Living in the valley. A personal account of village life by one of the owners of Lecrin Valley Property

Village life

A personal view of life in an Andalucian village. (Articles added periodically. Last addition 08 May 2008.)

19 January 2004.

Back in Madrid, after the weekend in Andalucia. Again the weather was great, a bit cold at nights but when you are in the sun with the wind blocked off it is still good enough to sunbathe. We are putting our garden in order. This weekend I went to buy a lemon tree to plant in between the orange trees we already have, but I made the mistake of letting Carmen come along. Now we have a herb garden, three jasmine bushes, a bay tree, and a rampant ivy thing, which we hope will climb all over the balcony and look suitably rustic, if it doesn't pull the side of the house off. We also have three climbing plants that I don’t know the name of, but which made the neighbours cross themselves when they saw them. They say they have a smell like jasmine but so powerful that it gives healthy people a headache and those of a weak disposition the vapours. Evidently, the smell is so obnoxious that sometimes people come in the dead of night and cut them down as it prevents them from sleeping. Carmen wanted to send them back, but I’m going to plant them on top of the bluff at the bottom of the garden next to Antonio One’s chicken coop, the smell of which gives me designs on the well-being of it’s inhabitants.

And of course we bought a limonero, a lemon tree.

Antonio One has promised to plant us some vines to make a tunnel over our long, narrow terrace, but he can't do it until, 'The January moon has waned.’ The same with the pruning of my existing vine. NOT until the January moon has waned. I don't know if we have to dance naked in a circle while this is being done, but if that's what he says, and he knows a thing or two about vines, then so be it. My reputation in the village probably won’t be affected overmuch by such a mundane thing, as I’m English and expected to be a little bit eccentric.

Well, ‘menguar - to wane' is not a verb that I’d heard before so at first I didn't know what he was talking about. I pretended to understand all the subtle implications of his statement and wandered off to ponder this pearl of wisdom from my agriculturally savvy neighbour, and to consult the dictionary. I wasn’t much the wiser. Do I need some special invocation or do I need to get the cura in to bless the garden and the vine? As usual I'm lost and ask Carmen if she knows the correct rituals for vine-planting, but she's an Asturiana and knows only about apple trees. She wonders where I get my pagan ideas from, dancing naked around vines indeed, and calls me an English barbarian. I don't mention wassailing. I tell her it's not my idea, but her Spanish neighbour’s, who is probably a Satanist. So she asks Antonio and he explains about January's waning moon and the answer is that after the January moon has waned there are no more frosts. Allegedly.

So this year when I’ve harvested my grapes, I will be making my own mosto and I can get my own back for all the hangovers I have had to suffer testing the neighbours' brews. It's when I am asked to step in as an arbiter and decide who makes the best mosto in the village that my problems start. My heart and liver drop when they bring out the 2 litre Coke bottles full to the brim with muddy liquid, with a look of reverence on their faces, and I know that they won't let me leave until all the bottles are empty and I've judged whose is the best. And the question is never resolved as in the morning no-one, least of all me, can remember the verdict. So they say we'll have to do it all again, but invite Pedro and Miguel this time as their mosto is very good, which adds another half-gallon of hooch to the kitty. The truth is that is that there is no good mosto. It should, and probably has been banned from commercial production. Which is why all the men in the village brew their own particular moonshine and my brain cells are being killed off at an amazing rate. Mind you, it would probably be good to put on chips with a bit of salt.

The lemon tree got planted, with only four different theories of how to do it from two of our neighbours and their wives, (both husbands called Antonio, both wives called Ascension, which adds to the confusion.) I look suitably enlightened, stick my head in the hole I’d already prepared and do what they tell me. After getting me to move it to all points of the compass, presumably as it has to be aligned with the waning moon, they arrive at a concensus and I am allowed to fill in the hole. Then I have to empty it again as I have forgotten to put in the manure. In fact I have no manure and have been told nothing about using manure. I know about shooting into the branches of apple trees with 12-bores, or beating them with a cudgel while full to the gun'les with cider in order to increase the harvest, but that doesn't translate very well to limoneros, which are a little more sensitive than Granny Smiths.

Luckily Antonio One has a donkey next door, so we all go to look at his midden, and discuss for another ten minutes which part best serves a lemon tree. No decision forthcoming, I suggest we take a bit from the top, a bit from the middle and a bit from the bottom, then mix it all together, only to be met with cries of derision. Another ten minutes and we decide that the best thing to do is to take a bit from the middle, then a bit from the top and then a bit from the bottom and mix that. I felt so stupid for suggesting otherwise! So I refill the hole, half earth and half donkey manure, part raw straw and part over-ripe mulch; wet, warm and sticky. Then begins another argument, (or as Carmen calls it, and the Spanish dictionary defines it, a discusión) as to whether to bed it in with plenty of water or just a little. Ten minutes and we agree that somewhere between a little and a lot is sufficient. But I don't know if that translates to two litres or twenty. So I get a bucketful and give it to Antonio One and he says 'No, let Antonio Two do it.’ But he declines too, as do their wives; and I get to thinking that they don't know how much to put on it either. So I take the bucket and resign myself to the castigations and sure enough, as I begin to pour, Antonio one shouts 'Enough!' and Antonio Two shouts 'More!' while Ascension One sucks in her breath sharply and Ascension Two shakes her head resignedly and says, ‘Ay-ay-ay.’ But at least I have a tree planted in the garden where previously there was a hole, so that’s a result.

Of course, after all that hard work, (giving advice is very hard work, much harder than digging a hole for a tree,) they decide it is time for a glass of wine and pats on the back for all except the poor Ingles, who once again has had to be taught the proper way to do things in Andalucia and, of course, has to supply the wine and the tapas!

In the absence of a garden shed, I have converted a room in the basement into a workshop, complete with a lathe, chainsaw, tool-grinder, and all my other equipment gathered over the years. I made the mistake of showing it off to the two Antonio’s and word has got around that I have a tool-grinder. So now I have visitors at all hours of the day and night, ‘Just popping in for a chat on my way back from the campo,’ with hoes, axes, scythes, secateurs, saws and anything else they can think of. The wives turn up with scissors and knives and I am beginning to feel like a tinker. But I am trading this tinkering of mine for the use of various things of theirs. I have my eye on Antonio One’s donkey for when it is time to harvest my oranges, and Antonio Two has a mechanical mule which will come in useful when we have to move furniture from the village square to our house, after we move there from Madrid.

And there I’ll have to leave you, as I have to go and buy some secateurs, and prepare myself for next weekend's lesson on pruning vines, if the moon has waned by then. If not, I'll have to do it at two in the morning, by torchlight with muffled secateurs. I can’t see my boss in Madrid letting me off for a couple of days midweek, ‘Because the moon has waned and the plants in my garden need me.’ The last thing I want is for him to get it into his head that I am a moon worshipper, or more likely, a lunatic. That would make my job with the British Council less tenable than it already is.

It’s mid-January, the almonds are now blossoming, giving credence to the Costa Blanca theory. We are 35kms inland and 2000ft higher than the coast so are a little behind them. There is 3m of powder snow on the Sierra Nevada. The trees are full of oranges and lemons and all is well in Paradise.

Keep sweet,

Ron y Carmen


26 January 2004.

A week has passed since the planting of the limonero. This week we managed to wangle three days in the valley, Friday to Sunday. I turned up at the houses in Saleres in the late evening with my secateurs at the ready and my weather eye cocked toward the moon. Waxing or waning? I can’t tell as there is no moon as yet, so it’s off to Jose’s bar in Restabal for a beer and some food then to bed.

I met Antonio One early the following morning, just as he had finished saddle-bagging his donkey, ready for a trip to the campo to harvest some oranges.
‘How’s the moon?’ I ask. ‘I need to prune my vine today or tomorrow as I won’t be here next weekend.’
‘Remember, pruning can only take place when the moon has waned,’ he says, repeating the caveat of the week before, his eyes glazing over like an oracle.
‘When will that be?’ I ask.
’Yes,’ he replies and rides off into the sunrise.

So I set to working around the two houses, hanging esparto curtains and flower pots in Carmen’s house and fly-screens in mine, but staying well away from vines. A few hours later Carmen calls me for lunch so I down tools and shut the wicker-gate to our garden, indicating to all in the village that we are not to be disturbed, save for the direst Hippocratic emergencies. This has become a necessity. The villagers get up at sunrise and work in the campo until they come home for lunch at about three in the afternoon. Most of them pass our house on the way back as it is the first one they come to on the mule-path from the groves. If they see that we are there they have taken to popping in to get Tinker Ron to sharpen their tools ready for the afternoon, or to get La Doctora Carmen to remove a mote from their eye, lance a boil, dig out a splinter, offer a quick diagnosis for some real or imagined sickness, or to explain the latest medical reports that the hospital has given them. (I should perhaps mention that Antonio One, at seventy-six, has cheerfully had three heart attacks and Antonio Two, a mere sixty-seven, is morbidly awaiting his second.)

Mid-way through lunch there is a pounding on the door and I can hear Antonio One shouting my name. Fearing an emergency I open the door and find him standing there with a plastic bag filled with vine cuttings.

‘We have to plant these today,’ he says.
‘What about the moon? Has it waned?’ I ask.
‘It’s Friday,’ he says enigmatically. ‘I’ll call you when I’ve finished my lunch.’

After lunch he is at the door again with the cuttings. I should explain that there is a patch of land at the back of Carmen’s house and beside mine, measuring about ten metres by six. It is wonderfully fertile, as attested to by the metre-high grass that grows there which Antonio One has been using to feed his donkey. But it has a one in three downhill slope.

‘We’ll have to make a small terrace along the top to plant the parras,’ says Antonio, and we set to. It is easy digging and soon there is a half-metre wide terrace ready for the vines. Carmen appears on the terrace above and watches the goings-on with a professional eye. Not a professional eye as regards vine-planting, but with a professional medical eye as to how long it will take before Antonio has his fourth heart attack.

I explain to her in English that Antonio has said that we have been given grace to plant as it is a Friday. She says knows. She has been talking to Ascension about this while we have been preparing the terrace and has been told that on Fridays birds don’t eat vine cuttings. I begin to wonder if this is a Spanish conspiracy to wind me up, and picture the laughs at my expense in the bar when Antonio tells the other men in the village about his gullible neighbour, El Loco Ingles. But Antonio doesn’t go to the bar and the look on Carmen’s face says she’s a bewildered as me. She wanders off to pot plants and garner more folk-lore with Ascension One in the main part of the garden.

The planting went well. We now have eight vines to cover our terrace; and for good measure we planted two jasmine bushes, some mint and two cuttings from an unknown plant that the esparto-curtain-maker’s-wife gave us. Nobody, including Ascension One knows what this cutting is, or even which way up to plant it, but as there are two we planted one up one way and the other up the other and have our fingers crossed that one will take. And the ivy has been planted and trained skywards to cover the balcony.

As I am on the slope and have the tools with me, I decide to terrace the whole slope, so now we have three narrow terraces ready for planting. I want to plant a creepy flowery thing like a passion flower, which will give good ground cover, keep the soil together and require minimum work. But Carmen saw some men unloading almond cuttings when we were buying the limonero and other plants last week, so next time we are in Saleres we will be looking for almendros. Never mind the irrigation problems, never mind the fact that I will have no room to move around them on the minute terraces unless I am belayed on, never mind the harvesting problems; we are going to have some almond trees. And a few small olive trees would be nice, says Carmen.

