Always a foreigner, never a local
A Scots bloke posted a video the other day—someone I’d never come across before—wrestling with his doubts about living in Spain. He was heading back to Scotland for a few weeks to test if it was still the place of his memories before committing to staying or going “home”. Reading between the lines of his eleven-minute video, what he missed was the easy comfort and deep-rooted sense of belonging from his past. Spain was great, but he felt he’d never truly belong. And frankly, I suspect he has a point.
I’ve never once doubted our own move here. I’ve bought my funeral plan. I expect to end my days here. We didn’t leave the UK for negative reasons; we came to Spain for positive ones, and lots of those things still amuse me even now. It wasn’t even about chasing the sun—our initial plan in Castilla y León would have involved cold winters and far cooler summers than what we actually ended up with here in Alicante. What captured my imagination instead was the glorious, vague anarchy of Spanish daily life: a culture that considers eating five times a day and dining at ten at night entirely logical; where a Sunday lunch table is left looking like a scene of utter carnage, children run wild between restaurant tables at midnight, and a concert kicking off at two in the morning is just business as usual.
The Scot was really talking about the comfort of unspoken routines. In a British pub, the ritual is simple: walk up to the bar, order, pay, and carry your drinks back. Here, you sit and wait. You sit to re-order, and you sit to pay. It’s not complex, but grasping those hundreds of unwritten micro-habits is what makes you feel like you’ve understood the terrain.
The real barrier, though—and in my opinion the biggest one—is language. First-generation immigrants are (nearly) always foreigners. The second generation are more at home in the new country, though the links remain strong, and by the third generation, the “old” country has become foreign. When we step out to village events nowadays, the welcome is genuinely warm. Talking to our next-door neighbour Vicente is hardly effortless, but it's easy enough—just the other week I was singing the virtues of Hammerite-type paints while he lamented the endless toil of repainting his wrought-iron fence. But even if I know Titanlux Oxiron is the local equivalent, to Vicente and the rest of the village, we will eternally be the “English neighbours”. My friend Jesús still asks my opinion on Andy Burnham, a man I’d struggle to pick out of a line-up, even as I readily recognise Spain’s ministers of transport or culture. No matter how much local knowledge I soak up, the assumption remains that I’m secretly pining for fish and chips and a bowler hat.
Language is one thing, but there's also the question of what you might call cultural instinct. You can learn an enormous amount about a country, its history and its institutions, but that isn't quite the same as having grown up with them.
There’s a subtle boundary there that hard facts can’t cross. On a guided trail walk recently, I realised I knew more about the First Carlist War than half the locals in the group. But that intellectual trivia doesn’t bridge the gap. It doesn’t help me catch the fleeting, everyday cultural references that any local instinctively understands.
Thinking about it afterwards, following a trip back to the UK for a wedding a few weeks ago, I recognised the difference. At the wedding, I found myself blathering away with an effortless fluency I never deploy in Spain. I suppose I could manage a version of that here, grammatical hiccups aside, without losing anyone. But I wouldn’t dare. I wouldn’t presume.
And maybe that’s the ultimate difference between me and the Scots bloke. He saw that permanent boundary as a possible reason to pack his bags. I see it as a fair price to pay for the privilege of living here.
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