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!”