The orange trees that we already have growing in the garden produce horribly sweet juice oranges. They are old trees, at least the trunks are, about a metre in circumference. From the cardinal points on the sides of each of these trunks grow four much smaller calibre main branches. Because of the slope on the other side of the garden wall, I am loathe to dig up the trunks and plant another type of orange as the old trunks have long, deep roots which keep the garden from eroding. I have pipe-dreamed of cutting and grafting different kinds of fruit onto each of these four branches and foolishly mentioned it to Carmen. I say I think orange, grapefruit, tangerine and lemon would look nice, four different fruits on the four different branches of one tree. Carmen has yet to learn the value of prudence during conversation in the valley and mentioned this to Antonio One. Next week he is going to meet the grafting expert, who lives in the next village. So that is now out of our hands and will be the subject of another letter.

I am beginning to wonder if they are using our garden to experiment with?

02 February 2004

I suppose that as I am writing about the Valle de Lecrín I ought to describe it. It lies at the western tip of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Andalucia, Southern Spain. The Sierra Nevada are big mountains, going up to eleven and a half thousand feet, the tops covered in snow from November to May. I can see the snow from my study window and when the sun is shining on it, it's breathtaking. They say that on a good day you can see Africa from the top of the highest peaks, if seeing Africa is a good day for you.

The valley is mid-way between the city of Granada and the Mediterranean. Our village, Saleres, is at the bottom of the valley, but nevertheless at a height of about two thousand feet. It has a marvellous micro-climate that normally allows the almond blossom in January to remain untouched by frosts. As long as the blossom comes out after the January moon has waned.

There is a river that runs through the village, called the Rio Santo. It’s only small but it runs year-round which is quite rare in the south of Spain. This keeps the valley irrigated and beautifully lush and green. None of the locals know it’s called the Rio Santo but name it after the next highest village in the valley, from whence it comes. This was quite confusing when I first arrived here and at first I thought there were three rivers. It starts in the hills above Albuñuelas, runs through the Albuñuelas gorge, down through Saleres and on to Restábal. From there it empties into the large and very deep Béznar reservoir at the bottom of the valley. The people who live in Albuñuelas call it ‘El Rio,’ the people living in Saleres call it ‘El Rio Albuñuelas,’ and the people in Restábal call it ‘El Rio Saleres.’ Nobody lives in the reservoir. There is a footpath that runs beside the river, which should be avoided after a night on the beer unless you are an inveterate traveller, as it goes east to Athens in one direction and west to Gibraltar and on into Africa in the other. There are few roads and the locals use mules to transport fruit from the groves to the village whence it is picked up by truck and taken to one of the various cooperatives.

The valley is steeped in history and ruins. There is a Roman villa and baths, Moorish forts and lookout posts, and later Mozarab churches and houses. My old house is one of these, the deeds merely stating that the house is ‘more than a century old.’ The walls are a metre thick and made of mud. I didn’t know this until Paco the builder tried to put an adjoining door between my house and Carmen’s and had to call in a team of miners to finish the job. It’s cool in summer and warm in winter which is just why it was built like that.

The valley is very steep-sided so the Moors terraced the slopes to enable the planting of orange, lemon, almond and olive trees to supply the nearby city of Granada. The main acequias, or water channels, follow the high contours around the top of the valley and can be tapped into to flood-irrigate the terraces below. To do this, you level your terrace and build a foot-high retaining dike around it, then you dig an acequia from the main acequia to your piece of land. When you are ready, you open your sluice, the water runs along your acequia and onto your terrace until it is flooded to the height of your retaining dike. Then the sluice is closed and the water gradually seeps into the soil. When the terraces are flooded at dusk, the orange-red reflections of the sunset in the still water is stunning. Like rice paddies with attitude.

Carmen has inherited a piece of land in the most inhospitable part of the valley and I am dreading the time when she wants me to terrace and build an acequia down to it. I have only been there twice, and the second time I fell down an overgrown acequia and slid down to the terrace below, smashing my ear against a rock and damaging a couple of ribs. I returned to Madrid the following day with a blue-black ear and was incapable of lifting my arm to write on the blackboard without moaning pitifully, a source of great amusement to my students.

Saleres has about three hundred souls. There were more, but the earthquake of a hundred or so years ago sent half the village down the valley side and into the Rio Albuñueñas. The bottom of our garden is the fault-line which separates the half of the village which disappeared from the half which remained. Carmen’s sister is a Mining Engineer and she bought some topographical maps of the area to us last year when she came to stay. When she visits she sleeps with a crucifix clutched to her breast. I am currently devising a delicately balanced gadget which will fall with a great noise if anything untoward occurs. There are literally dozens of fault-lines running through the valley, but no-one in living memory admits to having so much as felt an earth tremor, although there was one last month. Just in case, Carmen’s house is built using new construction techniques, but in the old village style. The foundations are a half-metre of steel reinforced concrete, the basement is a bunker, and if there is another earthquake we will simply slide or roll down the valley side and come to rest in the Rio Albuñuelas, hopefully the right way up.

The people of Saleres are delightful in the main, polite, helpful and generous to a fault with their time and possessions. A pleasure to know. They are a little idiosyncratic, but then, who of us isn’t? Everybody is related, if not brother and sister, then at least a ‘primo,’ or cousin. Everyone knows everyone else, their business, their foibles and their strong points and this can be a great advantage to a foreigner. You only have to get on well with one person in the village and the rest are bound by family honour to be your friend too. Unless the friend you have has enemies. In this case you are honour-bound to take part in any blood-letting vendetta which may be on-going; or at least not to be too friendly with the enemy and his family if you see them. Most people have forgotten what started the vendettas in the first place, but it is normally a mule or a woman. I prefer to play the slightly idiotically grinning ‘guiri,’ or foreigner, and play hale-fellow-well-met to all and sundry, including dogs and cats. This always puts you in well with somebody. Saleres is full of characters, nearly all on the old side, as the youngsters have left to work in the cities of Granada or Barcelona.

If you ask the mothers of the ones who live in Barcelona what their children do for a living, they invariably reply ‘Business People,’ which means they are taxi-drivers or entrepreneurs of one kind or another. These prodigals only come to the valley once a year, during the entire month of August, the only month when there is no work to be done in the campo, save perhaps the early harvesting of almonds. This means plenty of parties and is a good time to be in the valley, but a bad time to be waiting for a taxi in Barcelona. All the villagers from Barcelona drive BMW’s or Mercedes’, and the only way to tell the taxi-drivers from the entrepreneurs is by noting the colour of their limousines. The entrepreneurs vehicle doors aren’t painted a dull yellow and don’t have a sign on the roof saying ‘TAXI.’

The ones who now live in Granada are teachers, doctors or nurses, with a couple of agronomists and agricultural engineers thrown in. They drive sensible estate cars and come and stay at the parental home every weekend and work in the groves to help their parents, many of whom are well beyond retirement age. On Sunday evening they fill their cars to the brim with oranges and sell them in Granada’s shops for a bit of cash on the side. I often smile when every Friday evening one of the teachers from Granada arrives in his Renault Espace, dressed in a sober suit and looking suitably serious and teacher-like. He parks in the Church Square and walks smartly into his parents house. Half an hour later you see him smiling broadly, dressed in traditional village working clothes, riding his father’s mule up the track into the campo. I have taken some photos of him for his pupils and will blackmail him at some time in the future.

It is a bit of a paradox that the village school which gave a such good education to these young professionals is now closed as there are not enough children to justify it being there. It has now merged with the schools in Melegís and Restábal, the old school building currently being used as an adult education centre and a library. Many of the oldsters, having suffered from the neglect of Andalucia under Franco, are now going to evening classes to learn to read and write. There are also handicraft lessons, always over-subscribed by the older women. They have a natural ability to ‘make-and-mend,’ having lived that way for well over half a century, and some of the artefacts they produce would sell well in any handicraft fair. On a high point, some of the people from Barcelona and Granada are now restoring the family homes in the village with an eye to retirement away from the city, which bodes well for the village, and even better for Paco and Jose-Luis the builders.

There are no shops in Saleres. but there is a small market once a week in the bottom square in front of the olive mill. When it is not market day, the village is serviced by dozens of white-van-men who drive into the square at all hours, their horns screaming like banshees. The local women can distinguish one horn from another, but that skill has defeated me until now, as I’m deaf in one ear and have difficulty distinguishing where the sound is coming from, let alone who is making it. Anything we need, Ascension Two gets for us as she lives next to the square, and we pay her later. There are three different bakers who each come three times a day; the egg-woman, the frozen-food man, the red-meat butcher man, the chicken-meat-man and just about anyone else who has ideas of selling anything. Last week there was a man selling sofas and chairs, with a deafening loudspeaker atop his Transit van proclaiming to all that their luck was in and that the Chair Man had arrived.

Until last year there used to be the open-backed rubbish-truck, which was a sight and smell to behold. It would arrive daily at six-thirty in the afternoon, the only vehicle with a timetable. The driver would jump out and run upwind to avoid the smell and the villagers would hold their noses and throw their rubbish over the sides and into the back of the truck. It was a good time to meet people, to find out how they were and what they were throwing away. Nowadays there are psychologists who go through peoples rubbish to find out what kind of personality they have, but this has been going on in Saleres for years. You have to remember to throw any really good rubbish away privately, or disguise it in a black plastic bag, or people will think you are getting above yourself. The truck has now been replaced by the council with large plastic rubbish containers and a modern truck comes and empties them. At least I suppose it does, as on reflection I can’t ever remember seeing it, but the containers are often empty so it must do. In the bottom square there are three pristine containers for glass, paper and old clothes. This is an attempt by the Council to ‘Go Green,’ but no-one in the villages throws anything valuable or re-usable away so they stand sadly neglected where they were originally positioned.

The villagers all grow their own vegetables in the campo, as the alluvial soil from the Sierra Nevada is capable of supporting anything. The wild asparagus that Antonio Two occasionally brings us, when mixed with scrambled eggs from Ascension One’s chickens, is a dish worthy of a king. I forgot to mention that many villagers have a room on the ground floor of their houses for breeding chickens, another for the mule and an extensive bodega for mosto-making and the like.

The village bar is in the main square, the door hidden behind an old striped curtain. Only men go in there and it intimidates even an ex-bar-room-brawler like me. It’s the most basic bar I’ve ever been in, a room with a waist-high wall running down the middle to separate the bartender from the customers. These customers are at least two hundred years old, always wear trousers, boots, shirt, pullover and jacket, no matter what the temperature outside; look as if they’ve never left the bar and speak an argot which I have given up trying to understand. I have never seen any of them in the village or in the campo, and am not sure who they are. Perhaps they’re the ghosts of drinkers past?

Due to an event of about five years ago I’m accepted there. When I say accepted, I mean that with the aid of sign language they serve me miniscule bottles of beer, and I’m hoping that in another few years they will talk to me and give me what I order and not what they decide I want. If the bar is shut and you need a drink you can always knock on the door of the barman’s wife and she will open up for you. She also has the keys to the church if you wish to visit that out of hours, so you can get a job lot, so to speak. A pragmatic approach by the cura, I think.

