Proverbs

A woman’s work is never done

Alexander's Spanish homework for some reason involved Solomon and I remembered the little rhyme: King David and King Solomon led merry merry lives/With many, many lady friends and many, many wives/But when old age crept up on them, with all its fears and qualms/King Solomon wrote the Proverbs and King David wrote the Psalms. It was a bit lost on Alexander who didnt see the contradiction in having lady friends and writing.

Proverbs have been arriving unbidden in my mind over the last few days: I rarely thought about a proverb in the office as there didnt seem to be that many suitable ones for being a PR director - but now that I am in the house, they turn up everywhere, particularly the one about a woman's work never being done.

The second day of the matanza was sausage day: having washed the intestines and bladders and turned them inside out, they were filled with meat: fatty meat for the blanquilla sausages, which are cooked, and leaner meat for the chorizos, which are not. Like the day before, a large number of people were involved: Juana and Pablo, their daughter Consuelo and “Moncha,” her Galician husband Ramon, Antonio, Juana’s son and his novia Maria, their other son and his novia, Juana’s cousin Carmen and her husband, daughter and her novio, plus Juana’s other cousin, whose name I forget, from Albox, Isa, the neighbour who needs a husband but owns the thousand year old olive tree, Maruja, the neighbour from Barcelona whose niece is married to Zidan Zidane, and a few stragglers. Sandy turned the mincer, into which we pushed dozens of dried red peppers, soaked overnight in water and then squeezed (my job, with one of the novias). Maruja, who grew up her, was impressively deft with the “tripas,” the intenstines – turning them inside out over the mincer and then massaging the meat along to the right density. They were then tied with double knots and tossed into a tub for later. In the background, someone was shooting partridges – the endless pursuit of food. I asked Maruja if she ever did the matanza in Barcelona: no, she said, I go to the supermarket, which is a lot easier. Certainly, there is a lot of work in butchering a pig and making sausages; you have to wonder why people thought it was worth it to have to wash out bladders and turn them inside out and stuff them, rather than just eat vegetables. But as Consuelo said, the point of cooking is that it takes time; you could see she was in her element up to her elbows in fat – she suddenly seemed the competent farmer rather than just the nice country girl she usually is. Clearly a large part of the point was that they need meat to eat for the rest of the year, but there is also clearly a pleasure in the ritual and the process as well as the sociable side of the matanza - at least a dozen people in the house cracking jokes and eating.

We ate paella at lunch, with various unidentified bits of pig in it, with a sweet cabbage, rather like lettuce, and the green olives I saw Juana, Isa and Maruja picking a few weeks back. I got a lesson in these too: I never realised till now that the green olives came were unripe black ones: you bash them and leave them a fortnight in salt water with a bit of the plant that looks like broom, and the leaves of the carob tree and lo and behold they are edible, instead of taking the roof of your mouth as they do if you try and eat them from the tree. You wonder who ever realised in the first place that you could eat the things.

Meanwhile, I have my own list of jobs to do, many relating to the new donkeys – it is already clear I have made a rod for my own back. Alexander and I took them for a walk; Penelope was quite docile and Luca generally followed, though occasionally he went off and did his own thing and danced about in the road then there was absolutely no way you could get him to change his mind. When I pushed him, he just bit me or pushed back, and as he is not yet wearing a halter he is hard to fight. Penelope is also impossible to push; if she decides she is not going in, that is it. Hence the expression: stubborn as a mule. They both rolled in the gravel at one point, which was pretty funny, but then Luca went mad and started biting me, Penelope and Alexander in turn, so we were quite glad to shut him up. I am worrying about him: he needs to learn to wear the halter, and I haven’t found one, though I have been told there is a place nearby that sells all that, plus also pheasants, apparently – whether live or dead is not clear. It sounds like an interesting shop. This is a job for tomorrow, along with arranging for the children’s quad bike to be repaired – they have now destroyed both lights and as I have no trailer yet I can’t get it down to the garage.

Hanging over me, too, is all the admin I haven’t done. It’s easy to forget when you are worrying about where to get a bridle, but I have to post various overdue admin letters to England in the apparently more reliable Vera post office. It is quite impossible to keep track of money – I have no idea what is in the Spanish bank accounts since the statements they send are always out of date and, to me, unintelligible, on lots of tiny little slips of paper, in no clear order. I haven’t worked out how to see the Cajamar account online – while the BBVA one appears to need a different password each time, plus after that you have to use a little plastic card to enter a code from a particular square; hardly worth the effort as when you get on there the information is equally impenetrable. (BBVA still hasn’t managed to provide me with a debit card that works: I have now had three, and every time I go into the bank they just issue me another non-working one.) HSBC, meanwhile, says it is not possible to set up any kind of standing order to a non-UK account, so I have to call them in person and go through a lot of palaver and pay a charge if I want to move money to Spain. It might be a lot easier if we were paid here, only IBM doesn’t want to do that, and no doubt it would have other admin consequences. It still isn’t clear how we get health cover, since we are resident here but don’t pay tax we are in some kind of black hole between the UK and Spain; let’s hope we don’t get sick.

There are times when I feel pretty tired though. After all the sausage stuffing, walking the donkey and then chasing Luca, plus doing Alexander’s Spanish maths homework, I had a pile of ironing left. Then Pablo came up with the tractor and we had to unload a lot of alfafa for the horses while I worried about when and how I would get Luca castrated, as he will have to be at some point, I am told, or he will become unmanageably aggressive. This means a trip to the local vet, who I am told, quite inexplicably, works in the Lubrin slaughterhouse. But the work involved in living here is a rod for my own back - which means I am not going to complain. You choose your rod – whether it is stuffing intestines or having to feed and walk a donkey. But you can see why old people decide it’s easier to live in a bungalow with a couple of armchairs and a budgie. It was a lot easier leaving the house, getting on a train to work and bossing other people about to no real effect: I had an hour alone on the way in and way out, a lot of time exchanging idle gossip in restaurants, and the right to an hour of yoga several times a week. Having said that, it was about 20 degrees today and wearing shorts in the middle of November still counts for a lot. And at least the devil will not have a chance to put me to work, since there is a fat chance of my hands being idle.