The Home Counties

Maggie has a plan for a bit of a rebuild of our house. Demolition and rebuild apart there is also a long list of ancillary jobs. One of those is putting a sliding door between the kitchen and living room. Maggie has something specific in her mind's eye, something rustic, something wooden, and a visit to the Fundación Casa Pintada in Mula yesterday made her wonder about reclaimed doors.

I remembered that we'd been to a market where they had a supply of antique doors. We misremembered (something that seems to happen more and more frequently) the name of the market and ended up going to a place called el Mercadillo el Zoco in Algorfa rather than the Mercadillo el Moncayo in Guardamar.

I've been here, in Spain, a while. It's not new to me, not novel, but it still takes me by surprise when we go somewhere public and Britons apparently outnumber Spaniards. It can happen in bars, in housing estates, and even in towns. It happened today. Maggie was sure that there were lots of Belgians, Dutch, Germans and French at the market, which is almost certainly true, but there was no doubt that the lingua franca was English, not Spanish. Also, in my opinion, the overriding presence was British.