The event of five years ago. I was in Saleres for a fortnight in August, working on my house. It was wickedly hot at around 40 degrees and I had spent all day on the terrace in the sun, building a pergola. When I’d finished I went to the fridge for a well-earned beer or two and found that I’d earned them all already, so decided to go to the bar for my reward. My request for a cerveza was dutifully ignored, the barman and the customers looking at each other and shrugging shoulders at the sweaty red foreign intruder wearing shorts and a T-shirt. I pointed to a bottle of beer on the bar and the barman got me one out of the fridge. The bottle was only twenty-five centilitres, less than half a pint, and I’d been working for eight hours. I drank straight from the bottle and with the bottle still tilted to my mouth I pointed to the fridge for a second. The barman gave me another which went down in one, two beers in less than thirty seconds. Then I asked for another and had that in a glass, then one for the road and was out of the bar within three minutes. Not unusual in the Nags Head, but in the village the word spread like wildfire.
‘There’s an English borracho, a drunkard living in the village,’ I heard whispered around the streets for the next few days. So I went to Mass the following Sunday, clean shaven and with shirt and tie, and think I was forgiven, but I don’t go to the bar except in the direst emergencies or to frighten visiting friends. I prefer Jose’s bar in Restábal.

My immediate neighbour, Antonio One, worked as a guest-worker in a factory in Germany for most of his adult life, and now enjoys his retirement working in the campo. He is seventy-odd years old, about five feet high, weighs less than eight stone, is always working and laughing and has a grip like a vice. He has a heart condition for which he takes a battery of pills which occasionally put him on tilt and bring out some charmingly eccentric behaviour. His wife Ascension looked after the land whilst he was away and between them they know everything there is to know about crops and plants. Antonio has problems understanding my Spanish, which is sort-of Castellano, and he only speaks Andaluce, and the Andaluce of the valley at that. When we suffer a communication problem he reverts to German, as he assumes that as I’m not Spanish I speak German. My German is known as soldaten-sprecht, or soldier-speak, which enables me to order up to five beers, to ask directions to the nearest fast-food outlet and to get a taxi back to the barracks, none of which is of much use in a farming valley in deep in southern Spain. But we get on fine, and once I even did what he expected of me.

But I am worried about his concept of time. Having waited three weeks to prune my vine, and having been told that I have to wait ‘until the January moon has waned,’ I’m afraid I doubted his word, checked my diary and found that the moon had waned on 15 January and it is now February. This weekend when I arrived in Saleres, there was the moon defiantly waxing itself in full view of me and him, but still he adheres to his ruling. Either he is stark raving mad and I should get on with the pruning, or he doesn’t know what month it is and I should advise him in some way that January is past. The trouble is that nobody else in the village has pruned their vines either, and I’m beginning to wonder if they are on the same calendar as me. But paranoia is a wonderful thing, as they say. Or is Saleres the Spanish translation of Brigadoon and do I pass through some kind of a time-warp somewhere on my journey there?

It would explain those customers in the bar.

09 Feb 04

The February moon is on the wane. I saw it last night.

This weekend in Saleres was just work. We went into Granada first thing on Saturday morning to see the solicitor and from there to the nursery to get yet more plants and pots. This time Carmen bought some red-flowering things and decided she wanted them planting around the kitchen door. Personally I love bees and we often get honey from the villagers that have hives. I have told Carmen that the plants are only in flower for four months of the year and that she can come through the kitchen door in complete safety for the other two thirds of the year. But she still wants them moved.

The swimming pool is now looking nice. The water is crystal clear, the ph level is perfect. The chlorine is just right. There are a couple of bits of algae on the bottom which I will scrub off when the water is warm enough to swim. This weekend I didn’t even need to vacuum the bottom as no detritus had accumulated during the week. One less job to do. Until Carmen decided to re-pot a rosemary plant and hang it on a pillar next to the swimming pool. At first I thought it was a long promised earth tremor, but when I looked out of the kitchen window and saw the plant floating in the pool and the pot and earth on the previously spotless pool bottom, I realised that this was just Carmen.

We had some night storage heaters delivered during the week, and I intended to fit them at the weekend. I unpacked one and assembled it, only to find that it had no cable and that the shops had shut for the weekend. So I set about the next task, running a telephone cable from my house to Carmen’s. This had to be routed from the front door, over the roof of the cloisters we have around the swimming pool, along the outside of the cloister wall, through the tunnel, along another wall, through my bedroom window, across the ceiling and into the telephone point. Thirty seven metres with supports every metre or so. Tedious work.

There was a wedding in the village this weekend, and for once we were not invited. I didn’t know there was a wedding until I was straddled across the ridge of the cloisters, the cheap new drill I had purchased in a sale in Madrid in my hand, ready to drill a hole to fix the telephone cable. I pressed the trigger of the drill and the world exploded. There were flashes and hisses and the most incredible explosion. I looked at my hand, expecting it to have been blown off, but it was still intact. Then I realised that it wasn’t the drill which had caused the explosion but rockets from the celebration at the bottom of the village. As I believe I’ve told you, we are at the top of the village, and these things went off at about head height. The tinitis in my right ear from my Commando days was immediately triggered and is still ringing now, days later. Antonio Two, who hadn’t been invited to the wedding either, but was sat on the wall next door watching me working, thought it was hilarious. As did Pablo, Antonio One’s grandson, who was sat next to him. Pablo was supposed to be in the church for the wedding ceremony but had skipped out because the sermon was dragging on. Evidently the cura was taking full advantage of having the majority of the village captive and was giving them a fair old dose of fire and brimstone.

The telephone task took all afternoon. Antonio One’s family were all at the wedding and they then came home at about five to get ready for the reception. Antonio One himself didn’t want to go as the smoke in restaurants aggravates him, so when the family had gone, Carmen suggested he came around to us for a glass of wine later that evening. He popped around at about eight and after a few wines he told us some things about the village, especially about the civil war and it’s effects. He said that five men from the village had been executed for being Communists, although the truth was that they were nothing of the sort, but braggarts trying to impress the other villagers who had paid the ultimate price for their bravado. Antonio was eight at the time and knew only of the Red and the Blue sides, with no notion of their politics. Of course there are still those in the valley who remember and who carry grudges, as after any Civil War. During Franco’s time Antonio got out of Spain and went to work in Germany. I told him some of the stories that my mother had told me about being in London during the Blitz and he seemed surprised to hear that we had had a war and that the Germans had been involved. We had a couple of bottles of wine and a Sunday Roast I had prepared and he rolled home at about midnight.

On Sunday morning he told his family we had wined and dined him, and they gave him a bit of a hard time as they had all been feeling guilty about going to the wedding and leaving him behind. He retaliated by saddling up his donkey and going off to the campo.

I bumped into Antonio Two a little later as I was taking some rubbish to the square. He was loading up a friends car with his decoy bird. This is a partridge which has been kept in a cage and encouraged to sing. It is taken to the campo and the cage is placed in a likely spot for an ambush. The idea is for the bird to sing and attract other birds, which are then dispatched with an escopeta, or shotgun. It seems a little unfair it seems to me, but I keep my mouth shut.

The plumber had arranged to come at four on Sunday, to talk about putting more taps in the garden for Carmen’s plants. We waited til seven, with no sign of him, although I hadn’t been holding my breath. We left then. It normally takes an hour on a Sunday evening to traverse the sixty metres from our house to the car as you have to stop and say goodbye to everybody, but this weekend the streets were bare. Then we bumped into Juan and Antonio Two in the square. Antonio was annoyed, as his prize songbird, on whom the hunters had been relying for a good shoot, had decided to stay dumb for the afternoon and no-one had shot anything. This annoyance was added to somewhat by the sound of it singing it’s head of in his garage, making up for lost time. Evidently the thing is agoraphobic and only sings indoors.

By some oversight we had forgotten to invite Juan and his wife to our house warming party so we told him they must come round one evening for a drink. His eyes lit up and he said, ‘Bueno, I have some very good mosto just coming into it’s best.’ And my heart sank.

Which day next week can I afford to write-off because I will have a screaming hangover?

26 February 2004

We were in the valley for all of last week. It is now Thursday of the following week, I am in Madrid and I have only just recovered. Carmen’s sister Luisa was with us and we spent the week looking for a job for her in the Almeria area. Lot’s of driving and late nights with too much alcohol and food.

I mentioned the Spanish drivers last time, as noted on my drives back from Granada, but I didn’t mention the drive from Madrid to Granada on Fridays. As Carmen works Friday afternoons it very much depends what time she finishes as to the ease of getting out of Madrid. Four o’clock is the optimum, but this is rarely achieved. Five o’clock is catastrophic and can often mean two hours for the first ten kilometres. This is because the City Council has built four ring road/motorways by-passing Madrid, which all disgorge their traffic onto the two-lane N4 going south. That translates to twelve lanes of truckies all desperate to get to their homes in the south for the weekend. They are all bloody-minded in the extreme and give no quarter.

Spanish trucks are governed to 90kph, but unfortunately not all their governors are precisely regulated. So for the first two hundred kilometres there is a free-for-all. As I have plenty of time to waste on these journeys, Carmen being busy on the phone for the first two hours before she is rendered comatose by the trip, I have made some observations.

If a truck is travelling at 90kph and the truck in front is only capable of 89kph, the faster is honour bound to pull out to overtake. A truck of fifteen metres needs approximately fifty metres to overtake another fifteen metre truck. Fifty metres at a relative speed of 1kph takes three minutes, so I must resign myself for those three exasperating minutes when I have to halve my speed to accommodate the trucks. But of course the road is never flat. If there is an uphill slope the overtaking vehicle loses it’s 1kph advantage and it descends into a teeth-gritting, white-knuckle battle between the two truckies. If it is a downhill slope both drivers knock their trucks out of gear and freewheel their thirty two or forty tons up to some terrifyingly illegal speed, which Spanish macho laws dictate as absolutely mandatory.

Meanwhile, behind me and the suicidal truckies, the frustrated Spanish car drivers are going apeshit, trying to overtake on the inside and get between the two trucks in the five metres before they draw level. This is with cars measuring four point five metres. I ponder getting a set of fighter pilot’s mirrors fitted to our car so that I can see where the next unguided missile is coming from. Sometimes, if there is a truck with a governor functioning at 88kph, several trucks will try to overtake at the same time, which gives you time to have a cup of tea, do a bit of make-and-mend, write to Mum or catch up on the hundred and one other things that you have neglected to do during the week. Then magically at Valdepeñas, virtually all the trucks disappear and the next two hundred and fifty kilometres can be covered in an hour and a half, unless a lone truck has decided to do something silly in the Valley of the Falling Dogs.

And now to the good news. The January moon, masquerading as the February moon, has waned. I spotted Antonio One pruning his vines the other day and he told me to get ready to prune mine. He came around later with his pruning saw and his secateurs, and I got a ladder. As I have said, he is seventy-five, yet he still insisted on getting up the ladder to do the pruning, all the time talking to the vine, congratulating some branches for being nice and strong and condemning the others to instant death.

The plant from the esparto-curtain-maker’s-wife has died, to be replaced by a climbing, flowering bush-type thing which has gone mad and is growing all over the patio railings. I hope that during our weekdays in Madrid it doesn’t strangle the limonero and I have to start all over again.

