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.