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.