I wanted a small bench built into one corner of the garden, carefully positioned so that I could sit surrounded by fragrant jasmine bushes and watch the sun go down whilst drinking a gin and tonic. (Some chance!) I asked Paco the builder to build me a banco, which is bench in Spanish.

But not in the village.

In the village a bench is called a pollo. In the rest of Spain a pollo is a chicken, and I somehow failed to make the connection. So when Paco had built it he asked me, ‘¿Te gu’ta e’ pollo?’, ‘Do you like the bench?’ I replied, ‘Yes, as long as it’s not more than a couple of days dead. And I don’t like it frozen, it’s not the same.’ Then remembering that Paco likes hot food, I carried on, ‘I’ll curry one for you one day, if you like,’ and walked off.

Paco first looked amazed and then nearly fell off his ladder laughing. He is a great bloke, the head of a family firm of builders and is very patriarchal on-site, directing his much younger brother and two sons. But when he laughs his body shakes and the tears run down his face. I didn’t see this until we became friends, as he was too polite to laugh at me when I was around. I found out when his wife came down from Albuñuelas one day, ostensibly to see how the building was progressing, but actually it was to see the guiri who was making her husband so happy that he laughed for an hour every day after getting home from work. Paco’s Andaluce is so strong as to be unintelligible and is spoken, or sung, at a hundred miles an hour. When he speaks to you it’s like being shot with a machine gun full of vowels with the odd consonant thrown in as tracer.

I saw the rubbish truck for the first time last week. Actually, I only saw the back of it as it was stuck for some reason at the entrance to the church square. I sat in the car looking at the back of it for half an hour, unable to get out of the village. Eventually it moved, but I never discovered what the trouble was. Probably the driver has a brother, sister or cousin in the village and was having a glass or two of mosto.

Carmen had to phone Paco’s wife, Trini this week, to see if our house was still there after we heard that there had been an earthquake centred in the Straits of Gibraltar. She said that she had noticed something amiss in Albuñuelas as the dog had been barking all night and that her plumbing had developed a leak. She didn’t know about Saleres, so we phoned Antonio Two who put our minds to rest by saying all was well and reiterating that Saleres is the best place in the world to live and that earthquakes don’t happen there, even if the seismological office in Granada registered 0.6, which ain’t much. I hope the quake of last century is the only one we’ll have in a millenium. (As an aside, one of my Arabic students once told me that he lived in an area infamous for earthsquawks, which I think is a much more descriptive and onomatopoeic word.)

Antonio One has spoken to the grafter from the next village and they have decided which fruits to graft onto our tree. They haven’t told me as I don’t need to know, being a guiri, but it will happen ‘when the sap starts to rise.’ Whether that is the sap in the grafter or the tree, I have yet to verify. I’m not sure if I fancy a horny horticulturist running about the garden, so I hope it’s the sap in the tree.

It has been raining for the last week, in the south and here in Madrid. This good in one way, as the esparto curtains which I hung a couple of weeks ago had stretched and were hanging badly. The rain has caused them to shrink a little, or more accurately for the weave to contract, and now they fit perfectly. This is a blessing as I was about to re-hang them last weekend but got distracted. So now I’ll use them as some kind of weather-divining instrument, as we use seaweed in the UK. If they fit it is raining, and if they touch the floor it is sunny. I’m not sure I need them solely for this reason as I’ll get wet going outside to check, and thereby get a rough idea of whether if it is raining or not. I’m getting wiser and haven’t said anything to Carmen yet, as I know she will like this idea of a folkloric weather diving system in the garden and suggest knocking another window through the kitchen wall so as to be able to see the curtains from the comfort of the house. Unless it is raining so hard that we can’t!

Carmen likes television and decided that as we had to have an antenna fitted, we might as well have satellite channels, as the cost is much the same. She asked me what channels I wanted to see in English and I only wanted the news, so we opted for an eighty centimetre dish, which wouldn’t be too obtrusive and upset the ascetics of the house. The workmen duly arrived with a one metre forty dish, and said that the best place was to put it was up on the terrace. Now, from out terrace we have some of the best views in Spain, and the thought of a huge parabolic dish mounted in front of me destroying the view was too much. I asked where was the smaller dish that we had ordered, and they told me that the woman in the shop had decided that I needed to see all the English channels in the world and had adjusted our order accordingly. Yet another case of the Spanish knowing what’s best for me. We declined the offer to turn Saleres into Goonhilly Down and had an eighty centimetre dish fixed low down above the ski-slope that I terraced for the vines that Antonio and I planted last week, and hope it will not be too obtrusive. Or that the vines won’t rip it out of the wall. I can now get BBC, NBC and CNN so should be OK for news of the next earthsquawk. Carmen went off to buy a new television. ‘Get a small one,’ I said, so she came back with a top-of-the-range flat-screen thingy which cost half as much as the house. It took me half the following day to fill in the holes the fitters had made in various parts of the two houses to allow the cables to pass through.

I also spent two days fitting the storage heaters, slim-line jobbies which blend in well to the interior of the house and work a treat. Antonio the electrician, came and fitted a time switch as the law prohibits me doing it, a ten minute job which cost eighty euros. Antonio the blacksmith is avoiding us as he promised us a metal table one night when he was drunk and realised when he had sobered up that it was his uncle’s and wasn’t his to give. I can’t think of any more Antonios, but four of them is enough to confuse conversations. Lorenzo the plumber has also visited us and fitted three more taps in the garden to cope with Carmen’s horticultural endeavours.

On Friday night we went to Jose’s bar and caught up on events. Everyone congregates here on a Friday, to spend their ill-gotten gains for the week. I was talking to Jesus, a really gentle person who nevertheless looks as if he is on leave from the Spanish Legion. He works as a labourer, specialising in chain-saw work. He is self-employed, although guided by Jose, and is the proud owner of five chain-saws and a battery of strimmers. I have visions of him going to work with all his chainsaws strung across his chest in a bandolier, which knowing Jesus is quite possible. One night about two years ago, I met him as I was leaving Jose’s bar at about three in the morning. The bar is upstairs, and reached by a flight of marble stairs. This particular night, Jesus had been imbibing rather heavily and had decided to buy a mule from one of the other customers. They had disappeared into the night to look at the mule an hour or so before, and I thought that would be the last I saw of Jesus that weekend. But as I left the bar, who should be halfway up the stairs but Jesus, complete with mule, which he was going to show off to those customers still left drinking. Jose tried to get him to take the mule back into the street but it couldn’t turn on the stairs and it wouldn’t back up, so it had to come into the bar, do a pirouette and leave the right way round. No-one batted an eyelid. Last Friday Jesus was wearing a tennis-style wrist support in red, white and blue. I asked him what he had done and he said he had sprained it while using a chain-saw at an awkward angle. He told me that he had been to the doctor who had looked at his wrist and then told him to drop his trousers and cough, had looked down his throat and in his ears with a torch and had then told him to read a page of text held at arms length. Jesus told the doctor that he couldn’t read it and the doctor told him to get some glasses and that the sprain had been caused by not being able to see well enough to judge distances. Jesus then had to tell the doctor that it wasn’t that he couldn’t see the text, but that he couldn’t read. He is a gem of a bloke, and generous to a fault.

Jose and his family run the bar with military proficiency. Jose was a ploughman until about ten years ago, when he opened the bar as a hobby. In fact he named the bar The Bar Jovi. His wife Trini, (note the wives are all called Trini or Ascension,) is a marvellous cook and they have built themselves a little empire of three or four flats and two restaurants by sheer hard work over the last few years.

Luisa and I, accompanied by Pablo, Ascension One’s grandson made a trip to Carmen’s finca to assess the work that needs to be done. With Jesus helping me I think it can be done in a week of hard work, the trees pruned and the terraces put back into shape. There are twenty-plus orange trees and a few assorted others, almond and olive mainly, and the nearest acequia is not too far away. The problem will be harvesting the oranges, as there is no track nearby and I will have to hire a mule to shift the four tons or so of oranges the finca will produce. If the river, which runs past the bottom of the finca were deeper, I could raft them down to Saleres, but it isn’t.

But that’s a problem for another day. This weekend it is shelf-fitting in the pantry and putting a wire-rope support bridge across the garden for roses, bourgainvillaeas and crawly things with white flowers and no smell to climb along.

Keep sweet

Ron

05 March 2004

Last weekend was much as usual. I had my tasks to do and they were to fit six shelves in the pantry and put a wire span between the kitchen wall and a pillar supporting the cloister to allow the climbing plants to make an archway separating the garden into two distinct areas.

I had the wood for the shelves cut in Madrid to save work. This was an experience in itself. I had the measurements to hand and went to the department responsible for cutting wood in Leroy Merlin, Spain’s equivalent of B & Q. I took one look at the lad behind the counter and knew that this wasn’t going to be an easy job. He was cubic in shape, had a long pony-tail covered in wood-shavings and a bewildered look on his face. I gave him my measurements, four shelves at 18cm x 39cm and two at 35cm x 35cm. He looked at the measurements and he said that I would have lots of spare wood left after the cut. I asked him why and he said that he had to cut the shelves from a master piece which measured 100cm x 120 cm and that that would not be very efficient. He then went on to show me, by way of diagrams that I would have twice as much spare wood as I would have shelves. I asked him why he didn’t use a smaller master to cut my shelves from and he said he didn’t know. I pointed across the aisle to a pile of planks 200cm x 40cm, tailor-made for my shelves. He then told me that that wasn’t his wood, but that if I wanted to go and get plank and bring it over, he would cut it. This cut the price of my order by sixty per cent and so I did.

The trucks were worse than usual on the drive south and we went straight to Jose’s bar for a drink to recover, before turning in early.

On Saturday I painted the shelves ready to fit them and got on with the wire bridge to support the plants. The bougainvilleas had died in the week, as there had been very strong cold winds; and I should have recognised this as a portent of doom. There was more snow on the mountains than I had ever seen before and the wind brought the temperature down to a miserable 3 degrees all day. It cut through my overalls like a knife, causing me to wonder about the waxing moon and it’s promise of no more frosts.

I started the span by drilling a hole in the concrete pillar and fitting a very strong expanding eye-bolt to take the strain of the nylon-coated stainless steel cable I had bought. Then I did the same to the kitchen wall and connected the two with a cable to form the main span. I put tensioners either side to take up the final strain when the whole was complete. The next part was time-consuming as I had to fit six other spans to form an arch, all attached to the main span and equidistant from each other. It looked fantastic when it was fitted, Brunel would have been proud of me. I gave the tensioners one last tweak to make it ship-shape and Bristol fashion, and a brick shot out of the kitchen wall, the eyebolt fixed dead-centre, dragging the whole caboodle to the ground. I was not amused. Not one little bit.

I decided to drill another hole a little to the side of the gaping hole in the kitchen wall, and after three goes managed to drill one with sufficient holding power and started again. Once finished it looked great again, I ignored the tensioners and attached the plants to the wire. Then I filled the hole in the wall with white concrete and sat back to have a beer.

It didn’t look right. I thought so, Carmen thought so and Ascension One (hereafter called Chon) definitely didn’t like it. It spoiled the effect that you get when you walk through the main door and see the views out across the valley.

