with baskets of vegetables. Every now and then, though, you see an old man toiling up a road with a mule or a donkey, and you wonder about the life they lead, walking up the hill when everyone else is in cars, going to sell some vegetables in the market. They wouldn’t know about the Internet, would they? They sometimes look at you, as if from another universe. We inhabit the same place, but in ways that have nothing in common. How do they feel – as if they have been left behind in a past that no longer exists, except in small pockets – living a life that most people no longer even remember? I suppose we all get stuck in time, but some more than others. I have decided to get a donkey: very Marie Antoinette of me, no doubt, but I always wanted one, and it was not realistic in Sevenoaks. Juana looks at me and asks me what I will use it for – surely not to go to Lubrin? I say Alexander would like to go to school on the donkey, and she tells me it will take two hours and that she has suffered a lot with donkeys: they are stubborn, presumably, as mules, and then when you poke them, they take off like rockets, or like Sancho Panzo’s donkey, of course.

At home, I find out we have a goat, or Lara does. Pablo gave it to her – it is about six inches big, and its mother rejected it as being too small- something I can see the logic of- there are a lot of mothers in Sevenoaks who would have done that if they could. It is black with a few random white spots, and has been named Mimi, despite my attempt to call it Spotty. I expected it to die, but it has not. It is tottering about squeaking and no doubt will grow into a huge, ugly she-goat, which I will have to feed for the rest of its natural life. However it is very cute now, and smaller than the cats, which is quite funny: they eyed it with disgust and ran off. Sandy is away in Australia for nearly three weeks: he sounded philosophical about it on the phone: we have to hope so.


Good grooming: Spanish hair

We went together to the hairdresser in Albox, where Consuelo went to a convent school. My idea was to be less blonde and English, and Consuelo recommended I go there: she has been going there for eleven years. On arrival, however, it looked pretty dodgy, rather like Yvette’s of Purley about 30 years ago – a pile to tatty “Semana” magazines, and girls with rather blotchy complexions. Used as I am to the smartest salon in Sevenoaks, it seemed a bit short on ambience and I started muttering to Consuelo about just having a trim, eyeing her out of the corner of my eye and noticing that she has a burgundy curly perm. She clicked her tongue at me and said a change was good: she changes her hair all the time. This is true: she has been permed and straightened, dark red, blackish, mauve, and auburn. I sidled into the door behind her.

Ana, the hairdresser, started on Consuelo, then suddenly grabbed me and said I was going to have a “gran cambio,” a big change: I had a lot of grey hairs to cover up, and my colour needed to be different. OK, then. I just gave in as there seemed not much point giving my opinion. She pushed me around the room, bouncing from me to Consuelo, while a tall skinny woman in a denim micro-mini washed her own hair in a basin. If this wasn’t Albox, she would have had to be a hooker, but all the daytime clothes here look designed for a Croydon nightclub in the 1970s so you never know.

During the process, she talked animatedly about how the Spanish like to be more “arreglada,” than the English. Arreglado – arranged - being “soignée” in French, but of course, there is no English equivalent. They like makeup, nails, hair, all to be done properly, whereas, she pointed out, the English go to the supermarket in bikinis, pyjamas, and the men in bare chests. I said feebly that not all English were like that. No, she agreed, clearly I was not, for a start, I spoke Spanish properly, which is generally seen as making me a freak of nature around here. “Don’t cut off too much,” I pleaded, as she grabbed the scissors. “Yes, yes,” she said, crossly. “It’s necessary.” She didn’t take any shit: there was none of the “what would madam like?” business. At the end, she whisked me out of the basin and said, Julia, you are going to be very pleased with this big change. Do I look Spanish? I asked. “Yes, much more,” she said, satisfied. I was darker and definitely more arranged, with flicked up bits bordering on Farrah Fawcett Majors, but in a good way. It certainly was one step up on the straggly ends tied up with bulldog clip that I normally favour: for once in my life, I looked like a grown-up lady. The question is, will it stay that way? I can see myself buying Carmen rollers, and putting them in at home. Carmen rollers – a concept that takes me back to my schooldays. But after all, what was Carmen, if not Spanish and, without doubt, “arreglada.” The whole colour and cut thing cost 52 Euros, which is about £30 I guess, compared with the £195 I was paying in Sevenoaks.

Mala gente in pursuit of work

After the fiesta, Juan took me aside and warned me about Fiona, the mother of a friend of Lara’s who he says has a drink problem and I must be careful with her, she might be mala gente. Her husband used to work with him a bit (though usually he doesn’t employ Brits: they turn up too late, and then stop for a beer all the time). Then she had an affair with this Spanish guy, and a drink problem. Well, she seemed a good time girl to me, but there was a jagged edge to her partying – and she hangs out in the English bar at the top of the hill. There are always a few stray men with bad chat up lines in there, always in search of a bit more money, another opportunity. One of them slagged off my builder, saying he underpaid his workers and treated them badly. He’s in with the Mayor, that’s why he gets work, he said. But I stuck up for Juan, who has been a good friend. I’ve never seen him anything other than polite to everyone. The Brits don’t like the fact that he undercuts them, I suppose. They are all running out of work, and, as Fiona said, after 3 years most people find their savings have gone. What did they expect? I left the bar pretty promptly, particularly when one slimy character started trying to buy me a drink. It was like re-entering Eden being back in the village – peace, and the good people of Los Herreras. It’s only a small town, but to us, Spanish or English, it’s the wicked city.