So next weekend I will take it all down.

The shelves went in on Sunday morning. Or at least most of them went in. One had to be left out, as the wall where it was supposed to go is so far out of true that there was no way of affixing it. This is a result of asking Paco to build the house to look as if it had been there for centuries. No straight walls, no perfect plastering, but built in the old style.

So it is and so the shelf don’t fit. I will find some other place to fit the spare shelf.

I also put some hooks in the pantry to hang the brooms and the ironing board, and little by little the house is taking shape. The storage heaters were a Godsend over the weekend as it was very cold, but the television hasn’t been switched on since we bought it. The vines are budding but the limonero is looking very sad after the wind gave it a battering. Carmen had built a cactus garden on an old harrow we brought from Asturias, but the wind blew one of the esparto grass curtains across it on Sunday and decapitated half of the cacti. Carmen was the height of fortitude and instantly dipped the severed pieces in rooting hormone and replanted them. I hope they take.

09 Mar 04

I didn’t have time to send this last week, and now another weekend has passed.

The span with the plants was taken down and thrown into a dark corner of my workshop. Carmen decided that she wanted all the plants in the garden moving to different positions, which did my back no good as they all weigh a ton. She then gave instructions that the cactus garden was to be removed and off she went shopping, leaving me to do so. I removed the cactii and drilled holes all over the house and garden to hang them in becoming positions. Carmen came back from shopping with another car full of plants and I was told to move the cactii to other positions.

Antonio One came a-knocking at my door at about twelve on Saturday with a handful of mint roots, and then he disappeared down to the terracing at the back of the house to plant a two-metre line of mint. I am looking forward to this sprouting as I love real mint tea.

Which reminds me. I was in Lavapies the other day, the so-called ethnic barrio of Madrid, stocking up on herbs, spices and Arab comestibles. All I needed at the end of my shopping trip was mint, or hierba-buena as it is called in Spanish, to make some of the aforementioned tea. Hierba-buena loosely translates in English as good grass, and grass has the same street meaning in Spain as it does in England. So when I asked the lad in a small Moroccan supermarket if he had any good grass, he looked really hurt and said of course, all his grass was good and how many grammes did I want. It’s been a long time since I had any ganga cake, and I won’t say that I wasn’t interested, but I resisted. The memory of the aged aunt of a rebellious teenage girl in Southampton, found by the Police on the verge of the motorway trying to mow the grass with her teeth in the belief that she was a sheep, after the niece had fed her a ganga omelette, is still fresh in my mind.

I digress. The neighbour below us is complaining that the water from our de-calcifier is flooding her kitchen. The fact that her kitchen window-sill is an inch above the main drain for our corner of the village, and that that may be a contributory factor, has failed to register. She says that it has never happened before and I point out that I had never cleaned my drain before and that now it is clean, rain water can follow it’s proper course to the drain outside her house, rather than pass through the walls of my house and make the winters damp and dank in my bottom bedroom. This didn’t register either and in the end I told her that her strange window arrangements were not my problem, but that I was willing to brick up her kitchen window next weekend if it would help. It would certainly help me, as I wouldn’t have to put up with her moaning. This is a game played by the villagers, when Carmen is out of the house, aimed solely at getting the girri to fund their house maintenance. This is the third neighbour to try it on. Another, living in a house two streets away, spent a whole morning showing me that his kitchen floor was flooding due to the rain from my roof coming up through his floor. When I pointed out that the roof in question wasn’t mine, but a Scottish neighbour’s, he still thought I should pay for a new floor as the offending Scotsman wasn’t there to do so and that I was an accomplice by guiri association. Even Antonio One tried it on during the building of the house. It is a village pastime, to blame all ills on the latest incumbent to the village. I hope we have some new guiris here soon. My tenure as village idiot is in danger of being over-extended.

All the while this was going on, Antonio was busy on the terrace between us trying to pretend he wasn’t there, as he no doubt remembered his vain attempt at extortion. But it is quite light-hearted, and looked on as a game by all concerned. And I will probably build a small retaining wall to stop the rain water splashing into her window, all in the name of good neighbourliness. I am a little wary of building the wall for one reason and one reason only. Her husband is a member of the Guardia Civil in Granada and brews the most lethal mosto of them all. And if he feels he is beholding to me my health will undoubtedly suffer.

A friend of mine from my Army days come to visit on Saturday, prior to a skiing holiday in the Sierra Nevada. We duly got stuck into the beer and wine late in the afternoon, the war-stories started coming out, and Carmen arranged a slap-up meal for the evening in Jose’s. But I ate something that disagreed with us and I spent Saturday and Sunday shouting down the big white telephone. Carmen felt rough too, but didn’t react as violently as me. I lost two kilos, which shows that every cloud has a silver lining, but Sunday’s drive back to Madrid was very subdued. I hope Antonio One, Chon and their family enjoyed the immense doggy-bag that we brought back from Jose’s on Saturday.

My friend is looking for an Internet Café in the ski station so that he can tell the world that he met up with me and that I was old and senile and unable drink more that a couple of pints of beer and a couple of glasses of wine.

And that is it for this week. We are off again tomorrow for a long weekend, hopefully of rest. But there are a couple of lights that Carmen wants me to put up, one above the barbecue table and one in the dining room. And the pergola and the roof garden need building on the upstairs terraces…………

15 March 04

We had a long weekend last weekend, as Carmen had to visit a doctor in Granada on Thursday. We left Wednesday night and arrived late, too late in fact to have a beer after the long drive down. But we had to get up early in the morning, and just after we did so, Michelle phoned me and asked if we were OK. We were blissfully ignorant of the events in Madrid, and switched on the television to see the carnage. Being out of Madrid on that day reinforces my opinion that there is a god that looks after sinners.

I dutifully drove Carmen to Granada and had a glorious four hours to myself to research what is happening in Granada these days, prior to our move there next month. There is a group of Americans coming here in June to stay at one of the luxury houses in the valley, and they need a guide and mentor while they are here, and I am he. That is if they don’t cancel because of the bombing. So I visited the souq next to the cathedral and practiced my Arabic, talked to a guide in the cathedral about prices, annoyed the Tourist Information Office with interminable questions, and generally sussed the place out. This involved visiting a few bars and restaurants in the cause of duty. When the bar owners think you are going to drum up trade for them they are most helpful and forthcoming with free glasses of wine and a tapa or two. So from now and forever I will assume that cloak. The Egon Ronnie of Spain.

Of course, no day out would be the same without a trip to the nursery, so we did and Carmen bought some carnations to plant around the other carnations she bought last time she was there, which are planted around the primroses she bought the trip before that. The nurseryman has taken to putting up bunting at the weekends to welcome her to his place, and she is treated like royalty. I scowled at him and tried to threaten him in any way possible in an attempt to get him not to sell her anything. But I’m afraid his love of money takes precedence over his fear of me and soon we are going to have to hire a guide to find our way from the garden door to the house.

Prior to our arrival, our neighbours Chon and Antonio had lived a tranquil life, cultivating oranges, lemons, almonds and olives. Their house was a bit like a traditional farmhouse with bits of corrugated iron and bricks lying around the yard, just in case they were needed. The stable and storerooms are finished in concrete and not painted white like the rest of the village. During the building of our house, we needed to knock down a bit of Antonio’s garden wall to allow access for the dumper. When the wall was rebuilt it was extended and covered to make a wood-shed built of concrete, and a door was knocked in another wall to allow easier access from their house to the stable. Now Carmen has filled the garden, she is starting to put flowers outside the garden door to make the place look pretty. Chon looks after these flowers whilst we are in Madrid; has caught Carmen’s disease and has taken to putting a few pots outside her house to make the place look a bit brighter. Carmen has also started a campaign to convince Antonio to paint the walls of his stable white, to improve the aesthetics of the place. Chon has fallen under the influence of Carmen’s enthusiasm and agrees that the walls should be painted and the place generally tidied up. Antonio now spends a lot of time in the stable cursing quietly to himself.

The very first plant we received when we arrived was a huge aloe-vera, in a ten gallon oil drum. This was donated by Chon. I have been told that aloe-vera is the cure for everything, but up until now all it has given me is a strained back from Carmen’s incessant desire to move it to different locations around the garden, a rash on my face and arms where the spines on the leaves stick into me whilst I am moving it, and a bill for a pair of glasses which it malevolently ripped off my face during one such move, before catapulting them across the garden. The good news is that now the garden is full of other things, the aloe-vera has been returned to Chon. She decided she wanted it on top of the recently-built concrete wood-shed. It is now too heavy to move alone, having been replanted into a huge earthen pot, so I asked Manolo, Antonio’s son-in-law, to help me move it up the slope and onto the roof. Chon then filled the rest of the flat-roofed shed with other plants and I went back to drilling yet more holes around the house and garden, to accommodate the cactii that still needed a home after last weeks change of plan. About two hours later there was a kerfuffle outside our house and Chon was calling for Carmen and I. We rushed outside to find Antonio returned from the campo and atop the wood-shed trying to move the aloe-vera. Now I can’t move it alone and he, at seventy-odd and with a heart condition certainly can’t. But he was shouting about it being too heavy for the roof to support and wanted it off. We managed to get him and his blood pressure down, and waited for Manolo Two, Manolo’s eighteen-year-old son, to arrive from the campo to help me to move it. He came and we moved it to a place further down the slope, where it now sits in regal splendour.

Antonio is a likeable bloke, much like me. He never stops working, much like me, and when he gets up in the morning he has a plan for the work he has to do that day and he likes to get on with it without being disturbed, much like me. So the next day, while he was busy mucking out his mule, Carmen and Chon, who were outside the stable, suggested that he move two five metre lengths of corrugated iron which were resting against his wall, to allow for the placing of yet more pots of flowers in the entrance to our houses. He went ballistic. I was in our garden, you’ve guessed it, drilling holes for something or other, oh yes, a Tunisian rug to hang on the wall, when I heard a sound as if someone had shut the cat’s tail in the door. It was in fact Antonio throwing a right royal wobbler. Now I’ve seen some wobblers thrown in my time, but this was a classic, and I reached for the car keys whilst mentally planning the quickest route to Granada Hospital intensive care unit. He took a while to calm down, and didn’t need my services as a driver, but Chon has since told us that he was in none too good a state that night and needed treble his normal intake of heart pills. But the corrugated iron has been moved and I’ve reminded Carmen that she can’t change the world, or at least our corner of the village overnight. And it has made her realise that I am not the only one that throws a wobbler when told that it is imperative that I get down from a ladder immediately, put down my tools and move a two-hundredweight urn three inches to the left or right because it doesn’t look quite right.

Carmen bought a selection of pastries while we were in Granada and we took those around to Antonio and Chon’s in the evening as a thank-you for the help they had given us. I had my misgivings before I went, and tried to stay in our house, but Carmen dragged me along. I remember the mosto coming out, and I remember having a hangover long before I finished drinking the stuff. I haven’t experienced this since I was in Malta many years ago and drinking Marsovin Semi-Sweet, a wine that the M.O. had warned us not to drink as it was medically proved that it turns you into a manic depressive. I remember Charro, Chon’s daughter, saying that the food that kept appearing was only an aperitif, and I remember going to bed with a blinding headache. And it was still there in the morning, which meant I went into my workshop and scowled at everything for a few hours, before getting out the chain-saw and attacking the wood-pile with it, ostensibly looking for some nice pieces of olive or orange wood to use on the lathe, but really to ventilate my spleen.

When I calmed down, I got working on the lathe and made a nice vase out of an orange branch, which I proudly showed to Carmen who proudly gave it to Chon, who is now convinced that I am a saint. She put it in the mini-chapel which she has in her house, the repose of about one hundred figurines of the other saints of Spain, and she now wants me to make some candlesticks for the church.

Which reminds me, it is Saint Jose’s day tomorrow, and as there isn’t a Saint Ronaldo, except for Real Madrid fans, it has been decided by Carmen’s father that as my middle name is Joseph, we celebrate with a meal out. (We are going to Asturias tomorrow for a long weekend, four hundred and fifty kilometres in the opposite direction to Granada, on the north coast of Spain)

And that’s it for this week. Nest week I’ll tell you about Asturias, if I can remember anything!!!

P.S. I also put a plug on the wall high above the barbecue table without any let or hindrance. Except that Carmen doesn’t like the light she had OK’d last week and I have to change it. But I had anticipated this so I only have to unplug the old one and plug in a new one, not re-wire the whole cloister. I am getting wise to her!!!

30 Mar 04

Well, we did go to Asturias the weekend before last, and all Carmen’s tests were negative so we are happy for another six months. Lots of food and drink with Carmen’s parents and friends and I put on the obligatory half stone in five days. Now I’m back in Madrid and on a prison diet.

We went to Saleres last weekend, Thursday to Sunday, and it rained the whole while. In fact it rained throughout Spain and a lot of the Med coast suffered flood damage. But not Saleres, we had a gentle rain for the duration, because as Antonio Two reminds us,
‘Saleres es el pueblo mas bonito del mundo.’

No weekend would be complete for Carmen without a trip to the nursery, so off she went while I got busy assembling a prefabricated table that her father had made me. He works in a steel factory and the table weighed about three hundred pounds, but is a great addition to my workshop. Carmen arrived home with another two huge urns. I bit my tongue and experienced phantom back pains at the thought of moving them endlessly around the garden this weekend until she finds the right position, normally the one she started at. Later the nurseryman and his assistant arrived, who by now are part of the family. They brought even more pots and plants and stood in the rain discussing the garden with Carmen.

Saturday was a quiet day.

Until Carmen told me that Antonio One had asked her if I could help him later with his burra, the female donkey. The poor thing’s rear leg had swollen quite dramatically and Antonio suspected hormiguillas This translates in my Spanish to small ants, and I wondered if they had climbed her leg and bitten her whilst she was in the campo. But it transpires that they are small insects that bore into the hoof, lay eggs and infect the blood. They are not ants at all, and I was told that the farrier, not the vet, was coming to take care of the problem. Antonio wanted me to hold her leg firm whilst he held her head and the farrier did his stuff. I looked at her leg and sympathised with Antonio and the donkey and asked,
‘What’s she called?’
‘Called?’ he said. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Name?’ he said. ‘It’s a donkey.’
‘No,’ I say, ‘It must have a proper name.’
‘Oh,’ says Antonio. ‘Lolita.’
No comment.

I suspect that many of you don’t know, and my horsey sister Elaine will be hurt when I say this, but I don’t like horses and that includes mules and donkeys too. In fact I don’t just dislike them, I am scared of them, and I’m not scared of much. This fear is not without foundation, as the things bite me whenever they see me, and always in the same spot. They put their teeth either side of the muscle on my right shoulder, and bite into the joint. The pain is undescribable, and it has happened at least a half-dozen times. I can be in a crowd of a hundred people, but if a horse is nearby it will unerringly find it’s way to my shoulder, clamp it’s teeth firmly on the muscle and shake me ‘til I scream.

A little example. The Saddle Club in Cyprus, having just watched my daughters taking part in a gymkhana. I am walking past a stable door when a horse, waiting in ambush, sticks it’s head out and grabs my shoulder. I yell in pain and everyone turns from the gymkhana to see what is happening. I am in my best uniform, being Duty Sergeant that day, and look ridiculous hopping about with a horse attached to my shoulder. It hurts so much that I retaliate by letting loose a round-house swing which catches the horse just beneath it’s eye. It is so shocked that it lets go and jumps back into it’s stall, where it loses it’s footing, slips over onto it’s side and can’t get up again. All the men are awed that I have apparently laid out a horse with a left hook, and the wives and children are outraged at my cruelty. I can’t care less and am trying frantically to wipe the tears of pain from my eyes before anyone sees them. My daughters are so ashamed of me that they start looking for foster parents and my ex-wife disowns me, again. The event passed into regimental history and did my image no harm, but I received scowls from the wives and kids for the rest of my time in Cyprus.

Back to the plot. Antonio says he will call me when he needs me and I go back to working on my lathe in the workshop. Pablo calls me at six and I go to the stable to find Antonio and Lolita gone. Pablo and I rush all around the village and we eventually find him waiting by the fountain at the entrance to the lower square. I am in such a rush that I am still wearing my bright orange overalls, which puts Lolita on edge and had the four old men who sit permanently on a wall to the side of the square talking about a guiri butano, or bottled gas delivery man. Antonio is looking pensive, grasping a bottle of white spirit in his left hand and the rope for Lolita’s halter in the right. Pablo and I sit down next to him and wait, and I wonder whether to ask for a slug of the white spirit as a bit of Dutch courage.

Lolita is a thoroughbred donkey, with the mark of the Cross of Christ on her shoulders, given as a mark of honour for services rendered. She stands about chest-high to me and weighs about three hundredweight. Normally docile, now she senses that something is afoot, (literally in her case,) and stands nervously stamping alternate back legs. I suspect she is warming up in preparation to kick me. The four old men on the wall opposite shout across to Antonio, asking who I am. They often do this; talk about me as if I don’t exist and can’t speak Spanish. One of them, drunk as a skunk, wanders across to inspect me and the donkey.
‘Does he speak Spanish?’ he asks Antonio nodding his head in my direction.
‘Yes,’ I interrupt. ‘I am the bastard son of Antonio that he sired while he was in Germany.’
Antonio says nothing.
The man nods knowingly and asks me where I live. He has a pair of false teeth which don’t fit and which jump about in his mouth completely out of synch with his lips, clacking like punctuation marks during every utterance. I can’t understand a word, but it doesn’t matter as he doesn’t know what he is saying either. Antonio keeps dumb and leaves me to it. He’s worried about Lolita.

Eventually the farrier’s Land Rover arrives and he jumps out and walks across to the old men to have a chat, ignoring us completely. When he is finished he strolls back to us and looks at Lolita, shaking his head sagely.
‘Hormiguillas!’ he says, looking at the painfully swollen leg and goes for his tools.

‘Who is going to hold her?’ he asks on his return.
‘He is,’ says Antonio, pointing at me.
‘Come on then,’ the farrier says and I know that my moment of truth has come.

We start with the good leg. I lift it as I’ve seen John Wayne do it in the films, and lock it tight under my arm and against my leg. Lolita is docile and the farrier, using a ferocious pair of pincers, clips about half an inch off the unshod hoof. So far so good.
‘Look,’ he says proudly, pointing to a discoloured portion of the newly exposed hoof. ‘Ormigatas!! Like I said.’
Then he gets a knife from his pocket and begins to dig them out. Lolita is not happy about this and struggles to escape. But I have my life at stake here and she can’t move too much. When he is finished gouging a hole in the hoof he asks Antonio for the white spirit and pours it into the hole. Lolita objects violently and tries to kick the farrier who skips away and tells me to put the leg down.

Now it is time for the other leg. This is the swollen one and looks painful. When I go to pick it up Lolita scurries away. The farrier and Antonio bring her back into position and hold her still, looking at me expectantly. They obviously assume that every Englishman is a gentleman with a string of horses and that this is an everyday occurrence for me. I take a deep breath, realise that England’s honour is at stake, grab the infected leg, bend and lock it firmly against my body and leg and hold my breath. Lolita is snorting like mad, and the farrier is starting to sweat.
‘Hold her tight,’ he says and begins his clipping.
She tries to hop away on her other leg, but can’t. The hoof cut, the farrier again produces his knife and begins to dig out the hormiguillas in this hoof. This infected wound is obviously very painful and Lolita gets ever more skittish. The farrier works frantically to finish, and having done so, reaches for the white spirit.

The rest is a blur. The white spirit went into the open, infected wound. Lolita lost it big time and tried to kick the farrier with the leg I was holding. I felt it coming and locked my body rigid, with the result that the rear leg, instead of shooting out backwards, straightened and lifted Lolita’s aft end about a foot off the ground. The farrier was off on his toes, Antonio suddenly found himself holding the halter of a donkey doing a handstand, and I had the whole three hundredweight of enraged Lolita resting on my knee. The old men all gasped in amazement and wonder at this apparent circus trick performed by the guiri and the donkey and the drunk’s false teeth clacked applause. Poor Lolita, realising that something was amiss, tried to cross-kick me with the unfettered leg, failed miserably and came down with one leg on the pavement, two in the road and one held by an orange demon. She wobbled there, completely off-balance, as confused as the rest of us and turned to look at me with vengeance in her eye.

Well, this orange demon knows when to run away and fight another day, and he did so, with as much aplomb as he could muster. Antonio was bewildered by it all, the old men appreciative. The farrier looked at me uncertainly, unsure whether to offer me a job or not.
And Pablo looked at me with awe and said,
‘Wow!!!!’

I took the leading rein from Antonio while he paid the farrier and walked Lolita around in a circle, trying to appease her. When Antonio had finished I told him I had to be off as there was something important I had to attend to. And there was. I went back to the house, had a long, cold beer, sat on the step, wondered what I would be asked to do next week, and would my retirement always be like this? If the word gets around the village, and it will, will I be called on to hold all the mules when the farrier comes to call?

I say again,

I hate mules, donkeys and horses.

Ron

P.S. Carmen has just read this and told me that I’m deaf and the donkey is not called Lolita, but Mulita, Little Mule. I thought Antonio was getting a bit soft, giving one of his animals a name, when his cats are called Gata and his dog is called La Perra. But I shall call her Lolita from now on, which will give Antonio something to tell the rest of the village about.

13 April 2004

We had a whole week in Saleres last week. In fact we had nine days, as it was Easter week.

We got into the house at four o’clock on Saturday morning as Carmen had had to visit a member of her company who works in Granada. We went to her friend’s house and met her husband, who everybody said is a couple of sarnies short of a picnic, but with whom I got on very well. Birds of a feather? At eight fifteen we were woken by Lolita braying at the top of her voice, Antonio’s dog Canela howling in a sympathetic alto, and Antonio cooing to the pair of them. Our alarm clock in Saleres.

We got up at about ten and opened the door to the garden, ready to receive visitors. Antonio was first and told us that he was going to sell Lolita as he was too old to give her sufficient exercise. He had phoned a horse trader in Motril who was coming to collect her the following day. He didn’t know what would become of her, whether she would be giving donkey rides on the beach, be sold to another farmer, or be sent to the knacker’s yard. He was obviously upset and he left for his stable, so as to spend as much time as he could with his beloved friend before he lost her.