Last night, wild boar apparently attacked the solar heating for the pool, biting 4 big holes in the tubes and obliging me to get my builders to put a fence round it, which they did, in one day. Not without a bit of a run-in with the pool man, a Brit, who did the usual thing of wanting to have the “what’s wrong with Spain” conversation (the shops shut at 2pm, what a nuisance, they don’t turn up on time, etc etc.) I refuse to enter into it, and watch my Spanish builders put the fence up double quick. Juan tells me he thinks maybe it wasn’t wild boar, but bad workmanship, the pressure wasn’t correctly adjusted (as it would have been if he had been in charge). I like Juan a lot – he gave me his hat at the fiesta and is going to teach me to make migas, the local dish which is basically fried breadcrumbs, but very good. However, I sometimes feel he is trying to control me: he wants me to buy five olive trees from a friend of his, which I don’t really like: we had to drive to go and look at them and saying no was painful. We drove in silence for some minutes before I apologetically said that maybe later….Juan perked up and we started to talk about other things, like the donkey I want to buy. This is the way the world over but especially where it’s poor: everyone wants the work, everyone says someone else did a bad job. Wild boar are a picturesque excuse and certainly do come in search of water, but I suspect neither Juan nor the pool guys are right: I think it was Cheeky Uno, my neighbours’ dog, inspecting a new installation.

Hard sell in a ghost town

The next day, Erelia, one of my neighbours, turned up. Like most of the women of a certain age, she is in a black housecoat, and looks old, though she probably isn’t. She points out that I have made the house very nice: perhaps I would like to buy an olive tree? She is very persistent: it is a thousand year-old one. I say I don’t think so, but we end up driving cross country along the ramblas to look at 3 trees that she owns. They are huge, and there is no way anyone should dig them up – not least because they would die. Erelia is, however, very insistent, and says her brother can do it in his reto. I prevaricate, being English and polite: later, I moan to Juana that I feel like a bone with dogs fighting over me. I visibly have money, because of what I’ve done to the house, and everyone is trying to get me to spend it at their stall. Juana tells me I should just say, no I don’t want your bloody tree. “If I turn up at the house and asks for 2000 Euros, are you just going to give it to me?” Erelia also takes me to see her dead mother’s cortijo in Los Dioses. She says it needs a little work: in fact, it is not much more than a tumbledown stable, with a few wires running round it, and a couple of tiny religious pictures left on the walls. She points out how big it is and what a nice house it would be, hoping I will find an English person to buy it. Her sister, who is very small, with large warts, and extremely sweet, accompanies us – she appears about a hundred. I wonder about whether someone would want this house, but can’t imagine anyone living here, not even a writer in search of silence. The street is completely hushed and I ask about the neighbours. They have all gone, apparently – the young ones have left and the old died, she said. It is only her in the whole street, except for a couple of summer visitors from Barcelona. Around Los Dioses, I see four or five “Se vende” signs – some of them on completely neglected buildings. With one little old lady in black tottering down the alley, it is like a little ghost village, with the bougainvillea and the odd palm tree failing to hide the sad, vacant look of the place,

Self-sufficiency

English visitors arrive a few days later: very nice people, but somehow hard work for me, as I am trying to establish a Spanish routine and find every reminder of England forces me out of step: they are on holiday and I am not. And part of me resents having to talk English – not just the language, but the whole shebang. When I’m with an English person, I have to discuss stuff – school, life, relationships, materialism, her father, my mother - whereas with Consuelo, or Juana, we just potter about and do stuff with the almonds. I thought I might miss talking, but it’s quite tiring, and pointless, especially if you see someone once a year and maybe dont have much in common except your children. My English visitor is surprised that I don’t worry about the children vanishing on the quad, about the wasps and flies, the fire smoking all over the house, or about the winding road, which makes her scream. She asks the usual questions about whether I like it, how long we are staying, what am I going to do? What do I feel about this, that or the other? In a nice way, I mean, but my mind goes a bit blank: I no longer really think about that stuff. Perhaps I never did, anyway, but I had to make polite conversation whereas now I dont have to most of the time: the Spanish don't appear to do that, at least, not round here. I would like a bit more time to write, is what I actually think, but apart from that I seem to have lost the capacity to think ahead: most of the time I have no idea what the time is. Soon, I suspect I wont; be able to make conversation either. You would not expect a place to change you very much, very quickly, at this stage in life – after all, I worked in London all my life until July. From my room, I stare out at the hill opposite, terraced with the grey olives and the greener almonds, a little misty as the early sun rises and watch the farmers at work, being self-sufficient. You can live here on very little – I suppose if you were prepared to, you could live on your goat and chickens. You can’t buy anything really, but you don’t need to, and you don’t need to leave the village much. In London, I was always surrounded by people and stuff – and it tired me out, the way too much choice in a shop tires you out, or Christmas, which no doubt has already begun in the UK.

On our day off, we discovered a cove you reach through a tunnel in the rock and a climb down a rough path in the cliff. Nobody except one naked young man with dreadlocks listening to a radio - white shingle, turquoise water, fabulous snorkelling. It is mid October, and the sea was just the right temperature. It makes up for anything you care to think about. The times Alexander despairs of working in Spanish are getting fewer, I have more Spanish hair, and although I still have a pile of undone admin, and a constant undertone of worry at the back of my mind about working – none of that seems all that bad on a day like this.