Chon was not at home as she had been seconded by the town council to work in the local Orange Festival, so we decided to go there for lunch. We took Antonio along with us in the car and he was re-united there with all his family. On the journey he told us that if he didn’t have ties in Saleres he would sell up and go back to Germany, so upset was he at having to let Lolita go. I think it’s the tablets he is taking for his heart condition.

The orange festival is to celebrate the orange harvest and there was free beer and cheap food to be had. The food was a local dish, remojon and migas. Remojon is orange, onion, olives and salt-cod and has a surprising pleasant taste. Migas are fried breadcrumbs, and don’t.

Shortly after arriving we saw Antonio’s family gathered around him in a corner of the fairground. He was sobbing his heart out and the tears were coursing down his face at the prospect of losing Lolita and we all told him not to sell her if she meant that much to him. He agreed to this an immediately started to smile and laugh, so Lolita has a reprieve and has been getting star treatment all week; fresh grass and lots of grooming. I’m sure that Antonio thinks that she knew what he had planned and he is trying to get back into her good books. Her leg and hoof are now healed, but she still gives me the evil eye whenever I go into the stable. For my part I take great care not to get into any position where she can bite, kick, trample or spit at me.

In fact the stable is now a dangerous place to be. Two of Chon’s cats had kittens about two weeks ago. Antonio got rid of all but one of them, but the two mothers have both decided that the remaining kitten is theirs. The three of them have taken up residence in one of Lolita’s old saddlebags near the window and heaven help anyone who comes near them. Bearing in mind that these cats are semi-feral and answer to no-one, and that one is a psychotic Siamese to boot, going into their territory is a hazardous pastime. Fur rises and hissing and spitting begins, as one or the other of the mothers springs to the top of the saddlebag ready to claw any approaching offender’s eyes out. The kitten is Siamese and pretty as a picture, and as it has two mothers spoiling it, it does nothing but eat and sleep. How I envy it.

It rained very hard last week and the pool filled up with water from the cloister roof, so another job I have to do is to fit sixty feet of guttering. Paco came one evening with Trini and his youngest son, and they stayed until late, talking and laughing. When it was time to leave, their son came running back into the house to tell us that there was a dog in the swimming pool, and sure enough, there was a large black dog, clinging desperately to the side of the pool and whimpering pitifully. I pulled it out, just in time to save it from drowning, and it staggered off, cold and wet. Goodness knows whose it was or how it fell into the swimming pool, or why it didn’t try to get out by way of the steps in the shallow end. I suspect it was Miguel’s, as his dog is almost blind and about the same size and colour as the offender. The next day I had to check the pool for offensive objects, of which thankfully there were none, but I gave it a good dose of chlorine to make sure.

Believe it or not, Carmen bought more urns this week and I had the task of finding earth enough to fill them. So now the terraces at the back of the house are wider and deeper and my phantom back pain of the week before has become a reality. Fifty-odd buckets had to be carted from the terraces to the garden, although in all honesty, Carmen did also help, and got Chon and Pablo to help too. Carmen also appeared one day with a semi-mature, twelve foot high wisteria, which she somehow got into the car, but which was almost impossible to remove. It is now planted to the side of the house and we hope that next year we will have lots of wall-cover and flowers on that side of the house.

She was also a bit concerned that the urns were too new-looking, so she asked the nurseryman how to age them. He said that if you paint them with yoghurt the bacteria reacts with the terracotta to make them look older. So she bought eight pots of yoghurt and set Pablo to work painting all the urns. The little lad worked like a Trojan and finished them all just as it was getting dark, then came into the kitchen to get his reward of chocolate from the fridge. He went back into the garden to eat it and we heard howls of laughter. We rushed out to find all the cats in the neighbourhood busily licking the yoghurt from the sides of the pots and nothing we could do would persuade them to stop. Half of the cats in the village are feral, have the battle scars of hardened street-fighters and they never give ground. Carmen was incensed and to avoid a night of catfights she got out the garden hose and washed all Pablo’s hard work away and gave him another slab of chocolate in recompense.

She has also decided that we should live outside for the summer, which is why Paco visited us. He has received orders to construct a summer kitchen under the cloister next to the barbecue. Actually Paco will just build a couple of work surfaces, and I have to fit the gas cooker, the fridge,(we now have five), the shelves and anything else that comes into her mind.

As it got nearer to Easter, we were brought more into the local customs, notably the culinary ones. Chon showed us how to make roscas, a sort of doughnut, and then gave us about twenty of them. Luckily we have a friend who is a roscaholic and we off-loaded some onto her. On Thursday lunchtime, Ascension Two brought us a dish of salt-cod, breadcrumbs and egg, made into a kind of meatball, (or more accurately, a fishball.) Chon also cooked us some of these, so we had to eat both potfuls under their watchful eyes and with careful impartiality. Our bloatedness after this seriously curtailed our afternoon workrate.

This then posed another dilemma. How well should I clean the pots? If I cleaned them too well, military fashion, would they think that I was criticising their kitchen hygeine? If I cleaned them too little would they think I don’t run a clean kitchen? It may sound trivial, but this was a real problem at the time and could have affected my status in the village. I decided to play it crafty, so I cooked some marmalade and gave them a saucepan full each, neatly sidestepping the problem. Would you believe that they had never had marmalade before? The valley exports two thousand tons of oranges annually and they never use it for marmalade.

A couple of days were idyllic. We sat in the garden by the pool one morning, taking our breakfast of fresh orange juice picked five minutes before from our trees, poached eggs taken from under Chon’s chickens five minutes before that, fresh bread delivered half an hour before that, and a naice cup of tea. The sun was flexing it’s muscles for the day and there was not a cloud in the sky. The swallows were swooping gracefully over the terrace and taking sips of water from the pool whilst on the wing, disturbing it’s stillness but creating ripples that reflected the sunlight onto the white walls of the cloister. The air was filled with the smell of orange blossom and the humming of the bees feasting on it. Chon’s daughter Charo brought us some honeycomb which she had collected from one of her orange groves, and spread on toast it had the most incredible flavour of orange blossom.

And that is about it for this week. As you see, food and animals form the backbone of our existence of live in the village.

And do I miss England? Not a jot!!!

Keep sweet all.

Ron y Carmen

20 April 2004

Got to Saleres about nine-ish this Friday, after the obligatory stop at the nursery. Carmen said she wanted a vine and four geraniums. We managed to get away with a lavender plant, three flowerpots, two vines and eight geraniums. The nurseryman has retired and gone to live on a yacht in Monaco.

The car was packed full as we are gradually moving things from here in Madrid to the valley at the weekends. Chon was waiting at the door when we got there and I borrowed ‘la maquina,’ or the tracked cart that they have, to move the stuff from the square to the house. Antonio has passed me fit to drive it, after lessons from Pablo, his grandson. It is a brute of a thing, with handlebars festooned with clutches and tillers, a gear shift and an accelerator. It is unsilenced and driving it through the narrow streets makes enough noise to raise the dead. Or the older inhabitants of Saleres, at any rate. In the square I was attempting a three-point-turn with la maquina without destroying any of the parked cars, when I was greeted by a young man of about thirty-five whose name I don’t know but who always waves to me when he sees me. As usual he was with his large brown mule, called La Mula funnily enough. He works in the campo, one of the few youngsters to do so. He eyed la maquina and said,
‘They’re good, these machines, aren’t they? Is it yours?’
‘No, it is Antonito’s, my neighbour’s,’ I replied.
‘Think I’ll get one. This mule is too much trouble and too expensive. Hay and feed and vet and all. And it is dirty and needs cleaning out every day or two. With this maquina you just put fuel in it park it up at night.’
‘Yes, I suppose you’re right,’ I said, hating to agree with him and see another mule leave the valley. ‘But your mule is a fine strong animal, and in very good condition.’
His eyes lit up in appreciation.
‘Yes, thank you. But I think I’ll get rid of it and get one of those,’ he said, and walked off with his mule, which thankfully didn’t understand any of the conversation and realise the sentence hanging over it’s head.

Two trips sufficed this weekend and after that, having woken Antonio with the noise of la maquina outside his window, I went into his house to say Hello and to thank him for letting me use it. He was sitting in front of the television watching a quiz programme, the volume turned off, a two litre plastic bottle of mosto in front of him and his glass half empty.
‘I’ve sold the donkey,’ he said.
My heart dropped. Lolita of The Cross, whom I had helped with the treatment of her hormiguillas. Lolita, who kept my survival instinct in prime condition with the ever-present threat of vengeance in her limpid brown eyes, had gone to the horse trader in Motril. This was one of the few times that I willing accepted his offer of some mosto. We sat with our glasses in front of us and he sadly told me, or rather justified to himself, the reasons for getting rid of his friend.
‘She is only three years old, and I am seventy-six,’ he said. ‘She needs someone younger than me.’
My eyebrow rose, the effect of only one glass of mosto beginning to kick-in and with it my sense of the ridiculous. This was a donkey we were talking about, even if she was called Lolita. Nabakov sprung unbidden to my mind.
‘I can use the mechanical mule and if that can’t get anywhere I have la maquina. Anyway, I am too old for the campo now. I am useless and should retire.’
‘Rubbish!’ I replied. ‘You work harder than any of the youngsters around here.’
‘There are no youngsters,’ he moped. ‘They are all working in the towns. No-one wants to work the land any more. It is too hard.’
In this he was right and I could offer no defence. And the price of the oranges at the cooperative, even with subsidies, is hardly enough to justify the work. So we had another glass of mosto and drank it in silent tribute to lost friends.

It looked like a long night, so I excused myself for a minute and went to explain to Carmen that I was with Antonio and that he was feeling low after having sold Lolita. She was cooking a Spanish omelette, said it would be ready in an hour, and asked me to ask Chon to come and talk to her.

I went back to Antonio, and found a full glass waiting. I got him talking of this and that, to keep his mind off Lolita, and he started to tell me about his time as a young man in Saleres. He had lived with his widowed mother and an older brother, he told me, until he had been called up for the Army. The local mayor had for some reason not wanted him to go, and had told the military that he was needed in the valley to look after his mother. A battle ensued between the Army and the mayor, won of course in the time of Franco by the Army, who told the mayor that there was an older brother to look after the widow. Antonio actually wanted to join the Army, to get away from the poverty of the village, and off he went to Zaragoza, to a bakery unit. He told me that his job for two years, with a friend of his, was to stand at a hatch and spend the whole day passing out loaves out to those who needed it.
‘The cavalry would come first,’ he said, ‘And ask for a hundred loaves. I would pass two through the hatch and shout ‘Two!’ Then my friend would pass another two out and shout ’Four!’ The it was my turn again and I would shout ‘Six!’ until we had reached one hundred. Then the artillery would arrive and ask for three hundred, then the Infantry for five hundred. Then the Guardia Civil. It would go on all day, until we were finished. It was good work, I enjoyed it.’
‘Sounds great,’ I said, wondering how long I would have lasted doing such a monotonous chore.
‘Then I came back to the village and set my eye on Chon. It took a long time to convince her to have me but eventually she did. I was offered a job in the Guardia Civil in Pinos, but only as a cornet player as I’m one metre fifty and too small to do proper Police work. I would have had no chance of promotion, so I said ‘No.’ I was living in the cura’s house at the time, (he offered no explanation as to the whereabouts of his brother or mother,) but he said I had to leave, so as soon as we were married, I packed up and went to Germany to find a job. I had no money when I left but soon had enough to buy the little house next door. I stayed in Germany for thirty years, travelling back and forth on a bus. I love to travel.’
‘And now you have a lot of land and this fine house as well as the little house next door and your large stable and storerooms. You’ve done well for yourself and your family’
‘Yes,’ he said proudly. ‘Now I am not the poor man that the cura kicked out of his house all those years ago.’
His voice dropped. ‘It was the time of Franco. It was better to be in Germany than Spain then. Another mosto?’
I have noticed that when the old people of the village mention Franco, their voices drop, as if in fear of being overheard, they glance furtively around and instinctively reach for another glass of Dutch Courage before speaking. Then Carmen called and my hour was up. Already I had what I hoped was a psychosomatic ache in my liver so I made my apologies and went to eat.

I hadn’t mentioned it before, but have just remembered, that Antonio had spent most of Easter week in the stable with Lolita, the door firmly closed indicating that he didn’t want visitors. Carmen said that she could hear him talking to Lolita and cursing the fact that the old cura was returning to the village to take the Easter services, and vowing never to go to the church as long as he was there. I wonder what went on all those years ago?

I returned to Carmen and had an omelette full of herbs from our garden. She had no idea what she had put in it, which is a pity as it was delicious and she won’t be able to reproduce it.

Saturday was a day of drilling holes in our walls and Chon’s, to fit flowerpots for the eight geraniums. The roses have started to bloom, in the red and yellow colours of the Spanish flag, would you believe? I have retaliated by digging in my boxes of odds and ends and retrieving the Union Jack that I had on my flat door during the evacuation on Famagusta. It is hanging on my workshop wall, (re-named ‘Ron’s Shed,) and this is now my ‘corner of some foreign field that will be forever England.’ Anyone entering has to salute the flag and vow allegiance firstly to Elizabeth II and secondly to me as a warranted officer late of her service. So far only Pablo has done so, but I don’t feel in my heart of hearts that he means it. He just does it to get me to play football with him, or to have water fights which he loves. And he insists on saluting with his left hand.

The pool is having histrionics, it’s ph level has dropped like a stone. It’s probably because there is half a ton of orange blossom on or under the water. I have just been to buy some liquid to fix it and it seems like pretty potent stuff. Reading the label is like being briefed on the handling of WMD. (That’s Weapons of Mass Destruction for the old lags, not Siwa Oasis.)
Talking of orange blossom, I put a blanket under the orange trees the other day and shook some excess blossom off. I am drying it for use as an infusion, which is supposed to lower tension and stress. Antonio and I will be sharing it, half-and-half.

On Sunday I met Juan and Antonio Two in the square, with Juan’s son. His son no longer works in the campo but has a job in Granada. Juan spent twenty-odd years in France and is an expert on apples, which is of little use in Saleres. However, we do have membrillos, which are like furry apples and are rock-hard. You render them down by boiling and this produces a sweet jelly to eat with cheese. Juan and his son had been picking olives all weekend and were loading a trailer with sackfuls ready to go to the mill. Olives sell for about sixty centimos a kilo, and there must have been about three and a half tons on the trailer, which makes about 1,500 pounds sterling profit. A fair couple days work, I suppose. Pity there’s only one harvest a year.

The oranges are being picked at a fair rate of knots. There is only about another month or so before they are all gone. Some groves haven’t been touched at all, and the ground underneath them is bright with windfalls. Often the people working in the cities cannot find time to pick them. Or like ours, they can’t be brought from the groves without a mule and city-dwellers can’t afford the time to keep one. We are waiting for the council to put in a track alongside the river which will allow maquinas access, and of course I have to build a working acequia and link it to the main acequia, clean and repair the terraces and walls and prune the trees .

But that will be the subject of another story, hopefully to be told by me and not by Carmen at my funeral.

Love to all

Ron y Carmen

Well, we went to the valley this weekend, but kept very much to ourselves as Carmen was exhausted and I had to do some concreting work in the tunnel between the houses. The walls of my house are damp, which is normal in winter as there is no damp-course, and I am cementing a runaway for the water from the communal storm-drain. We actually stopped work on Sunday afternoon and had a siesta before the drive back.

Carmen went off to buy some plant-pots on Saturday and came back with enough pots and plants to fill the village, and an hour later the nurseryman came along with another van full. I looked in the back of the van to see if he had his shop signs, the till and his assistant there as I thought he was intending to move his business into our garden as he can’t possibly have any stock left in his nursery. Now we need to build an irrigation system to water everything or hire a team to work shifts around the clock to keep the things alive. We have the almond tree I predicted last week, and the olive tree, more ivy and a climby-smelly things which I am keeping hidden from the neighbours in case they think we are anti-social. She also bought some rosemary plants which are situated near the barbecue as Carmen loves rosemary with barbecued lamb; and some mint which took one look at it’s new home and died on the spot in the pot. So my roast lamb and mint sauce are once again a pipe-dream.

Ascension Two and her grandson helped with the potting of the plants and for once there no words of wisdom to be gleaned. Both Antonios and Ascension Two were in the campo all day Sunday picking oranges, so we didn’t see them.

As I said, I drove back from Saleres on Sunday evening for once not feeling too tired. A year ago, Carmen bought a new car, a two-litre turbo diesel which is a delight to drive. Carmen thinks it is a time-machine as every Sunday she gets into the car in Saleres and ‘Hey-Presto!’ two minutes later she wakes up in Madrid. I am not that fortunate. I have to drive for four hours and four hundred and sixty four kilometres, which is not so much fun, especially in the winter and in the dark.

However, it does give me time to do an in-depth study of Spanish driving mentality.

Basically, Spanish men need to get a certain number of macho-points per week to keep their driving licences. To gain these points they have to drive like things possessed and take as many risks and have as little concern for other road users as possible. They must overtake anything on the road, extra points awarded for overtaking on zebra-crossings or on the inside.

Spanish women are all divas who think theirs is a God-given right to do as they please on the road and any man who doesn’t give them right-of-way under all circumstances is an uneducated and uncultured moron and deserves to get his car bent. Any Spanish woman who doesn’t give way to another Spanish woman on the road immediately becomes a child-killer and a wife-stealer to the offended party, who reacts as if she was just that.

I have also noticed different types of behaviour on the motorway for different types of car-owner. For instance, when you get a BMW serviced they plug the car into a diagnostic machine and find out what, if anything is wrong. It is the same for the BMW driver. In the BMW showroom when you buy a BMW, the salesman shows you to a chair which has hidden electrodes which programme you to drive the BMW owners’ way, which is to put your foot down to the boards and flash your main beam every half-second, regardless of road conditions.

Drivers of Seat Leon Tdi’s are all nerds. They love to barrel along in the fast lane, every possible gadget working to it’s maximum. Flashers going, windscreen wipers working so fast that the rubber is melting, radio booming strength five, sun-roof opening and shutting; whilst the driver pays no attention to the road, maintains his one hundred miles an hour by means of cruise-control while he buries his head beneath the dashboard looking for another widget to play with. As he overtakes you he is adjusting his seat and steering wheel simultaneously, which gives the effect of him riding a bucking bronco.

Then there is the Audi driver. He just ignores everything that is going on around him and charges along at a ton-plus and heaven help anyone who is in the way. If there is a woman driving an Audi all is lost for us mere mortals. Fully comprehensive insurance and good health-cover suddenly assume overwhelming importance.

Many Spanish men, like Italians, have an Oedipus complex, as evidenced by the way they stay living with Mum ‘til she throws them out when they are thirty five. Even then they have to go back on Sundays for lunch and to get their clothes washed and ironed. It doesn’t matter if they are earning a six-figure salary and are CEO of a multi-national, it’s off to Mum on Sunday. On the road this is manifested as follows. You are alone on the inside lane of a straight stretch of motorway in La Mancha, with visibility at about ten miles. Your speed is the regulation twenty per cent above the speed limit, as ordained in the Spanish Highway Code. Suddenly from nowhere, just like a UFO, you have a wingman sitting twenty yards behind you in the fast lane, matching your speed kilometre for kilometre. His lights are shining in your wing mirror, very efficiently destroying your night vision. You can feel the relief emanating from his car that he has found someone to suckle on to. This continues until there is a slower car in front of you and you indicate that you want to overtake. This provokes a reaction of frantic rage from Oedipus. Lights flash, he moves alongside you to stop you overtaking and depriving him of your company. He can see that you have to overtake but he tries his utmost to stop you. If you ignore him and pull out, suddenly he is a red spot in the distance, desperately looking for another teat to suck on.

There is a National Park about half-way between Saleres and Madrid, called Despeñaperros, which as near as I can get to a translation is ‘Dogs falling over a cliff,’ which sounds very Daliesque to me. In fact it should be translated as, ‘Drive like a mad dog and go over a cliff,’ which is what the Spanish drivers seem intent on doing. The road here winds around the bottom of a long gorge, lots of long sweeping bends, switchbacks and the occasional hairpin. The speed limit is reduced to 60kph, (75kph in real terms) but all the Spanish drivers see this a direct affront to their manhood and drive at double that. I am a little apprehensive driving through the gorge as I have always had a morbid fear of being hit by falling dogs. I know it’s irrational, but there it is. There have been some outstanding accidents here over the winter. A couple of months ago, all sixteen rear tyres of a huge truck carrying a concrete bridge span caught fire and welded the truck to the tarmac on a narrow curve, blocking the road for hours. A week after that a Seat-Leon-driving-nerd overtook me on the outside of a curve, slid into the barrier, ricocheted of that and did 3 x 360 degree turns in front of me before driving across both lanes and disappearing into a ditch on the opposite side of the road. There are the carcases of trucks which have rolled over the edge of the carriageway littering the verges and the whole thing is quite scary. This weekend there were just the normal truckies filling up both lanes like a scene from ‘Convoy’ and forcing the car drivers to seethe for ten minutes while they waited for the open road and the freedom to act like madmen again, which they duly did.

Last Sunday there was a slight haze about sixty kilometres from Madrid. What an excuse! I estimate the visibility was between eight hundred and a thousand metres, but this was not a chance to be missed. Most Spanish drivers not having seen fog, immediately assumed this was the real thing and reached for the fog-light switch. The sky lit up like a Christmas tree and night-vision was again destroyed. But that didn’t matter, this was the chance to use that switch that had been waiting so patiently on their steering columns for all that time. Any satellite cruising overhead would have assumed that the Autovia Andalucia had somehow caught fire and would have immediately alerted the fire brigades of five provinces to attend. Ten seconds later the mist was gone and you could hear the sighs of disappointment as some drivers switched their fog-lights off. Of course the majority of drivers just left their lights on and cursed everyone else for leaving theirs on and blinding them, but that’s the Spanish way. But what a tale to tell at parties. ‘Did I tell you about the time I had to use my fog-lights on the way back to Madrid?’

The last part of the journey is like approaching any other capital city. Like a black hole, the city exerts a gravitational pull which cannot be resisted. I first experienced this whist coming into London in a Fiat Panda a lot of years ago. The poor Panda was only capable of seventy five miles an hour flat-out, but the traffic was travelling at eighty miles an hour, gradually increasin